Lollardy

Since pilgrimages were a display of piety discouraged by Lollards, Margery Kempe was clearly no Lollard. Nonetheless, many of her contemporaries, including other semi-educated women from the diocese of Norwich, were attracted to Lollardy, not for its intellectual content so much as for its sense of pious extremity, of belonging to a secret yet elect body of Christians, knowing more and enjoying a closer relationship to their Saviour even than the priests in church. Before 1400, only a few English bishops took measures actively to pursue Lollardy. This changed, however, following the deposition of Richard II, very much at the personal initiative of Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury. Arundel perhaps hoped to use the pursuit of Lollardy as a negotiating tool with a court and a King, Henry IV, known to harbour knights sympathetic to the Wycliffites. The new King’s father, John of Gaunt, Wycliffe’s one-time patron, had broken with Lollardy after 1381, but, nonetheless, at his own deathbed had demanded that his body be left unburied and unembalmed for forty days, clearly in puritan expiation of his sins. The pursuit of heresy was also a means by which, after a distinctly uncomfortable start to his archiepiscopate in which he had been intimately involved in the deposition of King Richard, Arundel could stamp his authority both upon Church and state. Not for the first or the last time, the demand for strength and discipline was instituted by a leader who himself feared accusations of weakness.

In 1401, reinvestigating the heresy of a Norfolk chaplain, William Sawtre, first condemned by the bishop of Norwich two years earlier, Arundel found evidence that Sawtre had reverted to his condemned beliefs. As a relapsed heretic he was handed over to the King’s officers for punishment, and in March 1401 burned at Smithfield ‘bound, standing upright, to a post set in a barrel with blazing wood all around’. The punishment was all the more remarkable for having been carried out some weeks before the King formally promulgated the new statute by which it was justified, ‘De Haeretico comburendo’ (allowing for the burning of relapsed heretics). Sawtre is generally reckoned both the first Lollard martyr and the first criminal burned at the stake in England. In reality, burning had long been a punishment meted out in England to wives who killed their husbands (the crime of ‘petty treason’). A group of Cathar heretics unearthed in London in the reign of King John is said to have been summarily burned, and there were burnings again, as noticed above, at the Council of Oxford in 1222.

Even after Sawtre’s execution, the statute against heresy was used only once or twice before 1407, when a temporary eclipse in the fortunes of Archbishop Arundel allowed a petition to be introduced to King and lords in Parliament, clearly Lollard inspired, calling once again for the total disendowment of the established Church. Catholic priests should henceforth live by the alms of the faithful. The money obtained from the sale of the Church’s lands and treasures should be employed in part to ensure that future kings had no need to call upon extraordinary taxation, for the rest to endow fifteen new earldoms, 1,500 knights, 6,200 squires, 100 new almshouses, 15 universities and 1,500 Wycliffite priests for pastoral duties. Anticipating Henry VIII’s disendowment of the Church by more than a hundred years, and even then far exceeding the Reformation settlement in its ambition (there were not to be 15 universities in England until the chartering of the University of Nottingham in 1948), this was not a proposal that had any chance of being debated let alone of success. Even so, it demonstrates that Wycliffite sentiments continued to command sympathy even within the political elite.

Its probable author, Sir John Oldcastle, a Herefordsire knight with connections to the royal household, was also to prove Lollardy’s unwitting executioner. By marriage to the heiress of Lord Cobham, Oldcastle had risen to considerable wealth, with properties scattered across five counties and including Cooling Castle on the marshes north of Rochester. Archbishop Arundel sought to move against the heretics in Oldcastle’s household as early as 1410. However, it was the death of Henry IV and the accession of his son, Henry V, a King determined to display his orthodoxy, that gave the Archbishop his chance to act. Oldcastle was arrested and charged with heresy. Committed to the Tower, he escaped and in January 1414 sought to raise a rebellion, planning perhaps to kidnap the King amidst the celebrations of Twelfth Night. His conspiracy was betrayed. Forty of the conspirators were executed, seven of them by burning. The chroniclers, reflecting government propaganda, allege that 20,000 rebels had been waiting for the call to arms. In reality, there were never more than a couple of hundred. Oldcastle escaped, and was not recaptured until 1417, when he was at last burned as a heretic and outlaw. His reputation as a malign companion of the young Henry V lived on to inform Shakespeare’s Henry IV, where the character of the prince’s tutor was originally named Sir John Oldcastle. Protests from the then Lord Cobham, successor to Oldcastle’s barony, forced Shakespeare to think again, lighting, more or less by hazard, on the name of the Norfolk adventurer and patron of the Paston family, Sir John Fastolf. By such means was Sir John Falstaff, greatest of comic inventions, foisted upon an unsuspecting world.

Oldcastle’s rebellion put an end to all flirtations between the gentry and the Wycliffite heresy. Tarred by its associations with treason and rebellion against the King, Lollardy was destined to become a low-status puritan sect, secretly maintained in the households of a few thousand devotees, for the most part semi-literate artisans, its flame kept burning by only a handful of fully committed evangelists and preachers. Before 1414, the heretics themselves had enjoyed international contacts, in particular with the Hussite movement in Bohemia (themselves protesting against the privileges of the clergy and demanding a return to a simpler ‘Bible’ Christianity). Oldcastle himself had corresponded with Prague. The burning of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance in 1415, and the subsequent outbreak of a Hussite rebellion threatening the rights not only of the Church but of aristocratic property, merely confirmed the assumption that Lollardy in England must be ripped out by the roots. Before 1414, there had been no systematic inquisition into its spread. After Oldcastle’s rebellion, and with one eye clearly focussed on events in Europe, bishops sanctioned systematic persecution of the English Lollards. In the late 1420s, for example, whilst the bishop of Winchester, Henry Beaufort, was leading a contingent on the crusade launched against the Hussites of Bohemia, the bishop of Norwich investigated the Lollard communities of East Anglia, burning four of the Lollard leaders (one of them a former skinner, the rest former priests) and imprisoning more than sixty sympathizers. A suspected Lollard ‘rising’ in 1431 resulted in yet another wave of persecution, and there were further burnings in London in 1440.

Historians of the twentieth century, as always keen to imagine medieval society as if it were merely an offshoot of their own liberal concerns, have tended to argue that the persecution of heresy had both a good and a bad side. On the one hand ‘medievals’ were clearly at fault in denying the rights of religious minorities. At the same time, by clubbing together to burn a few heretics or massacre a few Jews, they asserted their own sense of community and greatly improved society’s ‘feel good factor’. This, of course, is a crude parody of the modern debate. It has nonetheless been asserted that, far from being inimical to the sense of community, inquisitorial procedures devised to counter the ‘threat’ of Lollardy presented ‘opportunities for the individual to become more involved in public action than he, or to a lesser extent she, had been before’. In an academic vacuum, this is no doubt true. The recruitment of large numbers of parishioners to spy and report on their neighbours, and the segregation of those who failed to comply with society’s norms, can no doubt be accounted a social good. In the same way, those today who report to the local council on the illegal dumping of garden waste, or the failure to sort plastic cups from tin cans in a bag of recycled refuse, can rest assured that they are securing their neighbourhood against the tentacles of the Antichrist. Whether it would be of even greater benefit to the community to burn all fly tippers, exterminate the burners of leaded petrol or arrange for the communal kicking of bigots and the illiberal, is best left to public (rather than academic) opinion to decide. In the meantime, there should be little doubt that heresy and its persecution had tragic human consequences.

Some Lollard communities survived into the sixteenth century, merging in due course with the earliest exponents of ‘Protestant’ reform. As a result, as ‘proto-Protestants’, the Lollards themselves were taken up by Tudor historians keen to demonstrate how ‘primitive’ Bible-based Christianity had survived all of the corrupt excrescences of the Middle Ages to re-emerge as Protestantism after 1500. Archbishop Cranmer, the first of the Protestant archbishops of Canterbury, seems deliberately to have encouraged the destruction of the tomb of his predecessor, Archbishop Arundel, precisely because of Arundel’s association with the persecution of Lollards. The Lollards themselves, not least in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, were represented as keepers of a sacred flame fanned back to life by Luther, Calvin and their English disciples. The irony, surely not lost on sixteenth-century readers, was that the Lollards, with their secret meetings, their need to hide from the authorities and their outward conformity to orthodox opinion, resembled nothing so much as the Catholic recusant priests in hiding in England after 1570.