Wycliffe

Already, in 1377, as a result of his teachings on papal authority and the eucharist, Wycliffe had been condemned by the Pope, who had ordered his imprisonment. By this time Wycliffe was proclaiming that the papacy, by its corruption and pursuit of wealth, had forfeited all entitlement to lordship. Since the bread and wine of the Mass continued to have the appearance of bread and wine, and since to have accidents without substance was to contradict the natural order, Christ could only be said to be present in the bread and wine figuratively or sacramentally. Without denying that Christ was thus present, Wycliffe in effect condemned the whole rigmarole of chantry masses for the souls of the dead, the feast of Corpus Christi and much else besides, arguing that the Church needed to return to its primitive purpose and teachings, jettisoning much that was late or corrupt.

Wycliffe was a charismatic teacher. He commanded a close personal following in Oxford. However, his preaching that loyalty and obedience could only be won, as by Christ, through love, and his assertion that only through the Bible, where necessary translated into English, could mankind find truth and salvation, appeared to cut at the roots of the Church’s established authority and, in the aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt, could be regarded as a dangerous incitements to the rejection of authority. In fact, there is no evidence whatsoever that Wycliffe or any of his followers were involved in the 1381 revolt. John Ball was certainly no Wycliffite, and Watt Tyler’s demand for the disendowment of the Church and the seizure of its resources for the poor was part of a longer standing anticlerical tradition with no direct links to Wycliffe. Nonetheless, in 1382, the new Archbishop of Canterbury insisted on the condemnation of ten of Wycliffe’s propositions, in theory condemning Wycliffe and his followers as heretics. Wycliffe himself died two years later, still unpunished but convinced that the papacy itself had become an arm of the Antichrist.

For nearly twenty years after 1382, no decisive action was taken against Wycliffe’s followers, who went on to publish a series of increasingly anti-clerical tracts and to translate the entire Bible into English as a collaborative venture. The fact that, despite condemnation and prohibitions, at least 250 manuscript copies of this translation are known to survive supplies some indication of its success. By comparison, only 21 complete copies survive of the great Latin Gutenberg Bible, printed in Mainz in 1452, and there are as many manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible as there are copies of the First Folio of Shakespeare, printed in 1623. The intention behind the translation was that believers should return to simple scriptural truths, putting aside the theatrical props of a Church too concerned with statuary, pilgrimages and relics to correct its own corruption of Christ’s teaching. As a puritan creed, in tune with much else in Catholic spirituality, this form of Wycliffism, more pietist than intellectual, exerted considerable influence even at the royal court where a group of knights close to the King was accused by the chroniclers of being secret supporters of what was already being called ‘Lollardy’: a term of uncertain origin, perhaps from the English ‘loller’, an idle wastrel, or from the Latin ‘lolia’, the tares or weeds to be divided from good Catholic wheat.

Here matters might have rested, with Wycliffe’s supporters as covert puritans operating on the far extreme of opinions that the Church was prepared to tolerate. Philip Repyndon, initially one of Wycliffe’s most enthusiastic disciples, returned like other Wycliffites to the orthodox fold, preferring to work from within the Church in order to institute reform. Repyndon died in 1424 as bishop of Lincoln. A hint as to the continuing extremity of his puritanism occurs in the terms of his will, in which he demanded that his body be left naked and unburied in a sack placed outside the church of St Margaret in Lincoln Cathedral close, there to be food for worms. Only the town crier was to announce his death, and every penny that he possessed was to be given to the poor, even the black cloth on the bier being given away as clothing. Needless to say, these conditions were ignored. Repyndon was instead buried simply but decently in the cathedral’s south-east transept. In the history of the established Church, propriety has generally trumped sincerity.