had long proved an obstacle to its real work of guiding the spirits of men.
Since almost every particular in Wycliffe's life has been made the subject of eager controversy, it is perhaps desirable that we should preface our account of his doctrine of dominion by a short sketch of his history as far as the time when he framed and published that doctrine. For the place of his birth we are dependent upon two notices of John Leland; one of which states that he drew his origin from the house of Wycliffe, settled in the village of Wycliffe-upon-Tees, the other that he was born at Ipreswel, now known as Hipswell, in the immediate neighbourhood of Richmond in Yorkshire.[1] The date we can only conjecture; but as he died in 1384, it is natural to fix it somewhere about the year 1320.[2] The well-ascertained connexion which subsisted between the family of Wycliffe and Balliol College, no doubt determined his enrolment at that foundation when he entered the university of Oxford; but considerable obscurity hangs over the details of his subsequent career. A confusion of dates has given rise to the common belief that he was at first a member of the Queen's College, and a confusion with a namesake has set him down as steward of Merton College.[3]
- ↑ A long dispute about the place arose from a misprint in Hearne's edition of the Itinerary of Leland. It so happens that the original manuscript in the Bodleian library is defective exactly at the point where the name ought to occur, vol. v. fol. 114 b, and that of the various existing transcripts only one, John Stow's (cod. Tanner. 464), was made before the manuscript was mutilated. Stow therefore remains our sole authority for the name; but his handwriting is perfectly unambiguous, and the word is Ipreswel. This, as I pointed out in the Athenaeum newspaper, nr. 2960. p. 82 (July 19 1884), Hearne inexcusably read as Spreswel, mistaking the capital I for a long s; and from that day to this every single biographer of Wycliffe has perplexed himself (Dr. Robert Vaughan's exploits in the search are notorious) in endeavouring to discover a place which owed its existence purely to a scriptural error. [In Domesday Book f. 310 D the name is written Hiplewelle.]
- ↑ Dr. Lechler vol. 1. 268 sq., thinks 1320 the latest date possible. Shirley however was inclined to place it some years later: Fasciculi zizaniorum, intr., p. xii. The traditional date, since Lewis's conjecture, p. 1, has been 1324.
- ↑ The former supposition is refuted by Shirley, intr., pp. xii, xiii; the latter is to my mind decisively invalidated by the arguments of the same writer, pp. 513-516, as well as by those adduced by Peter Lorimer, in his notes to the English
