The other peculiarity to which we have referred, is the medley of systems and maxims which had to do duty in the middle ages as the factors of a political philosophy. One theorist extracted from the Old Testament the model of a hierarchy; another read in Aristotle principles nearly approaching those of a modern constitutional polity. The civil law added something, added much to the imperialists systems; the canon-law, with its wonderful adaptations of Biblical texts, was of no less value to the curialists. But the basis of all was either the Bible of the Christians or the Bible of the philosophers, the Scriptures or Aristotle. And what is perhaps the most curious fact of all is that none of the opponents of papal claims (the advocates were naturally contented with their own canon-law) make any attempt to adjust their schemes to the political or legal framework of their own country. The publicists not only of France but even of England and Germany, write as though the state were constructed on an Aristotelian basis or at most as though its only law was that of the Roman jurisconsults. To this rule however there is one exception, an exception perhaps more illustrative of it than any direct confirmation. For the most ideal scheme of polity conceived in the middle ages, and the furthest removed from practical possibility, was also one modelled closely on the organisation of feudalism. This is the Doctrine of Dominion suggested indeed by a previous English writer but so appropriated and matured by John of Wycliffe that he may be fairly considered its author.[1]
- ↑ The relation between Wycliffe's doctrine and that of Richard fitzRalph, archbishop of Armagh, was pointed out by William Woodford, a younger contemporary. See his treatise Adversus Johannem Wiclefum Anglum, xvi. in Edward Brown's edition of Orthuinus Gratius' Fasciculus rerum expetendarum et fugiendarum, 1. 237, 1690. Compare Mr. F. D. Matthew's introduction to the volume of English Works of Wyclif hitherto unpublished which he edited for the Early English Text Society in 1880, p. xxxiv. The fact is confirmed in many details by so much as I have read of fitzRalph's treatise De pauperie Salvatoris in the Bodleian manuscript, auct. f. infra, 1. 2. [In 1890 I printed the first four books of this work as an appendix to Wycliffe's books De dominio divino, pp. 257-476.]
