LOLLARDS 811
followers, who were not troubled with need of theories, were content to allege that a church which held large landed possessions, collected tithes greedily, and took money from starving peasants for baptizing, burying, and praying, could not be the church of Christ and his apostles, who in poverty went about doing good.
Lollardy was most flourishing and most dangerous to the ecclesiastical organization of England during the ten years after Wickliffe's death. It had spread so rapidly and grown so popular that a hostile chronicler could say that almost every second man was a Lollard. Wickliffe left three intimate disciples: – Nicolas Hereford, a doctor of theology of Oxford, who had helped his master to translate the Bible into English; John Ashton, also a fellow of an Oxford college; and John Purvey, Wickliffe's colleague at Lutterworth, and a co-translator of the Bible. With these were associated more or less intimately, in the first age of Lollardy, John Parker, the strange ascetic William Smith, the restless fanatic Swynderly, Richard Waytstract, and Crompe; and there must have been a large number of preachers who itinerated through England preaching the doctrines of their master. Wickliffe had organized in Lutterworth an association for sending the gospel through all England, a company of poor preachers somewhat after the Wesleyan method of modern times. "To be poor without mendicancy, to unite the flexible unity, the swift obedience of an order, with free and constant mingling among the poor, such was the ideal of Wickliffe's 'poor priests'" (cf. Shirley, Fasc. Ziz., p. xl.), and, although proscribed, these "poor preachers," with portions of their master's translation of the Bible in their hand to guide them, preached all over England wherever they could be heard without detection. The Oxford university and many nobles supported them. Lord Montacute, Lord Salisbury, Sir Thomas Latimer of Braybrooke, and several others had chaplains who were Lollardist preachers; whilst many merchants and burgesses assisted the work with money. The organization must have been strong in numbers, but only the names of those have come down to us who were seized for heresy, and it is only from the indictments of their accusers that their opinions can be gathered. The preachers were picturesque figures in long russet dress down to the heels, who, staff in hand, preached in the mother tongue to the people in churches and graveyards, in squares, streets, and houses, in gardens and pleasure grounds, and then talked privately with those who had been impressed. The Lollard literature was very widely circulated, – books by Wickliffe and Hereford and tracts and broadsides, in spite of many edicts proscribing it. In 1395 the Lollards grew so strong that they petitioned parliament through Sir Thomas Latimer and Sir R. Stury to reform the church on Lollardist methods. It is said that the Lollard Conclusions printed by Canon Shirley (p. 360) contain the substance of this petition. If so, parliament was told that temporal possessions ruin the church and drive out the Christian graces of faith, hope, and charity; that the priesthood of the church in communion with Rome was not the priesthood Christ gave to his apostles; that the monk's vow of celibacy had for its consequence unnatural lust, and should not be imposed; that transubstantiation was a feigned miracle, and led people to idolatry; that prayers made over wine, bread, water, oil, salt, wax, incense, altars of stone, church walls, vestments, mitres, crosses, staves, were magical and should not be allowed; that kings should possess the jus episcopale, and bring good government into the church; that no special prayers should be made for the dead; that auricular confession made to the clergy, and declared to be necessary for salvation, was the root of clerical arrogance and the cause of indulgences and other abuses in pardoning sin; that all wars
were against the principles of the New Testament, and were but murdering and plundering the poor to win glory for kings; that the vows of chastity laid upon nuns led to child murder; that many of the trades practised in the commonwealth, such as those of goldsmiths and armourers, were unnecessary and led to luxury and waste. These Conclusions really contain the sum of Wickliffite teaching; and, if we add that the principal duty of priests is to preach, and that the worship of images and going on pilgrimages are sinful, they include almost all the heresies charged in the indictments against individual Lollards down to the middle of the 10th century. The king, who had hitherto seemed anxious to repress the action of the clergy against the Lollards, spoke strongly against the petition and its promoters, and Lollardy never again had the power in England which it wielded up to this year.
If the formal statements of Lollard creed are to be got from these Conclusions, the popular view of their controversy with the church may be gathered from the ballads preserved in the collection of Political Poems and Songs relating to English History, published in 1859 by Mr Thomas Wright for the Master of the Rolls series, and in the Piers Ploughman poems. Piers Ploughman's Creed (see LANGLAND) was probably written about 1394, when Lollardy was at its greatest strength; the ploughman of the Creed is a man gifted with sense enough to see through the tricks of the friars, and with such religious knowledge as can be got from the creed, and from Wickliffe's version of the Gospels. The poet gives us a "portrait of the fat friar with his double chin shaking about as big as a goose's egg, and the ploughman with his hood full of holes, his mittens made of patches, and his poor wife going barefoot on the ice so that her blood followed" (Early English Text Society, vol. xxx., pref., p. 16); and one can easily see why farmers and peasants turned from the friars to the poor preachers. The Ploughman's Complaint tells the same tale. It paints popes, cardinals, prelates, rectors, monks, and friars, who call themselves followers of Peter and keepers of the gates of heaven and hell, and pale poverty-stricken people, cotless and landless, who have to pay the fat clergy for spiritual assistance, and asks if these are Peter's priests after all. "I trowe Peter took no money, for no sinners that he sold. ... Peter was never so great a fole, to leave his key with such a losell."
In 1399 the Lancastrian Henry IV. overthrew the Plantagenet Richard II., and one of the most active partisans of the new monarch was Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury and the most determined opponent of Lollardy. It has been alleged that Henry won his help by promising to do his utmost to suppress the followers of Wyclif, and this much is certain, that when the house of Lancaster was firmly established upon the throne the infamous Act De comburendo hereticos was passed in 1400, and church and state combined to crush the Lollards. John Purvey was seized; William Sautrey (Chartris) was tried, condemned, and burned. The Lollards, far from daunted, abated no effort to make good their ground, and united a struggle for social and political liberty to the hatred felt by the peasants towards the Romish clergy. Jak Upland (John Countryman) took the place of Piers Ploughman, and upbraided the clergy, and especially the friars, for their wealth and luxury. Wickliffe had published the rule of St Francis, and had pointed out in a commentary upon the rule how far friars had departed from the maxims of their founder, and had persecuted the Spirituales (the Fratricelli, Beghards, Lollards of the Netherlands) for keeping them to the letter (cf. Matthews, English Works of Wyclif hitherto imprinted, Early Eng. Text Soc., vol. lxxiv., 1880). Jak Upland put all this into rude nervous English verse: –
