In the spring following the Revolt his old enemy, William Courtenay, who had succeeded the murdered archbishop Sudbury as archbishop of Canterbury, resolved to take measures for stamping out Wycliffe's crowning heresy. He called a court of bishops, theologians and canonists at the Blackfriars' convent in London, which assembled on the 17th to 21st of May and sat with intervals until July. This proceeding was met by a hardly expected manifestation of university feeling on Wycliffe's side. The chancellor, Robert Rygge, though he had joined in the condemnation of the theses, stood by him, as did also both the proctors. On Ascension Day (the 15th of May) his most prominent disciple, Nicholas Hereford, was allowed to preach a violent sermon against the regulars in the churchyard of St Frideswyde. The archbishop protested through his commissary, the Carmelite Dr Peter Stokes, who was charged with the execution of the archbishop's mandate (on the 28th of May) for the publication in the university of the decision of the Blackfriars' council, by which 24 articles extracted from Wycliffe's works were condemned, ten as heretical and fourteen as erroneous. The reply of the chancellor was to deny the archbishop's jurisdiction within the university, and to allow Philip Repington, another of Wycliffe's disciples, to preach on Corpus Christi day before the university. Chancellor and preacher were guarded by armed men, and Stokes wrote that his life was not safe at Oxford. The chancellor and proctors were now summoned to Lambeth, and directed to appear before the Blackfriars' court on the 12th of June. The result was that the university officers were soon brought to submission. Though they were, with the majority of regent masters at Oxford, on the side of Wycliffe, the main question at issue was for them one of philosophy rather than faith, and they were quite prepared to make formal submission to the authority of the Church. For the rest, a few of the reformer's more prominent adherents were arrested, and imprisoned until they recanted.
Wycliffe himself remained at large and unmolested. It is said indeed by Knyghton that at a council held by Courtenay at Oxford in the following November Wycliffe was brought forward and made a recantation; but our authority fortunately gives the text of the recantation, which proves to be nothing more nor less than a plain English statement of the condemned doctrine. It is therefore lawful to doubt whether Wycliffe appeared before the council at all, and even whether he was ever summoned before it. Probably after the overthrow of his party at Oxford by the action of the Blackfriars' council Wycliffe found it advisable to withdraw permanently to Lutterworth. That his strength among the laity was undiminished is shown by the fact that an ordinance passed by the House of Lords alone, in May 1382, against the itinerant preachers was annulled on the petition of the Commons in the following autumn. In London, Leicester and elsewhere there is abundant evidence of his popularity. The reformer, however, was growing old. There was work, he probably felt, for him to do, more lasting than personal controversy. So in his retirement he occupied himself, with restless activity, in writing numerous tracts, Latin and English. To this period, too, belong two of his most important works:—the Trialogus and the unfinished Opus evangelicum.
The Trialogus is as it were his summa summarum theologiae, a summing up of his arguments and conclusions on philosophy and doctrine, cast in the form of a discussion between three persons, Alithia, representing “solid theology,” Phronesis, representing “subtle and mature theology,” and Pseustis, representing “captious infidelity” whose function is to bring out the truth by arguing and demonstrating against it. The Trialogus was the best known and most influential of all Wycliffe's works, and was the first to be printed (1525), a fact which gave it a still greater vogue. It is also significant that all the only four known complete MSS. of the work, preserved in the Imperial Library at Vienna, are of Hussite origin. The note of both the Trialogus and of the Opus evangelicum, Wycliffe's last work, is their insistence on the “sufficiency of Holy Scripture.”
In 1382, or early in 1383, Wycliffe was seized with a paralytic stroke, in spite of which he continued his labours. In 1384 it is stated that he was cited by Pope Urban VI. to appear before him at Rome; but to Rome he never went. On the 28th of December of this year, while he was hearing mass in his own church, he received a final stroke, from the effects of which he died on the New Year's eve. He was buried at Lutterworth; but by a decree of the council of Constance, May 4, 1415, his remains were ordered to be dug up and burned, an order which was carried out, at the command of Pope Martin V., by Bishop Fleming in 1428.
A sober study of Wycliffe's life and works justifies a conviction of his complete sincerity and earnest striving after what he believed to be right. If he cannot be credited (as he has been by most of his biographers) with all the Protestant virtues, he may at least claim to have discovered the secret of the immediate dependence of the individual Christian upon God, a relation which needs no mediation of any priest, and to which the very sacraments of the Church, however desirable, are not essentially necessary. When he divorces the idea of the Church from any connexion with its official or formal constitution, and conceives it as consisting exclusively of the righteous, he may seem to have gone the whole length of the most radical reformers of the 16th century. And yet, powerful as was his influence in England, his doctrines in his own country were doomed to perish, or at best to become for a century and a half the creed of obscure and persecuted sectaries (see Lollards). It was otherwise in Bohemia, whither his works had been carried by the scholars who came to England in the train of Richard II.'s queen, Anne of Bohemia. Here his writings were eagerly read and multiplied, and here his disciple, John Huss (q.v.), with less originality but greater simplicity of character and greater moral force, raised Wycliffe's doctrine to the dignity of a national religion. Extracts from the De ecclesia and the De potestate Papae of the English reformer made up the greater part of the De ecclesia of Huss, a work for centuries ascribed solely to the Bohemian divine, and for which he was condemned and burnt. It was Wycliffe's De sufficientia legis Christi that Huss carried with him to convert the council of Constance; of the fiery discourses now included in the published edition of Wycliffe's Sermones many were likewise long attributed to Huss. Finally, it was from the De eucharistia that the Taborites derived their doctrine of the Lord's Supper, with the exception of the granting of the chalice to the laity. To Huss, again, Luther and other continental reformers owed much, and thus the spirit of the English reformer had its influence on the reformed churches of Europe.
Bibliography.—The documentary materials for Wycliffe's biography are to be found in John Lewis's Life and Sufferings of J. Wiclif (new ed., Oxford, 1820), which contains a valuable appendix of illustrative papers and records; Foxe's Acts and Monuments, vol. iii., ed. 1855, with app.; Forshall and Madden's preface to the Wycliffe Bible, p. vii. note, Oxford, 1851; W. W. Shirley's edition of the Fasciculi Zizaniorum, a collection of contemporary documents bearing on the history of Wycliffe and the Lollards, with interspersed narrative and comments (probably the work of Thomas Netter of Walden) (1858); and H. T. Riley's notices in the appendices to the Second and Fourth Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission. Among contemporary records the narrative of a monk of St Albans—a bitter opponent of John of Gaunt—is of conspicuous value; it was published under the title of Chronicon Angliae, by Sir E. Maunde Thompson (1874). Of this the account in Walsingham's Historia Anglicana (ed. H. T. Riley, 1863, 1864) is mainly a modified version. Knyghton, who wrote De eventibus Angliae at Leicester in the heart of what may be called the Wycliffe country, is very well informed as to certain passages in the reformer's history, though his chronology is extremely faulty (ed. J. R. Lumby, 1889-1895). There are valuable notices also in the continuation of the Eulogium historiarum (vol. iii., ed. F. S. Haydon, 1863), in the Chronicle of Adam of Usk (ed. E. M. Thompson, 1876), and in more than one of the continuations of Higden. For the study of Wycliffe's theology the controversial works of Wodeford and Walden are important, but must necessarily be used with caution.
Of modern biographies that by G. V. Lechler (Johann von Wiclif und die Vorgeschichte der Reformation, 2 vols., Leipzig, 1873; partial Eng. trans., by P. Lorimer, 1878, 1881 and 1884) is by far the most comprehensive; it includes a detailed exposition of the reformer's system, based to a considerable extent on works which were then unpublished. Shirley's masterly introduction to the Fasciculi Zizaniorum, and F. D. Matthew's to his edition of English Works of Wyclif hitherto unprinted (1880), as well as Creighton's History of the Papacy, vol. i., 1882, and Sir H. C. Maxwell Lyte's account in his History of the University of Oxford (1886), add to or correct our stock of biographical materials, and contain much valuable criticism.
