812 LOLLARDS
"Freer, what charitie is tins
To fain that whoso liveth after your order
Liveth most perfectlie,
And next followeth the state of the Apostles
In povertie and pennance:
And yet the wisest and greatest clerkes of you
Wend or send or procure to the court of Rome.
... and to be assoiled of the vow of povertie."
The archbishop, having the power of the state behind him, attacked that stronghold of Lollardy the university of Oxford. In 1406 a document appeared bearing to be the testimony of the university in favour of Wickliffe; its genuineness was disputed at the time, and when quoted by Huss at the council of Constance it was repudiated by the English delegates. The archbishop treated Oxford as if it had issued the document, and procured the issue of severe regulations in order to purge the university of heresy. In 1408 Arundel in convocation proposed and carried the famous Constitutiones Thomæ Arundel intended to put down Wickliffite preachers and teaching. They provided amongst other things that no one was to be allowed to preach without a bishop's licence, that preachers preaching to the laity were not to rebuke the sins of the clergy, and that Lollard books and the translation of the Bible were to be searched for and destroyed. He next attempted to purge the nobility of Lollardy. The earlier leaders had died, but there was still one distinguished Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle, in right of his wife Lord Cobham, "the good Lord Cobham" of the common people, who had been won to pious living by the poor preachers, and who openly professed the common Lollard doctrines. His chaplain, one of the itinerating preachers, was seized, then his books and papers were taken and burnt in the king's presence, and later he was indicted for heresy. It is said that at first he recanted, but the abjuration, said to be his, may not be authentic. In the end he was burnt for an obstinate heretic. These persecutions were not greatly protested against; the wars of Henry V. with France had awakened the martial spirit of the nation, and little sympathy was felt for men who had declared that all war was but the murder and plundering of poor people for the sake of kings. Mocking ballads were composed upon the martyr Oldcastle, and this dislike to warfare was one of the chief accusations made against him (comp. Wright's Political Poems, vol. ii. p. 244). But Arundel could not prevent the writing and distribution of Lollard books and pamphlets. Two appeared just about the time of the martyrdom of Oldcastle – The Ploughman's Prayer and the Lanthorne of Light. The Ploughman's Prayer declared that true worship consists in three things – in loving God, and dreading God, and trusting in God above all other things; and it showed how Lollards, pressed by persecution, became further separated from the religious life of the church. "Men maketh now great stonen houses full of glasen windows, and clepeth thilke thine houses and churches. And they setten in these houses mawmets of stocks and stones, to fore them they knelen privilich and apert, and maken their prayers, and all this they say is thy worship. ... For Lorde our belief is that thine house is man's soul."
The council of Constance (1414-1418) put an end to the papal schism, and also showed its determination to put down heresy by burning John Huss. When news of this reached England the clergy were incited to still more vigorous proceedings against Lollard preachers and books. From this time Lollardy appears banished from the fields and streets, and takes refuge in houses and places of concealment. There was no more wayside preaching, but instead there were conventicula occulta in houses, in peasants huts, in sawpits, and in field ditches, where the Bible was read and exhortations were given, and so Lollardy continued. In 1428 Archbishop Chichele confessed that the Lollards seemed as numerous as ever, and that their literary and preaching work went on as vigorously as before. It was found out also that many of the poorer rectors and parish priests, and a great many chaplains and curates, were in secret association with the Lollards, so much so that in many places processions were never made and worship on saints' days was abandoned. For the Lollards if not stamped out were hardened by persecution, and became fanatical in the statement of their doctrines. Thomas Bagley was accused of declaring that if in the sacrament a priest made bread into God, he made a God that can be eaten by rats and mice; that the pharisees of the day, the monks, and the nuns, and the friars, and all other privileged persons recognized by the church were limbs of Satan; and that auricular confession to the priest was the will not of God but of the devil. And others held that any priest who took salary was excommunicate; and that boys could bless the bread as well as priests.
From England Lollardy passed into Scotland. Oxford infected St Andrews, and we find traces of more than one vigorous search made for Lollards among the teaching staff of the Scottish university, while the Lollards of Kyle in Ayrshire were claimed by Knox as the forerunners of the Scotch Reformation.
The opinions of the later Lollards can best be gathered from the learned and unfortunate Pecock, who wrote his elaborate Repressor against the "Bible-men," as he calls them. He summed up their doctrines under eleven heads: they condemn the having and using images in the churches, the going on pilgrimages to the memorial or "mynde places" of the saints, the holding of landed possessions by the clergy, the various ranks of the hierarchy, the framing of ecclesiastical laws and ordinances by papal and episcopal authority, the institution of religious orders, the costliness of ecclesiastical decorations, the ceremonies of the mass and the sacraments, the taking of oaths, and the maintaining that war and capital punishment are lawful. When these points are compared with the Lollard Conclusions of 1395, it is plain that Lollardy had not greatly altered its opinions after fifty-five years of persecution. All the articles of Pecock's list, save that on capital punishment, are to be found in the Conclusions; and, although many writers have held that Wickliffe's own views differed greatly from what have been called the "exaggerations of the later and more violent Lollards," all these views may be traced back to Wickliffe himself. Pecock's idea was that all the statements which he was prepared to impugn came from three false opinions or "trowings," viz., that no governance or ordinance is to be esteemed a law of God which is not founded on Scripture, that every humble minded Christian man or woman is able without "fail and defaut" to find out the true sense of Scripture, and that having done so he ought to listen to no arguments to the contrary; he elsewhere adds a fourth (vol. i. p. 102), that if a man be not only meek but also keep God's law he shall have a true understanding of Scripture, even though "no man ellis teche him saue God." These statements, especially the last, show us the connexion between the Lollards and those mystics of the 14th century, such as Tauler and Ruysbroeck, who accepted the teachings of Nicholas of Basel, and formed themselves into the association of the Friends of God.
The question remains – What was the connexion between the Lollard movement and the Reformation in England? Many writers make Lollardy the forerunner of Reformation teaching; others, like Mr Gairdner, relying on the facts that the persecution of the Lollards did not rouse the English nation in the way that the martyrdom of Huss excited the Bohemians and that Lollardy had almost faded out of sight in the beginning of the 16th century, admit only a casual connexion between the two awakenings. The problem is scarcely one which can be settled by counting the numbers of Lollards convicted at different periods from the beginning to the end of the 15th century, or by pointing to the enthusiasm or indifference of the mass of the English nation to Lollard doctrines. The English Reformation down to the middle of Elizabeth's reign was much more a political than a religious movement with the great proportion of English people. Lollardy in its most essential and invariable characteristics had much more in common with mediæval religious revivals than with Reformation piety, and Lollard preaching must have had much more resemblance to that of Ockham and his recusant Franciscans than that of Luther, Calvin, or Peter Martyr. But Lollardy did one thing for England which other mediæval revivals did not do for the lands in which they
