safety-valve sky-high into little tiny pieces. When Lollardy bursts forth again in the reign of Henry VIII it will be called by the better name of ‘Protestantism’.
Changes coming all over Europe.Other changes, too, were not far away. For nearly a thousand years past the nations of Europe had been considered as one great family, of which the Pope and, since 800, some hazy German king who called himself ‘Roman Emperor’ were supposed to be the two heads; other kings were, or ought to be, vassals of these two. The Kings of England and France had never really admitted these large claims, and that was why England and France were ahead of other nations. But all these ideas were out of date; the spirit of the Crusades was dead, the commercial rivalry of great nations had begun. Gunpowder.Gunpowder was changing the face of war and was making the strongest and heaviest armour quite useless. Printing.The printing of books with movable type was discovered about 1459, and, at Westminster, William Caxton was printing English and Latin books in the reign of Edward IV. Discovery.In the same reign certain Bristol merchants were sailing far into the Atlantic, to discover half-mythical islands, of which dim stories, long forgotten, were now being revived and retold; they did not find any such islands till the reign of Henry VII had begun. Spaniards led by Columbus were the first to set foot in America in 1492; Portuguese were the first to round the Cape of Good Hope five years later. But the idea of new worlds to be discovered was in the air. Greek learning.Finally, the Turks had taken Constantinople in 1453, and its exiles, who still spoke a sort of Greek and possessed many manuscripts of the ancient Greek philosophers, came to Italy and began to spread the knowledge of Greek to Western Europe.
