not properly proprietary, and property is the result of sin; Christ
and his apostles had none.[1] The service,
however, by which lordship
is held of God is righteousness and its works; it follows that
the unrighteous forfeit their right to exercise it, and may be deprived
of their possessions by competent authority.
The question, of course, follows as to what this authority is, and this Wycliffe sets out to answer in the Determinatio quaedam de dominio and, more elaborately, in the De civili dominio. Briefly, his argument is that the church has no concern with temporal matters at all, that for the clergy to hold property is sinful, and that it is lawful for statesmen (politici)—who are God's stewards in temporals—to take away the goods of such of the clergy as, by reason of their unrighteousness, no longer render the service by which they hold them. That the church was actually in a condition to deserve spoliation he refused, indeed—though only under pressure—to affirm; but his theories fitted in too well with the notorious aims of the duke of Lancaster not to rouse the bitter hostility of the endowed clergy. With the mendicant orders he continued for a while to be on good terms.
Hitherto Wycliffe had made no open attack on the doctrinal system of the church, and for some time he had been allowed to spread his doctrines without hindrance. Early in 1377, however, Archbishop Sudbury summoned him to appear before the bishop of London, and answer certain charges laid against him. The nature of these accusations is not stated, but their purport can hardly be doubtful. On the 19th of February 1377, Wycliffe made his appearance at St Paul's. He was accompanied by the duke of Lancaster, by Lord Percy, marshal of England, and by four doctors of the four mendicant orders. The trial, however, came to nothing; before Wycliffe could open his mouth, the court was broken up by a rude brawl between his protectors and Bishop Courtenay, ending in a general riot of the citizens of London, who were so much enraged by the insult to their bishop in his own cathedral church—coming as this did at the same time as a serious attempt at an invasion by the duke in parliament of their civic liberties (Chron. Angl. p. 120)—that they would have sacked his palace of the Savoy had not Courtenay himself intervened.
Wycliffe had escaped for the time, but his enemies did not rely solely on their own weapons. Probably before this they had set their case before the pope; and on the 22nd of May five bulls were issued by Gregory XI., who had just returned to Rome from Avignon, condemning eighteen (or in other copies nineteen) “conclusions”; drawn from Wycliffe's writings. All the articles but one are taken from his De civili dominio. The bulls truly stated Wycliffe's intellectual lineage; he was following in the error of Marsilius of Padua; and the articles laid against him are concerned entirely with questions agitated between church and state—how far ecclesiastical censures could lawfully affect a man's civil position, and whether the church had a right to receive and hold temporal endowments. The bulls were addressed to the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London, the university of Oxford, and the king. The university was to take Wycliffe and send him to the prelates; the latter were then to examine the truth of the charges and to report to the pope, Wycliffe being meanwhile kept in confinement. The execution of the papal bulls was impeded by three separate causes—the king's death on the 21st of June; the tardy action of the bishops, who enjoined the university to make a report, instead of simply sending Wycliffe to them; and the unwillingness of the university to admit external authority, and, above all, the pope's right to order the imprisonment of any man in England. The convocation of the university, indeed, as the St Albans chronicler[2] states with lamentation, made serious objections to receiving the bull at all; and in the end it merely directed Wycliffe to keep within his lodgings at Black Hall for a time.
If the university was disposed to favour the reformer, the government was not less so. John of Gaunt was for the moment in retirement; but the mother of the young king appears to have adopted his policy in church affairs, and she naturally occupied a chief position in the new council. As soon as parliament met in the autumn of 1377, Wycliffe was consulted by it as to the lawfulness of prohibiting that treasure should pass out of the country in obedience to the pope's demand. Wycliffe's affirmative judgment is contained in a state paper still extant; and its tone is plain proof enough of his confidence that his views on the main question of church and state had the support of the nation.[3] Indeed he had laid before this same parliament his answer to the pope's bulls, with a defence of the soundness of his opinions. His university, moreover, confirmed his argument; his tenets, it said, were true (i.e. orthodox), though their expression was such as to admit of an incorrect interpretation. But Wycliffe was still bound to clear himself before the prelates who had summoned him, and early in 1378 he appeared for this purpose in the chapel of Lambeth Palace. His written defence, expressed in some respects in more cautious language than he had previously used, was laid before the council; but its session was rudely interrupted, not only by an inroad of the London citizens with a crowd of the rabble, but also by a messenger from the princess of Wales enjoining them not to pass judgment against Wycliffe; and thus a second time he escaped, either without sentence, or at most with a gentle request that he would avoid discussing the matters in question. Meanwhile his “protestatio” was sent on to Rome. Before, however, any further step could be taken at Rome, Gregory XI. died.
In the autumn of this year Wycliffe was once more called upon to prove his loyalty to John of Gaunt. The duke had violated the sanctuary of Westminster by sending a band of armed men to seize two squires who had taken refuge there. One of them was taken by a stratagem, the other murdered, together with the servant of the church who attempted to resist his arrest. After a while the bishop of London excommunicated all concerned in the crime (except only the king, his mother and his uncle), and preached against the culprits at Paul's Cross. At the parliament held at Gloucester in October, in the presence of the legates of Pope Urban VI., Wycliffe read an apology for the duke's action at Westminster, pleading that the men were killed in resisting legal arrest. The paper, which forms part of the De ecclesia, lays down the permissible limits of the right of asylum, and maintains the right of the civil power to invade the sanctuary in order to bring escaped prisoners to justice.
The schism in the papacy, owing to the election of Clement VII. in opposition to Urban VI., accentuated Wycliffe's hostility to the Holy See and its claims. His attitude was not, indeed, as yet fully developed. He did not object to a visible head of the church so long as this head possessed the essential qualification of righteousness, as a member of the elect. It was only later, with the development of the scandals of the schism, that Wycliffe definitely branded the pope, qua pope, as Antichrist;[4] the sin of Silvester I. in accepting the donation of Constantine had made all his successors apostates (Sermones, ii. 37). The year 1378, indeed, saw the beginning of an agressive propaganda which was bound sooner or later to issue in a position wholly revolutionary. Wycliffe's criticism of the established order and of the accepted doctrines had hitherto been mainly
- ↑ See R. L. Poole's preface to his edition of the De dominio divino, where Wycliffe's indebtedness to Richard Fitz Ralph, archbishop of Armagh, for his views on lordship and property is shown at some length (pp. xxxiv sq.). Fitz Ralph had been a fellow of Balliol, and was vice-chancellor of the university in or about 1333 (A. à Wood, Fasti Oxon. p. 21, ed. Gutch, 1790). The first four books of his De pauperie Salvatoris were edited by R. L. Poole for the Wycliffe Society, and published in 1890 in an appendix to the edition of the De dominio divino. Fitz Ralph also taught that lordship was conditioned by grace, and that property had come into the world with sin. Fitz Ralph's work was, however, directed to the settlement of the controversy raised by the mendicant orders as to “possession” and “use”; Wycliffe extended the scope of the doctrine so as to include all civil and ecclesiastical society.
- ↑ When he says that the bull was only received at Oxford shortly before Christmas, he is apparently confounding it with the prelates' mandate, which is dated December 18 (Lewis, appendix xvii.).—Chron. Angl. p. 173.
- ↑ In one text of this document a note is appended, to the effect that the council enjoined silence on the writer as touching the matter therein contained (Fasciculi Zizaniorum, p. 271). This, if true, was apparently a measure of precaution.
- ↑ So he describes the popes in the first sermon in vol. ii. of the Sermones. This may very probably refer to the two rival popes (cf. Buddensieg, Polemical Works, intr. p. xxi). Book iii. of his Opus evangelicum is also significantly entitled De Antichristo.
