THE LOLLARDS.

BY REV. A. JAMSON SMITH, M.A.

December 13th, 1883.

It is perhaps impossible to overrate the influence of Wiclif on the history of England in the latter part of the 14th century. He had during his life many adherents among the upper and the learned classes of the country. Oxford, the University where he taught, was in the zenith of its fame, a fame, to which, no doubt, he contributed to an incalculable extent. He was employed by his Sovereign in important Embassies, and it is conjectured that he sat at one time as member of Parliament. He established an order of poor Priests, that is to say, a great missionary body, who made it their chief aim to propagate his doctrines. Above all he, in company with other scholars, translated the Bible. The wellknown editors of this translation, Forshall and Madden, tell us that in its revised form, that is, in what is sometimes called Purvey's Bible, they examined 150 manuscripts in a more or less complete condition. These manuscripts were copied, we are assured, within forty years of the time that the translation was made. Nothing could be more significant than this fact of the enthusiasm and devotion of Wiclif's followers. In estimating its significance we have to consider the immense loss of such manuscripts that must have taken place as a consequence not only of the persecuting spirit of the age, but also of simple neglect. The survival, in truth, of so many manuscripts points to an existence at one time of other such manuscripts in numbers the extent of which it would be very rash to attempt to conjecture.*

In the Academy of December 16, 1882, it is pointed out in a most careful article, by Mr. Ramsay, that a majority of Chaucer's references to the Bible are from the Vulgate, that many are second-hand, and that some few appear to be directly from Wiclif's Bible; but that those quoted second-hand are from treatises in which Wiclif's Bible is cited. In either case "—Mr. Ramsay concludes "Wiclif's work would be shown to have made its way into the general literature of the period."

According to the contemporary witness, Knighton, the Lollards and I must, for the sake of convenience, use this term, which, if it included many who were in no sense true followers of Wiclif, also included all who were-were so powerful that they gained over to their sect half or more of the people of England. They effected this, he assures us, in the energetic language that comes of virulence, by all the arts of proselytizing, menace, persuasion and an assumption of superior piety. This old chronicler is however not merely virulent he is sadly convinced of the evil which the heretics were bringing on the country. Thanks to their misdoings the kingdom was divided against itself. They stirred up son against father, and father against son, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law, and, as it were, every man against his neighbour. Knighton, it is true, writes as an alarmed ecclesiastic and as Canon of Leicester, that is, as an inhabitant of a county in which Wielif had held a benefice during the last eight years of his life, and where in consequence his followers would naturally be specially numerous. Still, allowing for some exaggeration on Knighton's part, his testimony goes to show that the Lollards had gained in his time an influence that was seriously alarming to himself and other orthodox churchmen.

A well-known passage from the same writer, while it illustrates the zeal with which he and kindred spirits would, so far as lay in their power, suppress the translation of the Bible, shows at the same time their panic at its wide-spread diffusion. "The gospel which Christ committed to the clergy and doctors of the church, that they might sweetly dispense it to the laity and weaker persons according to the exigency of the times and the wants of the people hungering after it in their mind, this John Wielif has translated out of the Latin into the Anglican, not angelic language, whence through him it has been published, and disclosed more openly to laymen and women able to read than it used to be to the most learned and intelligent of the clergy. And so the golden pearl is cast abroad and trodden under foot of swine, and what was dear to clergy and laity is now rendered, as it were, the

common jest of both, so that the gem of the church becomes the derision of laymen, and that is now theirs for ever, which before was the special property of the clergy and doctors."

Take this passage in connexion with the Constitution of Arundel, which enacted that Wielif's books were to be examined by the University authorities, or a Commission appointed by them, and afterwards to be expressly approved by the Archbishops; take it in connexion with the large, though unknown number of copies. made within so short a time after the publication of this hated translation, and we may beyond question infer that both the translation and Wielif's books generally had an extensive circulation, and that this circulation was extensive in the face of the bitter hostility and declared opposition of those in high places.

The strength of Lollard influence in the University is indicated by the Statute enacting that all University officials should, under penalty of loss of degree and office, take an oath not knowingly to admit within their "hospitium" any master, bachelor, or scholar, or even servant, who was suspected with any show of probability of heretical or Lollard depravity.

Nor is the Parliamentary action of the time less significant. The celebrated statute of 1401 attaching to heresy the awful punishment of burning, and its confirmation, with additional still more vigorous clauses in 1414, are typical of the ordinary abhorrence among the respectable classes of speculative innovation. On the other hand, the proposal in the Parliament of 1410, so well known from Shakspere's account in the early part of Henry V., to confiscate Ecclesiastical property, indicates some sympathy among these very classes with the practical reforms urged by the Lollards, or perhaps, indeed, indicates a Lollard element in Parliament itself. It must be carefully observed that there might be a party in the House of Commons which could justly be described as Lollard, in so far as it heartily advocated a social reformation within the church, but which would nevertheless oppose in characteristic English fashion novel doctrinal theories. This was

* Statute of 1412. See Munimenta Academica, R. S., pp., 268-270.

certainly true at an earlier time of John of Gaunt: we can well imagine he would not be singular in this respect. Be this as it may, this Parliamentary action, whether friendly or unfriendly, is one more sign of the importance of the Lollards in the early part of the Fifteenth century.

Passing, however, from the Universities and the Parliament, while the passages already quoted from Knighton are general testimony of the strength of the Lollards in the nation at large, there is definite evidence to this effect in the facts that what is commonly known as Sir John Oldcastle's Rising, in 1415, numbered 20,000, and that no one was found to betray that knight despite of the large rewards that were offered.

There is then abundant evidence that Lollard influence in the early years of the Fifteenth century was widespread and deeprooted. After the celebrated attempt, however, of 1415, the references to Lollards become very scanty and meagre. There is, in fact, a strange absence of evidence as to the continuance not merely of their strength, but of the exercise on their part of any serious influence at all.* This silence, or, at any rate, reticence of the authorities raises the question: Were the Lollards suppressed by the hostility, to which reference has been made, or did the Lollard influence live on as an undercurrent? The latter view is on the face of it supported by the consideration that the chroniclers, occupied with the more dazzling events of the Hundred Years War and of the Wars of the Roses, might easily neglect a sect-perhaps we should say, sects-who had ceased to find any recognition or help among the upper classes. No one disputes the decline it is a question only of the actual extinction, or of the extent of the decline. For a time they so entirely disappear from the historical records of the age that, if it were not for Pecock's great controversial work, entitled Repressor of over much Blaming of the Clergy, and published just about the very middle of the century, we might suppose an utter extinction. But it should at

* I believe that in Polydore, Vergil's account in the Historia Anglica of the reigns of Henry II.-Richard III., there is no allusion to the Lollards.

once be observed that that book assumes a considerable body of Lollard critics of the shortcomings of the Church, just at a time when the chroniclers are to all intents and purposes absolutely silent as to their existence.

But in any case there is a striking contrast between the part played by the Lollards in the history of the early part of the 15th century, and in the middle and later part. What is it that accounts for the loss of power? To what does this loss amount? The latter question, at least, is one of immense importance. Few convictions have such strong hold upon thinking people now as the conviction that in the history of societies, as in the processes of nature, there are no breaks or gaps. We probably most of us have an instinctive feeling that the Reformation of the 16th century cannot be altogether separated from the Lollard movement of the 14th. The conclusion we should wish to arrive at is that the thread was dropt and taken up again, rather than that it was cut and altogether lost. To trace, in fact, all possible signs of Lollard influence during the Fifteenth century, to show that it never actually died out, is a matter of almost philosophic interest; it is a fraction, and an important fraction, of the subject of the continuity of national history.

But an answer must first be given to the question, what accounts for the comparative insignificance of the Lollards after the Second decade of the Fifteenth century. They met, as has been said, with strenuous opposition from Arundel, whose primacy was precisely contemporaneous with the reign of Henry IV. Allusion has been made to the statutes of 1401 and 1414 against heresy, and to the constitutions known by Arundel's name. Alliance with the Church was perhaps only policy with Henry IV. He was in some sense an usurper, and usurpers often find it convenient to pose as conservators of order and orthodoxy. Henry V., on the contrary, combined the spirits of the warrior and of the devotee, a combination which has never been a rare one. Henry VI. was, like all the weaker kings of earlier English history, an ally of the Pope. For one reason or another, then, the Lancastrian kings