I. Cor. xiv., 38, which, owing to a mistranslation in Wiclif's Bible, was supposed to contain a condemnation of all who were ignorant of the Scriptures; a text, in truth, of which the Lollards made so much, that the term “known men" became a shibboleth of their party. This, then, is an example of a Lollard in high places as late as 1459. We are, perhaps, justified ir assuming that his case was not a singular one, the more sc, when we recollect the inadequacy of the contemporary records.

But now let us look back on our facts, and see what conclusions may be drawn from them. Sixteen years after the abortive popular rising of 1415, we hear of a rising of Lollards sufficiently important to demand the interference of the Lord Protector. Ten years later the burning of a Lollard excites a considerable amount of popular indignation. As late as 1475 the statutes of New College, at Cambridge, recognize the dangerous influence of Wiclif's writings. But all this, it may be argued, does not amount to much. Yes; but observe that the reticence about Lollard influence is most complete just at the time we should expect it to be--in the latter part of the reign of Henry VI., and in the reigns of Edward IV. and Richard III. The famous chronicler, Commines, speaking of English affairs, says "This was a new phase of history to me, for I had never seen such mutations in the world before." He is speaking of the events only of the years 1469 and 1470, but the remark is applicable to English history throughout the middle part of the 15th century.

*

We must recollect that the Hundred years' War was renewed in 1415, and that only two troubled years elapsed between its cessation, in 1453, and the outbreak of what may be called the English Thirty Years' War, in 1455. Now, even if the records of the time had been far more satisfactory than they are, we should not, amid such stirring events as this description implies, have looked for many allusions to a force, which, though it might be ever so strong as a leaven of doctrine, as a deep-rooted sentiment or conviction, yet did not embody itself in any conspicuous *Bohn's Series: I. 196.

sect or powerful party. Most historians are agreed in asserting that the Wars of the Roses affected to a very slight degree the nation at large. We have, indeed, the authority of the shrewd observer, Commines, for this view, who remarks that "of all the countries in the world with which I was ever acquainted, the government is nowhere so well managed, the people nowhere less obnoxious to violence and oppression, nor their houses less liable to be destroyed and demolished by war than in England, for there the calamities fall only upon the authors of them." If this view of Commines be correct, if the view of most historians be correct, that these Wars of the Roses were purely dynastic-wars in which, with rare exceptions, such as that of the battle of Towton, the people took little part, then Fuller's statement is a very reasonable one, that "this very storm was a shelter to those poor souls (ie., the Lollards), and the heat of those intestine. enmities cooled the persecution against them."+ In other words, early in the Fifteenth Century the Lollards had lost all avowed supporters among the upper classes. Hence they were for a time exposed to all the enmity of the ecclesiastics, who hated them for their heresy and their denunciation of clerical wealth and pride, and to all the hostility of the ruling classes generally, who dreaded their real or supposed socialistic tendencies. But by and bye both clergy and nobility were "diverted from troubling the Lollards," and this was "good done by the civil wars." The reticence then, it may almost be called silence, of the records between 1440 and 1490 (roughly speaking) is due to two causes: there actually was little, if any, persecution of heretics or Lollards during a period when the attention of both Government and prelates was so entirely taken up with other pressing snbjects: the chroniclers were naturally so dazzled by these subjects that they altogether lost sight of heretics who seemed to them insignificant and uninfluential.

But in the last years of the century, as we have seen, the

allusions to Lollards and martyrdoms again became frequent. The times are again quiet. Printing also has been introduced into the country. A few leaders of thought, too, have already come under the spell of the new Greek learning, and when Colet, one of the foremost among these-a man, like Wiclif, conspicuous for the not too frequent combination of intellect and enthusiasm, of light and warmth-took the then unusual step of preaching in English, at St. Paul's Cross, he found, we are told, listeners among "poor Lollards."

And now we have carried our history down to the close of the 15th century. To touch even the threshold of the next, to approach even the history of the great Reformation, is at once beyond our aim and capacity. The 15th century is undoubtedly in many ways a barren and unprofitable study-still a study which the historical student, at least, must not entirely neglect if he believes, as I trust, we all do believe, in the continuity of our national history. The work done by Wiclif was never undone. He, indeed, was among

"The kings of thought who wrought contention with their
times decay,

And of the past are all that cannot pass away."

His followers, partly for reasons outside of their own control, partly owing to their own follies, ceased to exist as a party. But the protests which he and they made against the abuses of the Church had entered into the soul of the nation. When we think of the earlier history of that vast complex movement which we call the Reformation, is it not to Luther's uncompromising attack on indulgences, to Erasmus' polished satire against pilgrimages and image-worship, to Cromwell's summary abolition of the monasteries, and to Tyndale's and Coverdale's Translations of the New Testament and of the Bible, that our thoughts first and mainly carry us? Now it is precisely the dislike of indulgences, pilgrimages, image-worship, ecclesiastical orders, and the love of the English Bible, that figure most largely in the histories of Wiclif and the Lollards. If again the Seebohm's "Oxford References," VII., ad init.

Reformation was carried out in England, as it was, with infinitely less loss of life, with infinitely less persecution, than in other European countries, may not this in part have been the result of the work of Wiclif and his followers, who had awakened the nation by a gradual, almost unrecognised, course of teaching to a sense of these abuses and to an enthusiasm for the English Bible? Consequently when the day of reckoning came, it came with no such awful shock to the reverence for old traditions as in those less favoured countries, where there had not been, as there had been in England, a leaven of doctrine slowly fermenting, nor seed of reform imperceptibly growing into the fruit, of which the Reformation was the harvest-time.

Dr. Arnold, in his Lectures on Modern History, and other historians, have commented on the absence from the writings of the Fifteenth century of any presentiment of the great Revolution of the Sixteenth. This unconsciousness is, however striking, not exceptional. The growth of an avalanche in nature is no inapt illustration of the way in which Revolutions in history come about. Its mass gathers, flake after flake; slowly and, as it were, day by day;* and the villagers in the valleys beneath do not foresee the fall of the avalanche just because its pile has grown so gradually. Similarly, if the generation which lived immediately before the Reformation, had no presentiment of it, it was just because the material out of which it grew had gathered so slowly and so gradually. Yes! the explanation of the unconsciousness of what was to come in the next generation, which has struck so many students of Fifteenth history, is to be found, not at all in the suddenness of the great religious movement, but in the slow preparation for it, in which the martyrdoms of many a forgotten Lollard, as well as the life and work of Wiclif, statesman, scholar, and sage, played no small part.

The image is suggested by the grand passage in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound

Hark! the rushing snow,

The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass
Thrice-sifted by the storm, had gathered there
Flake after flake-

WAT TYLER'S REBELLION.

REV. A. JAMSON SMITH, M.A.

December 13th, 1882.

THE Historical literature relating to the Great Rising of 1381 is abundant, and in many ways very satisfactory. The accounts of the contemporary monks, Walsingham and Knighton, are full and forcible. The force, it is true, is the consequence of utter hatred of the insurgents; but as this hatred is quite undisguised, it is not misleading. Froissart, we must remember, was in London a short time after the rising took place; and so far as the events which occurred in London are concerned, his narrative is unusually vivid and interesting, even for Froissart. His attitude towards the insurgents is not so much that of hatred as of sheer surprise and dismay. In the sight of the chronicler of chivalry the rising of peasants and handicraftsmen against their lords was a piece of infatuation for which the devil alone could be responsible. However, his narrative of what took place in London has all the appearance of truthfulness. It of course does not fellow that, because we accept his facts, we accept his views of them. Of the two songs in the Rolls Series Collection of Political Songs, both are hostile to the insurgents. It is characteristic of Chaucer that he has only one allusion to the great popular rising, and that is contemptuous. The writing of history has been in the hands of the respectable classes. There is then nothing exceptional in the fact that the cause of the dumb thousands in 1381 found no exponent.