ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



and the Lollard preachers had not been real and intimate, the secular arm 

 would have been lifted but languidly in defence of the Church. 



The work and influence of John Wycliffe at Lutterworth give a special 

 interest to the history of Lollardy in Leicestershire; and yet exceedingly 

 little is known of his sayings and doings from the time of his retirement 

 therein 1382 till his death in 1385. The romance of the movement in 

 this county circles about men of a very different stamp : Philip Repingdon, 

 the clever young canon of Leicester Abbey, whose story belongs properly 

 to the chronicles of his own house ; William Swynderby, hermit and itinerant 

 preacher ; and William Smyth his companion. Before the official condem- 

 nation of Repingdon and his friends at Oxford, William Swynderby had 

 been preaching the new doctrines for some time in the neighbourhood of 

 Leicester. It is very unfortunate that we have no account of him except 

 that given by hostile critics, who are minded to put all his motives and 

 actions in the worst possible light. Knighton and the author of the Fasciculi 

 describe him as a man unworthy of any respect ; but if this were so it would 

 be hard to understand the wonderful influence which he apparently acquired 

 in a few years. 00 It seems indeed that he was a man of very restless disposi- 

 tion, who found it hard to continue long in any settled way of life. His 

 first essays in preaching were directed against the follies and excesses of 

 women, but finding this line of reform an uncomfortable one, 91 he turned 

 diatribes against the general luxury and covetousness of the times. After a 

 while he became a hermit in the woods of the duke of Lancaster, who 

 supported him as long as he cared to stay there. Then he betook himself 

 to Leicester Abbey, where the canons received him gladly, on account of his 

 reputation for holiness. 9 " It may well be that he was sincerely troubled by 

 the excesses into which the love of luxury and ease had led both clergy and 

 laity at this time, and felt, as did many who were perfectly orthodox in their 

 beliefs, that reform ought to begin from the house of God. Nor was he at 

 all singular in his subsequent passage from discontent with the moral failings 

 of churchmen to criticism of the received doctrines of the Church. 



His stay at the abbey was apparently not a very long one ; Knighton 

 does not explain on which side the deeper disappointment lay. At any rate 

 his next step was to join William Smyth and Richard Waytestathe in the 

 chapel of St. John Baptist at the town's end. 93 Smyth, who took his name 

 from his calling, is said to have turned his thoughts to religion on account of 

 a disappointment in love. He had taught himself to read and write, 94 and was 

 living an ascetic life at this time with Waytestathe, who was in holy orders, 

 for a companion ; they had turned the old chapel into a school where Lollard 

 doctrines were taught. These were of the ordinary type : denial of tran- 

 substantiation, refusal of all veneration to images and relics, and protest against 

 the wealth of the higher clergy. Knighton tells a story of how they put one 

 of their tenets into practice by turning an image of St. Katherine into fuel 



90 There is a legacy to William de Swynderby, chaplain of St. John's Hospital, as late as 1382, in the 

 will of an apparently quite orthodox gentleman, who made bequests to two or three gilds and altars in 

 Leicester. Gibbons, Early Lincoln Wills, 31. 



91 Cbron. H. Knighton (Rolls Ser.), ii, 189-90. The ladies retaliated with stones. 

 "Ibid. "Ibid. 182. 



94 This account of Knighton is corroborated by the register of Archbishop Courtney, who describes 

 Smyth as Rieratus, while his companions in penance were URterati. Wilkins, Concilia, iii, 211. 



365 



