JOHN WYCLIF A STUDY IN MYTHOLOGY by JAMES CROMPTON Every schoolboy knows that John Wyclif was "the Morning Star of the Reformation". Daniel Neal in his History of the Puritans, published in 1732 in London,X first used this phrase about Wyclif, and it has certainly stuck to him. There is a theological college in Canada, at Toronto, named Wycliffe College, where the praises of W yclif are sung in a stirring College Song : "Victorious sun of righteousness, At whose supreme command The morning star flames forth afar O'er England's darkened land, We praise Thee for that man of fire Who, called and sent by Thee, Flashed through the night the living light of Truth and Liberty." The theological College in Oxford founded in 1877 has nothing quite equal to that song of its Toronto sister, but Wycliffe Hall was founded at the same time as Ridley Hall in Cambridge to maintain the "Protestant, Evangelical Principles of the Church of England". It was felt by the sponsors that the choice of name was significant for the ends it was to serve. Later, Wycliffe College, a boys' boarding school to inculcate correct principles amongst the young, was founded at Stonehouse in Gloucestershire, ironically enough not far from the church at Westbury-on-Trym where Wyclif held a canonry without performing the duties attached to it. Lutterworth used to boast of a Wycliffe Foundry Co. Ltd., and in Leicester his name is recalled at elections, when voters from Wycliffe Ward go to the polls. He has given his name to many institutions and organisations with which he would have had little sympathy and less understanding, and he has come to symbolise for many in this country a form of extreme protestantism with which he would have greatly disagreed. The fact that his date of birth is completely unknown, and is now never likely to be known, did not prevent the Protestant Truth Society from cele­ brating the sexcentenary of his birth in 1924 by publishing a pamphlet with the title Keeping Wyclif's Memory Fresh, wherein he was described as destined "to usher in the dawn of civil and religious liberty in England". He appeared at "the midnight of time", when England was "in the grip of the Pope and his Friars" and through him "the light shone into dark hearts", and Englishmen "left behind them the rags of Papal superstition". His name was used as a rallying point for those who wished to hold fast to our "Protestant Heritage" so that all right-minded people should expose "how

6 JOHN WYCLIF 7

dark a night" it would be if "Roman Catholics or Anglo-Catholics dominated the land". There were, apparently to ensure this end, a Wycliffe Press, a Wycliffe Avenue in Finchley and Wycliffe Preachers, sent out by Mr. Kensit to spread this stirring message. Bishop Frank Weston of Zanzibar, at the Anglo-Catholic Congress of 1923, sent shudders down protestant spines by sending a telegram to the pope; the celebrations of 1924 were redressing the balance. Members of the Leicestershire Archaeological Society had already been urged to be cautious about the Wyclif cult. Under its aegis a small booklet on Lutterworth church was printed in 1916 that exposed the Wyclif relics for what they were, in order to counter the "much ignorant credulity" they had inspired. 2 This had not been the first warning. In September 1861 members of the Leicestershire Architectural and Archaeological Society, as the Society was then called, moved to Lutterworth for their general meeting. The main subject of the meeting, appropriately enough, was John Wyclif. A paper was read by the veteran nineteenth-century ecclesiologist and ardent Gothic revivalist, Matthew Holbeche Bloxam, who also conducted the party round Lutterworth church. It was quite an affair as can be seen from the account in the second volume of Transactions of the Leicestershire Architec­ tural and Archaeological Society,3 and, as was then usual, it lasted two days and included excursions. To embellish the occasion an exhibition of great ingenuity and variety had been arranged in the town hall in Lutterworth, the crowning exhibits of which were Wyclif relics that included a portrait, and an altar-cloth and candlesticks both said to have belonged to the reformer himself. The churchwardens had contributed a copy of Foxe's Book of Martyrs. After a suitable dinner at the Denbigh Arms, everything was set' fair for an evening of Wyclifolatry. So many came that some could not be accommodated and though Archaeological Societies in those days were primarily a man's affair, there were a "goodly number" of ladies present. Hopes were disappointed, there was no encomium on Wyclif. Bloxam, instead, launched a devastating attack upon the fake relics, the pseudo-Gothic of the eighteenth-century rebuilding of the church tower and the "present tasteless and miserable arrangement of boxes and pews". As for the relics, some were palpably of the sixteenth or even of the seventeenth century and, he added, not a single article came from Wyclif's day, nor had belonged to him. A genuine relic of Wyclif's own day, as he thought, had been recently disposed of in London, a manuscript of part of the Wyclifite translation of the Old Testament, once in Archbishop Tenison's library, bought, he lamented, by a private bookseller. Wyclif, he concluded, should be revered "not so much on account of his theological opinions", on many of which grave differences might arise, but for his "translation of the Holy Scriptures, or at least part of them, into the vernacular, the language of Chaucer and of the authors of Piers Plowman". His part in that is now more doubtful than Bloxam suspected. The audience was reluctant to abandon the Wyclif relics, but the challenge was only taken up by one gentleman who asked the speaker whether, having demolished so much that they had long connected with Wyclif, "Mr. Bloxam would kindly inform him whether the Reformer had 8 LEICESTERSHIRE ARCHltOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY

ever existed or had been in Lutterworth?" Mr. Bloxam replied that he believed his name would be found in the episcopal register of the period as "priest of Lutterworth". The meeting then went on to discuss the less explosive topic of the Battle of Naseby. Wyclif is an explosive subject, though never a dull one. The prime purpose of this paper is to examine the Wyclif myth or myths rather than to speak of the real Wyclif. The myth is a relatively easy and straight-forward subject, the real Wyclif is a complex and difficult matter, but accretions must first be laid aside, even if only a skeleton remains. It is possible, though this is not the occasion, to put some flesh on to these bare bones even when, to use K. B. McFarlane's phrase, "several layers of rich brown protestant varnish have been removed".4 When all has been said about Wyclif, he still remains a central figure to the England of the second half of the fourteenth century and, because of John Hus in Bohemia, he has a European significance. Much more can, indeed, be said about him than that his name is to be found in Bishop Buckingham's register "as priest of Lutterworth". An absorbing story of its own, a useful book could be written about the errors and misconceptions that later generations have associated with the name of the rector of Lutterworths. To trace the history of this posthumous Wyclif has value in itself as an essay in changing fashions of historical writing and interpretation. The power of emotive description, of eloquence and rhetoric, and of ideas strongly held, are only too evident. With or without recourse to detailed or accurate factual knowledge-its absence seems never to have acted as a deterrent-the strongest views for or against Wyclif have been formulated. Above all else, perhaps, the story shows how much, even when scholarship is sound, consciously or unconsciously pre-conceived standpoints affect judgements of character, of motivation and of importance in history. There is, undoubtedly, much humour in the story, so much so that, occasionally, there comes the feeling that even Wyclif himself could hardly fail to be amused-and he was not easily amused- at what has been said about him and all the things for which he has been held responsible. It is, of course, easy to debunk, easy to have fun at the expense of our great­ grandfathers, but if it stops there, then we are only performing a slight task. Something constructive must ultimately be put in place of the ruins. Some of those who have done much to fabricate, extend or preserve the myth have also, as we shall see, laid firmer ground upon which can be built a more reliable portrait of John Wyclif, who, for good or ill, is likely to remain an English worthy. The present-day debunker has no less a duty in interpreting Wyclif. The basic dilemma in studying Wyclif goes back to the original sources themselves: the records are impersonal; the chronicles reflect monastic feeling towards a man impatient with monks; the more readily available theological writings were from his opponents' pens. The most influential source of all was the Carmelite, Thomas Netter, who, long after Wyclif's death, wrote a great refutation of Wyclif doctrines and of those of his followers. Netter's Doctrinale Antiquitatum Fidei Ecclesiae, frequently copied in manuscript, was printed in the sixteenth century in Paris and JOHN WYCLIF 9

in Venice. This opponent, from an Order with a long history of antipathy to Wyclif, first canvassed in writing the view that the chief clue to Wyclif's character and motives lay in disappointment at his failure to achieve a bishopric. He based this upon a remark made at the Council of Constance by Robert Hallum, bishop of Salisbury, who had been at Oxford in the thirteen-eighties. So Hallum may well have been repeating Oxford gossip of Wyclif's own day; Netter belonged to the next generation.6 At best Wyclif appeared to fifteenth-century churchmen as a good, able man gone wrong. This was the picture which first passed into print in histories like that of Polydore Vergil, whose Anglica Historia, written in 1512-13, first appeared in print at Basel in 1534 in a sumptuous edition, illustrated by Holbein. This book was extensively used and quoted by sixteenth-century English­ men though they attacked its author. Wyclif was, wrote Vergil, "the head and prince of those who are distinguished by dishonour" ,7 whose rebellion was due to thwarted promotion. It seems to have been Polydore Vergil who in­ vented the story that Wyclif had fled into exile in Bohemia, a story that stuck with many later writers, even when they rejected Vergil's interpretation of Wyclif's motives. There were some later English writers, like the poet-historian Samuel Daniel, who in the seventeeilJth century accepted Vergil's intepretation. Daniel added his own further comments: that discontent was "the humour that commonly breeds schism"; that Wyclif's followers were "beguiled by disguises (barefooted and russet-dad) as extremes are". 8 Wyclif taught that gifts should not be made by the great to the Church and that it could be deprived of property in time of need, "a doctrine" thought Daniel, "pleasing to great men who commonly imbrace sects" either for ambition to get on or for jealousy, for hatred or for revenge. Daniel was writing a popular comprehensive History of England. More significant for us are the theological controversialists from the Reformation onwards for whom posthumous Wyclif was a many-sided figure. It was natural in the context of the Reformation that precedents should be sought for the changes in religion. The lapsed Carmelite, John Bale and his close associate, John Foxe, had no doubt that John Wyclif belonged to the company of those who would have been in sympathy with the protes­ tantism that was gaining ground in England in the reigns of King Henry VIII and Edward VI. It is not without irony that having cut down emphasis upon Apostolic Succession through the Church as far as episcopacy was concerned, something very like it was put in its place, a sort of apostolic succession of heretics. Wyclif was a corner-stone in this succession. Foxe's first draft of what came to be known as the Book of Martyrs was printed in 1554 in Strassburg in a Latin text, with an elaborate title: Commentaries on Church Affairs and a Description of important Happenings in the Great Persecutions throughout the whole of Europe from the time of Wyclif down to our own day. Wyclif thus became the immediate point of departure for Foxe's account of the purification of the Church. In the later edition of I 559, printed in Basel, and in the first English edition of 1 563 which has been much reprinted since, a great mass of further material was added, and the story taken further 10 LEICESTERSHIRE ARCH.£0LOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY

back to the early Church, thus providing a complete survey of the develop­ ment of heresy from the earliest times to the reign of Mary. There is much in Foxe of genuine historical merit, because he was able to consult many docu­ ments that have since perished. We are here less concerned with this aspect of Foxe than with the general interpretation he put upon so much of his material. As far as Wyclif was concerned he did, indeed, read some of Wyclif's own words in the manuscript which he borrowed from his friend John Bale. That manuscript is now in the Bodleian Library and was printed in part by Shirley in the last century, under the title Fasciculi Zizaniorum, a title which shows at once that its compiler, who is still something of a mystery, though of undoubted Carmelite origin and probably from Norwich,9 regarded Wyclif as an arch-enemy of the Catholic Church and likened him to the sower of tares in the Lord's wheatfield. John Bale who had known this manuscript first when he was a Carmelite at Norwich and who, later, salvaged it from destruction, was probably, the person who, in print, first turned the sower of tares into the hero of the Protestant Reformation. This notion appeared in 1 548 in his Illustrium Maioris Brittanniae Scriptorum . .. Summarium which was printed at Wesel during his first exile in Germany. He had taken with him the Carmelite manuscriprt0 just mentioned, used it extensively and made his own annota­ tions to it. His view of Wyclif put forward in 1548 was expanded in later works and gained great currency in his fuller Catalogusn printed at Basel during his second exile under Mary Tudor. Foxe made all this more popular and reached a wider public with the English version of his own book already mentioned. This first English edition was followed in 1570 by a revised and enlarged version. Further editions came in 1576, 1583, 1596, 1610, 1631-2 and 1641.'2 A fine edition in 1684 gladdened those hearts despairing at the revival of Roman Catholicism. Popularly known as The Book of Martyrs, Foxe's book passed into the English heritage of spiritual classics. Every parish church should by law have possessed it, Nicholas Ferrer at Little Gidding nourished his religious community upon it. It made a great impression. It was good to read. "Not many years passed" wrote Foxe, "God seeing idolatry, super­ stition, hypocrisy and wicked living used in this realm, raised up that godly­ learned man John Wickliff, to preach unto our fathers repentance; and to exhort them to amend their lives, to forsake their papistry and idolatry, their hypocrisy and superstition, and to walk in the fear of God. His exhortations were not regarded, he with his sermons was despised, his books, and he himself after his death, were burnt. What followed? They slew their right king, and set up three wrong kings on a row, under whom all the noble blood was slain up, and half the commons (in addition) thereto. What in France, with their own sword in fighting among themselves for the crown; whilst the cities and towns were decayed, and the land brought half to a wilderness, in respect of what it was before. 0 extreme plagues of God's vengeance! " 1 3 Wyclif, he continued, "stepped forth like a valiant champion unto whom that may justly be applied which is spoken in the book called Ecclesiasticus, of one Simon, the son of Onias : even as 'the Morning Star being in the JOHN WYCLIF II midst of a cloud and as the moon being full in her course, and as the bright beams of the sun, so doth he shine and glister in the temple and church of God'." 14 Here is that notion of the "Morning Star", used by John Bale, but not, in fact, extended into "the Morning Star of the Reformation" until the eighteenth century. All this for Foxe was part of a view of history. He regarded the Church as being in an extreme old age and tottering to corruption when men like Wyclif and then finally the Reformation divines of his own century appeared. With this view Bale agreed quoting the same text and comparing Wyclif to "another David who sported with lions". 1 , These two men, Bale and Foxe, launched Wyclif on his career as the great hero of the Protestant Reformation, a reformer before his time who had sounded a clarion call to purify a church that was incredibly wicked but which, unfortunately, was so wicked that it refused to listen to his call. Instead the great weight of its authority was brought down to condemn him and his followers, and to wreak vengeance upon his remains when they were finally disinterred from his grave in Lutterworth church, burnt and the ashes cast into the nearby river. From Foxe and Bale it is an easy step to writers of the Elizabethan period like the antiquarian William Camden, who spoke of "this English Luther".16 Wyclif's was a notable name in protestant martyrologies, not only in England but also in Germany and in France. The strict Lutheran opponent of Melancthon, the fiery Matthias Flacius Illyricus produced two works similar to Foxe's Acts and Monuments. He began publication in 1559 in Basel of a Latin work, known since the eighteenth century as the Magdeburg Centuries, a Lutheran version of Church history. Completed in r574,I7 it was soon translated into German. He had had more to say about Wyclif in an earlier work published at Strassburg in 1562 and much reprinted under the impressive title Catalogus Testium Veritatis qui ante aetatem nostram Pontifico Romano eiusque erroribus reclamarent. Wyclif was clearly a hero, one of those who had borne witness to the truth that had been more com­ pletely revealed in Luther. This literature was paralleled at the same time among Calvinists in France. Jean Crespin, Beza's collaborator, wrote martyrologies in Latin and French in the fifteen-fifties and sixties. 18 In these Wyclif was also the starting point. One of them was sufficiently popular to be translated into English by Simon Patrick and was printed in London by Thomas Creede in 1602 under the general title of The Estate of the Church. 19 It bore witness to Wyclif as "a break of day ... as from a deepe night" arraigning that "slaughter-house of consciences, the Papacy."20 It is still a matter of controversy amongst historians just how much influence was exerted by Wyclif and the Lollards on the course of the English Reformation. In recent years thanks to the work of Professor A. G. Dickens,2' Margaret Aston22 and John A. F. Thomson2 3 tl1e influence of both has been considerably more stressed than it was twenty or even ten years ago. Wyclif's influence was a consequence more than a cause. The "myth" was important because it was a source of strength and inspiration to many after the emer­ gence of the Reformers. As far as actual detailed knowledge of the writings of Wyclif was concerned, there is little evidence that the sixteenth century I2 LEICESTERSHIRE ARCHJEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY knew much at first hand. It is true that in 1525 in Germany, one of Wyclif's major works was printed, that is his work called TRIALOGUS, in the intro­ duction to which Wyclif was described as "the true and devout witness of Jesus Christ".2 4 Printed because it was thought that Wyclif had greatly influenced Hus, and Luther himself was interested in the works of Hus, it seems likely that Luther also studied this particular work of John Wyclif, but it would be hard to find much use made of it by Luther. As far as England was concerned, apart from a few copies of the 1525 edition imported here, no genuine work of Wyclif reached the printing presses. Some spurious English works were printed in the sixteenth ·and seventeenth centuries, and they were read and were influential in establishing the Wyclif legend, but it is difficult to believe that any of the major contributions of English Reformers to the New Theology were the direct result of reading Wyclif's works, most of the manuscripts of which were, in any case, not available in English libraries and there is little evidence of those that were in England being read. Several English manuscripts were not known to contain works by Wyclif until much later since his name had been expunged from the texts in the late-fourteenth century. Many manuscripts of Wyclif's writings were, then as now, to be found in Prague. Others scattered about Germany and Austria in libraries of religi­ ous houses, found their way either during the Thirty Years War to Sweden and are now in Stockholm, or during the secularisations of Joseph II's reign to the library of the Hofburg in Vienna where they have since remained. This latter group is the largest. The detailed provenance of the majority of these continental manuscripts is, alas, unknown. As far as direct knowledge of Wyclif's writing is concerned, unless it can be shown that individual English writers consulted those manuscripts now to be found in the libraries of Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College, Dublin, or the British Museum, then we must conclude that their knowledge of Wyclif was indirect. It was by what was said about rather than by him, by what he was supposed to have said in English works printed under his name or so attributed in manuscripts but without proof that they were his, and, oddly enough, by what his enemies said either in the chronicles which were printed, where chroniclers like Knighton and Walsingham quoted him extensively in order to refute him or to unmask him. It came finally from works by his opponents, either in manuscript or from printed collections of such writings. One important collection came from Quentel's press in Cologne in 1535, from the pen of Ortwin Graes, the butt of Reuchlin. Under the striking title Fasciculus Rerum Expetendarum et Fugiendarum it contained William Woodford's treatise on the errors in Wyclif's Trialogus, and full accounts of the various condemnations of Wyclif's works together with the lists of his heretical ideas. These were amongst many works by other writers meant rather to be "shunned" than to be "sought after". Graes dismissed Wyclif more vituperatively than any of Wyclif's own contemporaries. He was, Graes wrote, "the devil's slave, the standard-bearer of heretics, the herald of everlasting death, food for the flames of hell, the fool-hardy bearer of the standard of Antichrist, a consorter with demons".2 s Even this did not JOHN WYCLIF

prevent the book appearing on the Index of Prohibited Books, and it was widely used in Protestant circles. 26 In England it was valued highly enough to be reprinted with an extra volume added in 1690. Its editor, the Reverend Edward Brown, rector of Sundridge in Kent, was a versatile Cambridge scholar, who had first made the acquaintance of the original book of Graes when he had been a member of Sir John Finch's learned household in Constantinople.2 7 Brown's "valuable Repertory", as Bishop Christopher Wordsworth called it, is still used and has an important place in the history of Wyclifian scholarship. Another similar source, less manageable and more forbidding, were the printed editions of Thomas Netter's Doctrinale.28 Both Brown and Netter are to be found in English libraries. Much can be and was learnt about Wyclif's doctrines from refutations by his opponents, English scholars were content to leave matters there, were slow to make Wyclif's own Latin writings available; the "myth" was preferable. Well elaborated all over protestant Europe by 1600, the myth's most fertile ground was naturally England. There the harvest was abundant. Bodley's first Librarian, Dr. Thomas James, an ardent protestant controver­ sialist and disputer with papists, as well a good patristic scholar and librarian, wrote in 1608 a lengthy Apologie of Wyclif against the attacks of the Jesuit, Robert Parsons, to show the "conformitie with the now Church of England" of "this worthie instrumet or chosen vessel of God's glorie" for whom "nothing letteth us to pronounce him an absolute Protestant".2 9 He edited two so-called English works of Wyclif's and made him one of the key figures on the frieze of heroes and worthies with which he decorated Bodley's new library.3° James saw history as a fight between truth and error, honesty and deceit, learning and ignorance, and he was very interested in those authors "of the middle age" who "wished the same reformation that was afterwards brought to pass by Luther".31 Wyclif was a vital link in his chronology of truth, honesty and learning. The same notion of an apostolic succession of heresy was, at the same time, being urged by George Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury, in his controversy with the president of St. John's College, Oxford, William Laud, as a result of which there appeared in 1624 A Treatise of the Perpetuall Visibilitie and Succession of the True Church in All Ages. Believing that the Church had degenerated since 666 A.D., which was the number of the Beast in the Apocalypse, Abbot held that it had been redeemed by those who "like the heathen race runners" had handed on the torch throughout "the darkest period".3 2 Wyclif was one of those "noble worthies of the Christian world" named in a very long list stretching from the seventh century and ending with Luther. The picture thus built up passed into English popular writing with works like Thomas Fuller's The Church History of Britain, first printed in 1655, and later in his posthumously-printed The History of the Worthies of England, which appeared in 1662 and which, in addition, long perpetuated two ancient factual errors about Wyclif: that he had lived in exile in Bohemia and that he died in 1387. To Fuller, Wyclif was "that glorious saint".33 He placed his birth in the diocese of Durham wishing to complete his picture of "the last maintainer of religion (before the general decay 14 LEICESTERSHIRE ARCH£0LOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY

thereof) Bede" and "The first restorer thereof", Wyclif. He knew that it could not be established that Wyclif came from these parts but he urged in extenuation that "a scientia media might be allowed to man, which is beneath certainty and above speculation". Such he called his "persuasion" that Wyclif came from Durham.34 Whether from speculation, persuasion or from further work on manu­ scripts and texts, the result remained the same. The Kent topographer and Minister of Margate, John Lewis, was a prodigious controversialist of Low­ church and Whiggish views in the first half of the eighteenth century. His work The History of the Life and Sufferings of the Reverend and Learned John Wickliffe, D.D. appeared in London in 1720, with a second edition in 1723, and it was considered sufficiently authoritative to be re-issued by the Clarendon Press a century later. His sentiments were violent and his case was clear. He was primarily attacking Wyclif's Non-juring critics and especi­ ally Matthias Earbery, but he became interested in going back to the sources and looking at Wyclif's works themselves. For deeper acquaintance he borrowed from Archbishop Wake the Lambeth copy of the 1525 edition of Trialogus. He made history by publishing, in 1731, the translation of the New Testament which he believed to be by Wyclif. It was part of a scheme to print the whole Lollard Bible and to it was appended a history of biblical translation, but this venture got no further. Lewis's work was the most extensive done in the eighteenth century and he did make a praiseworthy attempt to consult and to list as many manuscripts as possible. His edition was dedicated to Lord Malton, later first Marquis of Rockingham, to whom Lewis had been chaplain and who, he said, had "so high an esteem for that sacred book that he would welcome a translation made by a Yorkshireman in those dark times".3s Although he sounded a note of uncertainty about Wyclif's authorship, Lewis could not bring himself to abandon that long­ standing belief. One gets the impression that the superior scholarship of Doctor Daniel Waterland had some impact upon Lewis. This learned, scholarly and judicious master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, was fre­ quently in controversy with Lewis and there were many letters exchanged between 1728 and 1730 on the projected printing of the translation of the New Testament. Waterland was clearly doubtful of the claim that Wyclif had translated the whole Bible as, indeed, that prodigious scholar Henry Wharton had also been. He concluded that, at most, Wyclif translated the New Testament, and this view Lewis seems to have accepted. Waterland made clear the distinction between the two versions of the Lollard Bible, and saw that the General Prologue must belong to the second and later version. Waterland wisely counselled Lewis, when he should reprint his life of Wycliff, to be content "to spl:).re your vindication of Wickliff, which is not perhaps necessary at this time, or may give offence".36 No new edition was called for until 1820 and by then Waterland's caution was ignored. Lewis had claimed Wyclif in support of his Low-church views and he much approved of Bishop White Kennett's description of Wyclif as "the first discoverer and guide in our blessed Reformation". Lewis was scandalised that Wyclif should be vilified by any protestant "as if his ashes were once JOHN WYCLIF 15 more to be burnt and his memory devoted again to popish execretions" .37 Controversy was hard-hitting in those days. Lewis alleged he had been threatened with a whipping by his opponent, an "ignorant man" who had written a "pretended history and lying advertisement" that was "a confused mass of ignorance and scurrility".38 Low-church enthusiasts had soon to share Wyclif with another bedfellow. The Methodists felt no less strongly that Wyclif was a Methodist and quickly brought him into their circle of worthies. In 1748 soon after the death of Lewis, there appeared The Parallel Reformers or the Renowned Doctor Wickliff and the Reverend Mr. Whitfield compared whereunto are added their effigies curiously engraved. Already other voices, less committed, were beginning to be heard, but English scholars more generally felt that Wyclif was a great Englishman. There grew up a feeling that England had done rather badly by the memory of one of her greatest sons. About 1820 a curate of Lutterworth, the Reverent Thomas Pindar Pantin, spoke of the disgrace among Englishmen occasioned by the lack of any stone to the memory of this great man in the town in which he had died. "He was first in the race of Reformers", Pantin wrote, "it was he who first opened the eyes of his countrymen to the iniquitous practices and the unjust usurpations of the Church of Rome ... he laid the ground-work for further labourers and ultimately, for the substantial blessing of the Reformation. If it be remembered that he was the first PROTESTANT against the errors of Popery and that he produced the first translation of the Holy Scriptures into the Vernacular English-the reprehension of a cele­ brated living author will not be thought unjustly severe: 'it is a reproach to this country that no statue has been erected to his honour'."39 There was a proposal to erect a bronze statue of the Reformer with a Bible in one hand and a staff in the other. It was to be placed in the churchyard at Lutterworth and nicely elevated on a pedestal of white Derbyshire stone, so that everyone who passed through the town could see it. There is no such statue in Lutter­ worth, so something must have happened to the scheme of the small commit­ tee formed by "a few gentlemen of that place". A white-marble memorial to Wyclif commemorating his sending out of a band of poor preachers was placed inside the parish church in 1837, the work of Richard Westmacott Junior, of whose work Dr. Margaret Whinney writes that it was but a "pale reflection of that of his father, and not, unfortunately, of his father at his best".4° The memorial itself is described by Pevsner as being, in spite of its date, "already entirely Victorian".4' About the same time considerable interest in Wyclif was stimulated amongst leaders of the Evangelical cause by the publication in the eighteen­ thirties of a new edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs. There had been many adaptations and abridgements of this classic protestant martyrology in the eighteenth century, especially amongst the Methodists, one from the pen of John Wesley himself, and many others bearing only tenuous links with the original work. The standard, reliable text of the original was still that of 1684 finely printed suitably to anticipate the triumph of the Protestant Succession. It ran to eight volumes. The accession of Queen Victoria saw a new edition also in eight volumes, produced under Evangelical inspiration by 16 LEICESTERSHIRE ARCH£0LOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY

the Reverend S. R. Cattley.42 By the eighteen-seventies it had reached its fourth edition. It is tempting to see reaction to the growth of the Tractarian Movement and to the "Papal Aggression" as a prime cause for this renewed popularity of Foxe. The main interest in Foxe was still in his descriptions of the Marian martyrs, but the Wyclif image or myth was much stimulated in the wake of these new editions. Nonconformist interest in Wyclif is further shown in the work of Robert Vaughan, a Congregationalist who was the second occupant of the Chair of History at University College, London. He urged upon his hearers, in his Inaugural Lecture of 1834 "the sound habit of criticism in regard to historical facts", in order the better to be able to distinguish between "the fictions of distant times and its realities".43 His own work on Wyclif hardly lives up to that standard, but he did make one move in the right direction. As the result of a meeting of the Congregational Union in Liverpool he founded, in 1843, a Wyclif Society for printing a series of Wyclif works as well as the more scarce and valuable tracts of the earlier Reformers, Puritans and Nonconformists. The response was less favourable than was hoped, and only one volume of Tracts and Treatises of John de Wycliffe appeared in 1845. Not all the works printed in it were genuine, but the "myth" was suit­ ably augmented by an elaborate coat-of-arms on the frontispiece, with an inset engraving of Wyclif supported by two medallions, one of a candle illuminating the Pleiades, and with a suitable inscription-oddly enough in the papal language of Latin: "The Light shineth in darkness" and "After the darkness Light", and then, in English, "Vaudois, Wycliffe, Geneva". A report printed in the following year lamented that this had not produced the expected increase in subscribers to the Society. By the eighteen-fifties Wyclif had been well launched as a hero. He was the subject in 1857 of the newly-established Stanhope Prize in Oxford. The successful essay, by H. Cowell, was printed under the title The Character and Place of Wickliffe as a Reformer. In matchless eloquence the writer spoke of "the stream of truth which for fourteen centuries had been con­ tending against the obstructive layers of superstition, ignorance and arbitrary power" and which had now forced its way to light and moulded Wyclif's destiny to give "the guiding impulse to the current of the excited feeling which evenually emancipated mankind from a state of mental servitude! "44 Across the seas, in Germany, Wyclif was, in the same year, the subject of two prize essays printed by the University of Gottingen, and Gotthard Lechler had made his debut at Leipzig and shown himself a formidable Wyclifian scholar with his book Wiclif als Vorliiufer der Reformation. Of greater significance, in England, was the publication in 1850, under the auspices of the Oxford University Press, of The Holy Bible . .. in the earliest English Versions made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his Followers. This elaborate dual text, still the only complete one,45 was the result of twenty-two years of work collating all the known manuscriots of the Lollard Bible by two great scholars, the Reverend Josiah Forshall and Sir Frederick Madden, Keepers of Manuscripts in the British Museum. JOHN WYCLIF

It was left to the Reverend Walter Waddington Shirley, in 1858, to crown the decade with his incomplete edition for the Rolls Series of the collection known as Fasciculi Zizaniorum, the most important single contem­ porary source for our knowledge of Wyclif and the early Lollards. To it he appended a lengthy life of the reformer in which he complained bitterly of the ingratitude and the neglect by his countrymen of one of "the greatest of Englishmen ... the first of the reformers".46 The life of Wyclif and the edition of the F asciculi, the work of a young man of twenty-nine, made Shirley's reputation, and in 1863 he was selected as Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford. His life of Wyclif was, in fact, the source of much error about Wyclif. It was Shirley who bedevilled Wyclifian studies by introducing the problem of what we may call pseudo-Wyclif. It was easy to explain away some of the difficulties, if not the blemishes, of the real John Wyclif by having, conveniently, one and then two contemporaries of the same name. They could be and were made to take the responsibility for much. Shirley launched Wyclif even further on his course as "the father of English prose". It was he, who in March 1866, first suggested to the Clarendon Press that some volumes of Select English Works of John Wyclif should be printed. He had only just approached Thomas Arnold to do this when he died, and so the series appeared without the lengthy introduction that he had planned as General Editor. Between 1869 and 1871 Thomas Arnold produced three volumes. Arnold, brother of Matthew and father of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, spent his time seceding to the Roman Church and return­ ing. A close friend of John Henry Newman, he broke with him and the Oratory in 1865, so the editorship of Wyclif's "English" works was carried out whilst he was outside the Catholic Church and living in a house in Oxford, in the Banbury Road, that subsequently, appropriately enough, was to house Wycliffe Hall. The money for editing came also at a useful time. In those days editors were paid for their work. No one, of course, at that stage seriously doubted that Wyclif had written works in English, and F. J. Matthew edited another volume of "English Works" for the Early English Tex,t Society in 1880 and, as late as 1929, H. E. Winn produced a slim volume of selections for the Oxford University Press. Shirley even went so far as to suggest that there might have been some written in Anglo-Norman. It would be wrong to castigate Walter Shirley too much, simply on the basis of his introduction to the Fasciculi Zizaniorum, because he also pro­ duced in 1865, A Catalogue of the Original Works of John Wyclif, which, with the corrections made to it in 1924 by Professor Loserth, is still the most reliable guide to the canon of Wyclif's Latin writings.47 Like Vaughan, Shirley had the idea of a Wyclif Society for the purpose of printing Wyclif's works, but his premature death, in 1866, prevented its fruition. His daughter, Alice Shirley, was to continue to press for this, and in 1881 that veteran Society founder and nineteen-century rationalist, F. J. Furnivall,48 succeeded in founding the Wyclif Society which, before its dissolution in 1925, was responsible for the publication of the greater number of Wvclif's Latin works. It was a considerable enterprise. The finances were contributed by English­ men, much of the editorial work was done by German Lutheran scholars. I 8 LEICESTERSHIRE ARCH.itOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY

It was, we saw earlier, in Germany that in 1525 the first printed edition of Trialogus appeared, and it was reprinted, in Frankfurt and Leipzig in 1753. The editor of the new edition was, probably, L. P. Wirth, who also wrote an account of Wyclif's life which was printed the following year and is frequently found bound up in the same volume.49 The mid-nineteenth century saw considerable interest in Wyclif in Germany and this culminated in the work of three remarkable Lutheran scholars who, together, gave a new direction to Wyclif studies. Gotthard Lechler, the Leipzig professor, already mentioned, re-edited Trialogus for the Clarendon Press in 1869; Johann Loserth and Rudolf Buddensieg were in the forefront of ,the work undertaken by the Wyclif Society.so German and English interest coincided to make the quincentenary of Wyclif's death a worthy occasion. For all this Wyclif scholars must be thankful, in spite of the many qualifications that need to be made to the commentaries which accompanied the texts. Much of the work was undoubtedly inspired by a desire to show ,Wyclif as the Protestant Re­ former, born out of due time, but the textual editing was well done and is not likely to be done again. Progress in completing the publication of the remaining unpublished Latin works is very slow. It may well require another centenary in 1984 to accomplish what the last one left undone even if there is no comparison in mood. One of the few certain things that we know about John Wyclif is the date of his death; he died on 31 December 1384; and our Victorian ancestors did not let the occasion of 1884 pass by unnoticed. In many ways, it could be said that the most important year in Wyclif's life was that year 1884. An Exhibition was arranged at the British Museum, and a committee for quin­ centenary celebrations organised special meetings and a dinner at the Guild­ hall in London under the presidency of the earl of Shaftesbury. The report of the proceedings during this commemoration ran to forty-eight pages, and was published under the title 'John Wyclif: the Great Medieval EnglishmanY At the junketting Professor Montagu Burrows, the Chichele Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford, said that it was a very great cause of satisfaction to possess a hero who was "every inch an Englishman, with all the virtues and very few of the faults of our ancient English charac­ ter. "s2 The earl of Shaftesbury, sincere Evangelical philanthropist that he was, was not so well-informed about the subject of these celebrations: Wyclif, he said, "left us a basis on which we can ever stand, a guide we can ever follow. I do not speak of his writings," he added somewhat disingenuously, "for I have not read them. I call him, therefore, the Morning Star of the Reformation".s3 The last speaker, the Reverend H. P. Hughes, rose to a climax with the words: "At last one solitary voice, and we rejoice to think the voice of an Englishman, was heard amid the silence of Europe, arraigning the papacy at the bar of Almighty God and commanding the crushed and bleeding people of England to stop the juggernaut car of Rome".s4 Libraries were filled with works written in that year, from skilled and unskilled pens, commemorating the great figure of Wyclif. We have only to look at entries in the general catalogues of the British Museum or Cambridge University Library or the Bodleian Library to see what a vintage year 1884 was for JOHN WYCLIF 19

Wyclif studies. And that it was taken very seriously is to be seen from a Young Men's Association in Coventry, who sacrificed their New-Year's Eve to hear a lecture on Wyclif delivered in the Queen's Road ChapeI.ss Perhaps the prize should be awarded to a novelette printed later, in 1887, with the title of ]ohn Wyclif Patriot and Reformer, by the author of Bertha, a Story of Love.s6 The Second Report of the Executive Committee of the Wyclif Society in June 1885 produced a great encomium on Wyclif as an epilogue to those of the previous year. Their report is worth quotation: "The Five-Hundredth Anniversary of the death of the great English­ man, John Wyclif, has come and gone; and among the tens of thousands of folk whose knowledge of the great Reformer was increast and freshened by the efforts of his honourers last year, there can have been none who was not glad that a WYCLIF SOCIETY existed, that a set of English and German students had banded themselves together to rescue the Master's Works from their five centuries' neglect, and make the records of his mind and soul accessible to the scholar's gaze. As the year 1884 drew to its end, and men thought sorrowing of the zealous patriot, preacher, missioner and englisher of the Bible, lying stricken with paralysis on his Lutterworth bed, his tongue silent, his hand still, they felt too that he "being dead, yet speaketh", and that once more his voice would go forth, his hand point the way, as over the long tract of time his skin-books turned into paper and print, would tell them the steps he trod, the spirit in which he prest onward, as he sought the Right and fought the Wrong, during his time of struggle here on earth".s1 The crescendo of praise for Wyclif reached in 1884 is understandable. The year before had seen the Quatercentenary of the birth of Luther and it was natural that Englishmen should wish to praise the memory of an English­ man, who, they had been assured on so many sides, had been the forerunner of Luther. Many of Germany's leading Lutheran scholars were, in fact, to make considerable contributions to the Wyclif revival by learned works and by editing his Latin writings. Patriotism entered into their approach, no less than into that of many English scholars of the same period. It is not without significance that the German scholars, Lechler, Buddensieg and Loserth were interested in Wyclif as a great "Teuton". "Both English and German scholars, foremost among them Lechler and Loserth, have considered it their prerogative," wrote Buddensieg, "to honour the memory of the great 'Teuton', and on their part, to blot out the reproach of ungratefulness cast upon his contemporaries by W. W. Shirley forty years ago".s8 Buddensieg, like them, wished to prove that Wyclif had anticipated Martin Luther, be­ cause they were all equally convinced that so much of Luther's doctrine had also been anticipated by the Czech Reformer, John Hus. It was, to say the least, something of an embarrassment to nineteenth-century Germans, filled with patriotic sentiment about the New Germany of the Second Reich, to find one of the greatest of German Worthies with an intellectual ancestry that might lead back to an inferior Slav nation like the Czechs in Bohemia. It suited their purpose well to be able to prove that before John Hus, doctrines 20 LEICESTERSHIRE ARCH./£0LOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY had been taught by an Englishman, which had anticipated sixteenth-century ones in a most remarkable way, or so, at least, it appeared to them. The whole Bohemian movement, Buddensieg thought, was simply an imitation. Hus borrowed nearly all his reforming ideas from the strong­ minded Yorkshireman, and the whole Hussite movement, he believed, was "mere Wycliffism". Hus as a theologian and as a Church reformer, wrote Lechler, "stood on Wyclif's shoulders"; they stood "as father to son", Wyclif "the master", Hus, "the pupil''.59 The Wyclifian ancestry of much of the theology of Hus and the Hussite Movement has, in recent years, been con­ siderably challenged. Many have sought to prove, and not without some point, that there would have been a Hussite Movement even if John Wyclif had never existed. This line of approach has, perhaps, gone a little too far. Fifteenth-century churchmen were clear that there was a connection, and there is no doubt that John Hus and Jerome of Prague at the Council of Constance were condemned and burnt at the stake because, basically, the Fathers of the Council of Constance regarded their teaching as identical with that of Wyclif which had already been condemned by those same Fathers. In this view the Conciliars were, clearly, but for different reasons, followed by nineteenth-century German historians who were also Lutheran theo­ logians. "We see then", wrote Buddensieg of Wyclif, "these great and principal thoughts of Luther, which one century and a half later brought liberty to a more enlightened age, and which, like a healthy dawn, bore the promise of inexhaustible development, were nascent in Wyclif's soul. They are not found there", he continued, "in the same clearness, depth and heart-stirring power as in the greater German and his work of universal import, but they were elements of new life, and it was through them that from the English shore those waves came that beat upon the German coast and here started the powerful movement of the sixteenth century". Of course, it could not be expected that these historians could look upon Wyclif as being quite the equal of their own Martin Luther. This is brought out most forcibly by Buddensieg himself who, continuing the passage just quoted, writes "It must be owned, Wyclif did not, like Luther, hold in his hand the very soul of his people, and in his country bloodshed and the State stifled his deep thoughts which had raised him to be a judge of the degenerate Church. He was not able to break the iron bands with which the papacy held his nation bound: he did not, like Luther, surround himself with a brilliant crowd of the en­ lightened minds of his time to give his nation a new rich culture-and therefore one cannot well speak of an 'Age of Wyclif'. But looking at that which he built upon ruins, I do not consider it fair, to call it demolishing work ... Wyclif roughly and defiantly faced his time with these principles, others worked them and made them bear fruit in true reformation . . . he threw life-bearing seeds into the furrow of time and became the pathfinder of a new world of thought teeming with life, which gave the promise of a glorious future and made the German race the bearer and watchman of a new spiritual culture".60 With the rise of Nazi Germany, less than thirty years after Buddensieg wrote those words, many had cause to know rather more about the German race and their new "spiritual culture". JOHN WYCLIF 21

In the nineteenth century it was possible to speak and to write about men of the past with a conviction and a certitude that staggers those, brought up later in traditions of careful, impartial scholarship, who have tried to struggle with the sources. But there was always more than one case to be made. There was a critical attitude to Wyclif that also has a history and this too we must now consider more fully. It follows upon the reputation of Wyclif bequeathed by his contemporaries and by their successors in the fifteenth century, of the Wyclif condemned by the collective voice of the late medieval Church. The facts and fictions upon which it was based are the same as those for the contrary picture, the conclusions were vastly different. Reformation controversy and politics to an amazing degree raged about individuals and Church history as well as about theology. This is an aspect of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Church history that has been neglected. It was not just a case of this or that view of the role of a particular person, the whole approach to Church history was involved. The continuity of truth and error was guaranteed through individuals. Apologists on both sides required such a succession. It could be expected that the seminary priests would be indoctrinated against the view of Church history already much canvassed by Foxe and Bale, and would fall back on that of Polydore Vergil and Thomas Netter. At the time of its appearance, critics of Foxe's book had not been lacking. One source came from an exile who died at Louvain in 1575. Nicholas Harpsfield, once archdeacon of Canterbury, "sorest and of least compassion" as Foxe unkindly and unjustly said of him, from his exile wrote a double attack on Foxe's book and on Flacius's Magdeburg Centuries. It was printed in Antwerp in 1 566, suitably disguised under the name of his friend, Alan Cope. How much this book was read and known in England is difficult to say but it set the pattern of recusant attitudes to Wyclif. He further elaborated his portrait of Wyclif in a manuscript work Historia Wickliffiana that was only published by Jesuits more than forty years after his death.61 For Harpsfield Wyclif was the "first and a chief calamity" of England, a source of heresies and evil dogmas, from whom they flowed as from "a great sewer". This disappointed, ambitious man, Wyclif was not the figure portrayed by Foxe "et id genus alii" but Antichrist.62 His language caught on amongst the Jesuits. Robert Parsons in a treatise printed abroad, at St. Omer in 1604, launched a devastating attack upon Foxe's view of the martyrs and his interpretation of history, and he refurbished Netter's and Vergil's brief Latin words with some sonorous English vituperation; "one of the most pernicious, wicked, disembling hipocriticall impugners of Christ and his doctrine". Wyclif was a time-server, a disappointed place seeker.63 Parsons can claim some credit for having made clear that Wyclif died in 1384 and not in 1387. He knew Harpsfield's work well in manuscript at Douai and used it in his own work. It was to refute Parson's Treatise of Three Conversions that Thomas James wrote his Apologie. What is more surprising, perhaps, is that there were contemporary Anglican voices, and scholarly ones, who were saying "Amen" to Harpsfield's and Parson's view rather than to James's. We have seen already that George 22 LEICESTERSHIRE ARCH£0LOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Abbot's view was opposed to that of Laud. More fiercely anti-Wyclif was the pen of Laud's great admirer, Peter Heylyn, whose Examen Historicum was printed in 1659. His immediate purpose was to make public the errors, falsified evidence, trivialities, partialities, "inadvertencies" and "imper­ tinences" of contemporary historians and in particular of Thomas Fuller. He challenged the view which, he said, arose from "the humour of some men who called every separation from the Church of Rome by the name of Gospel, and the greater the separation, the more pure the Gospel".64 Wyclif's heresies, he reflected, had been "canonised for Gospel" whereas they were "the fancies of a private man", many of whose views were "so contrary to peace and civil order, so inconsistent with the government of the Church" that they were "unworthy". "The wheat of Wycliffe" he concludes, "was so foul, so full of chaffe and intermingled with so many and such dangerous tares that to expose it to vice was to mar the market".6s Heylyn was here reflecting views he had first promulgated in 1627 and in 1633 in Oxford in his famous controversies with John Prideaux, when the latter had been Regius Professor of Divinity. Their controversy had been a repeat performance of that between Laud and Abbot, whose successor in Oxford Prideaux was. Oxford opinion was, then as later, brittle. The bright remark that lays a reputation low and the desire to shock are not new. In a conversation between Anthony Wood and Dr. John Fell in his lodgings at Christ Church, Wyclif was discussed, and the quip of the celebrated dean, later bishop of Oxford, so impressed Wood that he twice put it down in print66 and repeated it to Bishop Barlow a month after it had been made in June 1672. The scholarly Barlow immediately identified correctly the source of the anonymous opinion. It must have been the kind of remark that earned for that "noted man of the Church of England", as ,Wood called Fell, the jingle "I do not like thee Dr. Fell". John Wyclif, Fell said, "was a dissembler, a man of little conscience and what he did as to religion was done out of vain glory and to obtain unto him a name". Wood was conversant with the views on Wyclif of Netter and Polydore Vergil. He added that he did not know whether this interpretation was true or not, and then told Fell's story. In another place, he said that there were some absurdities in Wyclif as in the Quakers. To judge from the interest taken a little later by a group of Cam­ bridge scholars in the publication of a new edition of Graes F asciculus Rerum67 Wyclif was more highly honoured there. But we have it on the authority of the antiquarian Thomas Hearne that, a century earlier,68 Dr. John Caius in controversy with his Oxford namesake, Thomas Caius, had expressed a mean view of Wyclif, and was surprised that Oxonians should show any pride that Wyclif was educated there. Hearne clearly agreed with this estimate. On another occasion in 1720 he referred to the "paltry edition of lying Bale's trifling book" about Oldcastle. He was, of course, angry at the time and accusing a London bookseller of piracy, but, even allowing for that, Hearne was clearly no admirer of Wyclif and the Lollards, and he was accused by Lewis of dubbing Wyclif as "indeed a rebel and an impious man". In this view he was conforming to the established one of the Non-jurors, amongst whom Hearne is to be numbered. This view is seen at its best, its JOHN WYCLIF clearest and its most restrained in Jeremy Collier whose Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain was widely read in circles with little sympathy for his Non-juring views. Collier became the foremost Non-juror on the death of George Hickes, and had a deservedly high reputation. His learned book was first published in 1708 and contains an admirable list of antiquarian sources for his account of Wyclif. For Collier, Wyclif's tenets struck at the very roots of church government and property and would, he thought, have encouraged a degree of state control over the church that would have hindered the church's mission and would have been obnoxious to a Non-juror. He would allow that there was "some gold" in Wyclif's mine, but it was "not without a mixture of coarser ingredients".69 Collier's scholarly restraint was abandoned by a Cambridge Non-juror, Matthias Earbery, whose outburst against Wyclif set alight another controversy in 1717 when he printed The Pretended Reformers and the History of John Wickliffe, John Hus and Jerome of Prague. His aim was to discredit any reliance in the Church of England upon the Reformers and their alleged precursors. Wyclif, he wrote, was goaded by ambition, always "the parent of novel opinion". He was so revengeful for his failure to get a bishopric that he riled against all bishops, even episcopacy itself. His cause was patronised by one who tried to be "a vile usurper" (Gaunt) and "by an whore" (presumably, the Princess of Wales). His notions were "wicked and abominable", his religion was sup­ ported "by sacrilege and rebellion".7° Springing from this, thought Earbery, came the Lancastrian usurpation, the greed of Henry VIII that plundered churches and destroyed monasteries, and the events that led Mary, Queen of Scots to the scaffold. And, the final enormity, Earbery saw the spirit of Wyclif behind Benjamin Hoadly and the Bangorian controversy. New occasions had certainly bred new duties to defend the Church of England. It was Earbery's extremism that, as already seen, goaded John Lewis to concentrate his studies on Wyclif and to produce some significant work and much elaboration of the Wyclif myth. The work that thus brought down upon Earbery the vitriolic ire of Lewis was not his own. He was translating a French work, with which he was clearly in sympathy, by Antoine Varillas, that "smooth impostor" as Lewis called him. Varillas was a prolific, incautious writer who produced many, by no means unscholarly, volumes of French histories and religion. The work translated by Earbery had appeared at Lyon in 1682 under the title Histoire du Wiclefianisme ou de la doctrine de Wiclef, Jean Hus et Jerome de Prague. Work of this type had parallels outside France. The view expressed by Varillas is reflected in Italy by the work of an Austin Friar, P. M. Grassi, who wrote a book, in Latin, that was printed in 1707 in Vicenza. Its sonorous title was A Historical Narration of the Origin and Progress of the heresies of the English Priest John Wyclif. He described Wyclif as the "Adam (protoparens) of all North European heresy" and "the insensate wolf amongst Christ's sheep".1 1 He followed the theme of Wyclif's disappoint­ ment over promotion which, he said, citing the examples of Nestorius and Tertullian, is the usual explanation of the conduct of heretics. There is, of course, little evidence that such books were much known or read in England, 24 LEICESTERSHIRE ARCHJEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY

but the Non-juring tradition died hard and Collier's work remained popular throughout the century. If the temper of much of the Church of England was more likely to favour the interpretation of Wyclif put forward by Lewis, there were those even less likely to be so impressed when, with the advent of the Methodists, Wyclif was claimed as a forerunner by them too. The standard mid-eighteenth century view amongst many educated men and women is to be found in books like the Biographia Brittanica. Pub­ lished in 1766 it was a collection of lives of eminent persons modelled on Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary though somewhat less critical. The author of the life of Wyclif in it had read much of what the English antiquarians had said and accepted it all uncritically. He relied especially upon Archbishop Sancroft's young protege, the learned Henry Wharton, who was quoted at length. Wharton believed that Wyclif had been charac­ terised by an earnest and vehement desire to restore the primitive purity of the Church in that ignorant and degenerate age wherein he lived.1 2 It is interesting that, as is very clear in Wharton's case, meticulous and loving, medieval scholarship should go hand-in-hand with such a low view of the middle ages. Eighteenth-century rationalism was not likely to rate the middle ages any higher, but it sometimes produced more lukewarm estimates of Wyclif. A widely-read French historian can be considered under this category. Paul Rapin-Thoyras wrote a popular History of England. The French text of this appeared in Paris and The Hague and was almost immedi­ ately translated into English by Nicholas Tindal and went through several editions.73 His treatment of Wyclif was characterised by that balance of judgement that gained for him a reputation for sober, cautious history as a whole. He sprang from a Huguenot background and fled to England which he came to know well. He seems to have had astonishingly few axes to grind. A Scots opinion was more critical. David Hume, from his austere intel­ lectural heights, considered Wyclif was "strongly tinged with enthusiasm",14 and found further faults, not least in the absence of martyrdom. William Gilpin, a prebendary of Salisbury, admitted that Wyclif did not come well out of the questionings of the "ingenious Mr. Hume",1s and that Hume's censures had some foundation in history but, he added, the charge of failing to be a martyr was "a good handle" to anyone who wished to traduce the memory of "one of the greatest ornaments of this country ... one of those prodigies whom Providence raises up and diverts to its instruments to enlighten mankind". Wyclif, Gilpin believed, was to religion what Francis Bacon was afterwards to science : "the great detector of those arts and glosses which the barbarism of ages had drawn together to obscure the mind of man", to whose "intuitive genius Christendom was unquestionably more obliged than to darkness".76 But Hume was not the only person who poured doubt on ,Wyclif. Not that he either questioned or disbelieved the fictions about his life and works. He questioned his motives, his achievements and significance, in much the same way that in the later middle ages the implications of the Donation of Constantine were questioned and not accepted, long before. anyone had thought of undermining its authority by showing, as happened in the fifteenth century, that the document recording the Donation was itself a forgery. JOHN WYCLIF 25

When in the nineteenth century other Non-conformist writers, especially Congregationalists such as Vaughan, took up the cause of Wyclif it was necessary to defend Wyclif once more, this time against his Tractarian assailers for whom the Church of the Fathers held more appeal, or against the ardent Gothic revivalists of the Ecclesiological Society who regarded the development of church architecture in the fourteenth century as the be­ ginnings of a debasement that culminated in the ruin of real Gothic archi­ tecture under the Tudors and the subordination of the Church of England to the government. Wyclif came out badly. His own church at Lutterworth was not the purest Christian middle-pointed Gothic, and his views on the church's subordination to the lay power were seen to have provided a justification for Henry VIII. We have already mentioned Matthew Holbeche Bloxam who was a leading lay light in the Ecclesiological Society and also a Tractarian. Two Tractarian theologians, Bishop Christopher Wordsworth of Lincoln and, in the next generation, the great Cambridge scholar John Neville Figgis can be added as typical of Tractarian views. Even in the sacred year 1884 Bishop Christopher Wordsworth spoke with restraint. Lecturing to his diocesan clergy, he told them that a study of Wyclif and his time was a good antedote to "dispel the illusions of those who are enamoured of the Church of Rome and are tempted to fall away to her", that Wyclif glowed with zeal for God "but that he wrote sometimes as a schoolman rather than as a Divine". He was not free from the errors that arose from "a common infirmity of human nature" when zeal for truth leads to an excessive reaction against opponents and "overwhelming reliance" upon oneself.77 Bishop Wordsworth saw in Wyclif the origin of much of the trouble occasioned to the Church of England by the Puritans whereby, especially by encouraging a multiplicity of sects, "the Civil as well as the Ecclesiastical Polity" had been overthrown in the seventeenth century and the Church was still paralysed in her "warfare against sin and error". Wyclif, in fact, Wordsworth believed, lacked the "calm wisdom" of his hero "the judicious Mr. Hooker"78 which was more likely to preserve the Church of England from "reckless religious innovation". And this was also the view of John Neville Figgis who noted Wyclif's intellectual intolerance and the peculiar bitterness, then as now, of controversies confined to the learned. He did not believe that pique and self-interest could explain Wyclif, but he saw the incongruity of views. Many of Wyclif's admirers would have disliked his radicalism as much as Wyclif would their attachment to things of this world. "The Laudian revival" Figgis wrote, "would have disgusted him, the dignified leisure of latitudinarian prelates would have made his scorn; he would have repudiated the revived ecclesiasticism of the nineteenth century. The Evangelical Party would have been more to his taste until they became powerful, but the accumulation of livings by the Simeon Trust would have irritated him. He desired a new order, not the old order reformed".79 An even more discordant note had been struck in the year 1884 by a Jesuit, who wrote a book wii:h the challenging title: The Truth about John Wyclif. First a Luther celebration and then, complained the author, a Wyclif one. For the Reverend Father John Stevenson, Wyclif was the 26 LEICESTERSHIRE ARCH£0LOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY

"messenger of evil", the author of socialistic principles, "a breeder of insur­ rection and insubordination in the State, of impurity and immorality in the household". Exeter Hall had claimed him as one of their own, making, as he put it, "an exception in his (that is Wyclif's case) in worshipping idols, because this one was of home manufacture ... genuine British metal". Devotion went forth to this "newly-canonised saint ... this latest golden image which Nebuchadnezzar, the King, has set up". He wrote to make Conservative flesh creep, as he lashed out at doctrines which were "wicked and anarchic in the extreme, striking at the root of all lawful authority, both civil and religious, and such that if put into practice would render any civilized Government, Constitutional, Monarchical or Republican utterly impossible". 80 The "Morning Star of the Reformation" had now become, in Stevenson's eyes, the Morning Star of modern Socialism. The extremism of this Jesuit view was not without support from a more judicious authority who laboured long and successfully to make Wyclif's writings and theories better known to his countrymen, and one who was also a leading light in the Wyclif Society. "The political theory of Wyckliffe, with all its nobility", wrote Reginald Lane Poole, "rests upon as wilful and as preposterous a treatment of the Bible as that of any of his hierarchical adversaries. Carried into practice by those who were not able to appreciate its refinements, it resolved itself into a species of Socialism which was immediately seen to be subversive of the very existence of society".81 To conservative-minded medievalists of the second half of the nineteenth century the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was to the fourteenth century what 1789 and 1848 were to them. This Conservative attitude was further reflected in 1923 by Professor F. J. C. Hearnshaw, who saw in Wyclif and his followers a revolutionary undercurrent that was both entirely negative and destructive. He referred to Wyclif's followers frequently as "revolutionary agitators", and likened Wyclif to the Bolsheviks. To this view he added, with considerable rhetoric, a passage which, in spite of his dislike of Wyclif, perpetuates some of the myths about him. "It is eminently satisfactory and disembarrassing to have got the reformer clear of both the obscurantism of the Merton Wyclif and from the insolvency of his namesake at Queen's. For Wyclif, as we have already remarked, was essentially a Balliol man. Now to be a Balliol man is to be portentous. The typical scholar of Balliol is a youth distinguished by ominous brilliance : the typical fellow of Balliol is a meteor of high magni­ tude : the typical Master of Balliol, well Wyclif was the typical Master of Balliol, luridly luminous, heretically vapourous, the Great Nebula itself in the constellation of Lucifer".82 That great critic of the medieval church, G. G. Coulton also thought that Wyclif anticipated Fabian Socialism.83 On the other hand, the nineteen-twenties produced the first modern full-length biographical study of Wyclif by H. B. Workman, a two-volumed work which is still the basic biography and was reprinted in 1966 in the United States. It suffered from excessive adulation, had much invention of evidence and uncritical repetition as well as much sound scholarship. Workman, a Congre­ gationalist minister, was determined to make a hero out of Wyclif. He considered Wyclif to be "a Master of English", "the harbinger of a JOHN WYCLIF

premature spring", a "Nonconformist of Nonconformists, a Modernist of the Modems", but "in the main he is a medievalist" whose influence, he concluded, was beyond dispute".84 Since then much doubt has crept in. Wyclif has had less laudatory treatment at the hands of a most skilled Oxford historian, K. B. McFarlane, who has produced what is, so far, the most devastating analysis of the Reformer's life and motives,85 but one in which the excrescences of genera­ tions of Wyclifolatrous admiration are cut down to size. The picture which emerges from his somewhat caustic pen is of a man goaded into his final attack upon the Church by bitterness, pique and disappointment at his failure to secure preferment, to which can be added the fact that in the last two years of his life Wyclif suffered from a high blood-pressure which brought about a series of strokes, from the final one of which he died, on 31 December 1384. The state of Wyclif's health in the last two years of his life made Mr. McFarlane believe that he was a man in a great hurry, knowing that his days were numbered, careless of what he said, muddle-headed in what he wrote, and of less influence and importance than has been usually claimed for him. No one else has stressed the possibility and importance of Wyclif having suffered from high blood-pressure. Even if medically this were the case, which in view of his strokes appears likely, its significance can be exaggerated. There must be and, indeed, have been many scholars and others who suffer or who have suffered from high blood-pressure, without its necessarily or significantly affecting their quality of mind or undermining the importance of what they had or have to say. There has, in fact, always been more than one Wyclif. The Wyclif portrayed by McFarlane is, on the whole, that canvassed many times by moderate Anglican opinion and most clearly by High-Anglican opinion. McFarlane reacted to the uncritical and over-elaborate and eulogistic accounts of Wyclif that had rather captured the market since the latter part of the nineteenth century. In reaction the pendulum is inclined to go too far. A more recent biographical study of Wyclif, in 1964, by a Methodist writer, John Stacey, has attempted to modify considerably the picture which McFarlane's unsentimental work gave of the Reformer.86 In some ways his work is not entirely unsuccessful, but there are too many serious mistakes running throughout the book, founded either upon misrepresentation, or anticipation of views which could never have occurred to Wyclif, and too much real factual error to make the biography significant. Here we must take our leave of "Posthumous Wyclif". Few characters in history can have had such a varied posthumous career. In English his­ toriography there has been a love-hate relationship. At times it is hard to realise that the same person is being described. He,. has had as varied a parcel of descendants as any figure in history. And to suit the many different causes he has been made to serve, divers myths have grown up. Myths about Wyclif mean more than exaggerated and fanciful interpretations of his importance, whether they be to exalt or to minimise him. They mean also downright invention. We do not know when or where he was born, nor 28 LEICESTERSHIRE ARCH£0LOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY anything about his family or upbringing, yet whole chapters have been written about his early life and the aristocratic background of the Wyclif family. The chronology of his Oxford career is still bothersome; it has been put out of line by as much as ten years by some historians, including Shirley. The order of writing of his philosophical and theological works in Latin is still in dispute, though this would not be gathered from reading some writers. No one has yet really settled once and for all the question whether he actually wrote anything in English, but much has been printed as if he did. He wrote so much in Latin that it would only make confusion more confounded to have to fit in a host of English ones besides. He is still credited by many writers with sending out "Poor Priests" as if he were a fourteenth-century equivalent of St. Francis, St. Ignatius of Loyola or John Wesley, but no concrete evidence has been adduced. He has at times been credited with exile in Bohemia and with recantation. "History" wrote a Scot, "is· indeed the proper repository of all those facts which best illustrate the general nature of man. History, plain unsophisticated history, neither warped by party feelings, nor disguised by prejudice, forms a true and faithful mirror". 87 It is hard to feel that a true and faithful mirror will ever be found to reflect Wyclif adequately. We know so little about him as a person or about his life, and it is unlikely that more will be discovered. What we know comes either from chronicle sources hostile to him, from governmental records which are impersonal, or from his own writings which are almost entirely formal and unrevealing. As far as explanations of his character and motives are concerned, the poles of opinion we have examined cover most conceivable interpretations. Even if Wyclif ultimately finds that he has to submit himself to psycho-analysis, a fate that bas overtaken other historical characters, the conclusions will probably vary little from one or other of the views already canvassed, and such psychological explanations rarely command universal agreement, even amongst expert practitioners. One thing is clear. It is unlikely either that the last word has been said about him or that he will not continue to attract attention. It does seem difficult for anyone to write with restraint about him, which may indeed be the measure of his importance and significance. Disagreement amongst historians is not usually over unimportant persons or events. Certainly no estimate of Wyclif can fail to take into account this mass of writing about him, and on the basis of it, some may well come to the conclusion that in this posthumous career his real significance lies. Wyclif became the property of too many interested parties, but there are signs that he is being freed at least from some of these loyalties. He was condemned by the Church in the Council of Constance and Pope Martin V ratified this. The list ot heresies singled out for condemnation quickly became part of the authoritative lists of condemned opinions circulated amongst Roman-Catholic theologians. 88 In this ecumenical age there has been talk amongst continental Catholic theologians about reversing the sentence on John Hus. Perhaps no one will go so far for Wyclif, but many of the major contributions to Wyclifian scholarship in recent years have come from Roman-Catholic historians: in England from David Knowles,89 JOHN WYCLIF 29

W. A. Pantin9° and Beryl Smalley,9 1 in Ireland from a Jesuit, Aubrey Gywnn,9 2 in Belgium from a Benedictine, Paul de Vooght,93 and from Rome by an Augustinian, D. Trapp.94 Now there has appeared a new Lutheran scholar, G. A. Benrath,95 who has produced an outstanding study of Wyclif's Postilla Super Totam Bibliam. J. R. Robson has written a good clear intro­ duction to Wyclif as philosopher.96 They are all trying, and successfully, to free Wyclif from his later history and to place him back into the context of the fourteenth century to which, assuredly, he belongs. And in this work of rehabilitation Wyclif's status has been enhanced rather than diminished. There is no lack of interest in him. Doctor Gordon Leff chose Wyclif as the subject of his Raleigh Lecture in 1966 at the British Academy.97 The same year saw reprints of Workman's biography and Professor Deanesly's Lollard Bible. In the fruitful decade of the eighteen-eighties, even with all its partisan­ ship, men like Lane Poole, and also Loserth, saw the importance of Wyclif in the realm of Ideengeschichte. The emphasis in Wyclifian studies has come back once more to that point. Nothing will be lost by a renewed concentration on the sources, even if it means cutting many of those uncut pages in Wyclif Society volumes in libraries, whether in Oxford or Cambridge or London. It will certainly do no harm for us to refresh ourselves with what Wyclif actually said, rather than what has been said about him, and it must not be done in isolation. To relate him to the context of his day means also finding out more about his contemporaries and predecessors and about trends of thought, especially in philosophy and biblical studies. It will be rewarding work and it is not likely to diminish the importance of Wyclif. Like Leonardo da Vinci, Wyclif's mind teemed with ideas which, for good or ill, he let loose on the world. He hit out at every aspect of ecclesiastical life and thought in his day. No one is likely to doubt, still less deny, that he was a radical a l'outrance.9 8 30 LEICESTERSHIRE ARCHltOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY

NOTES

1. D. Neal, The History of the Puritans or Protestant Non-Conformists (1732-8), I, 3. Professor F. J. C. Hearnshaw (vid. n. 82) provides an interesting variant by the story of an examination candidate who only knew one thing for certam about Wyclif, that he was "the editor of the Morning Star''. This paper is an expanded version of the first part of one entitled "John Wyclif, Myth and Reality", read to a meeting of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society on 25 February 1966. Throughout this paper the simpler spelling "Wyclif" is used, except in book titles or proper names where the place-name form "Wycliffe" and other forms were used. Whimsical preferences for "Wyclyf" should be eschewed. 2. A. H. Dyson & S. H. Skillington, Lutterworth Church (Leicester, 1916), esp. p. 23. 3. Trans. Leics. Archit. & Archaeol. Soc., II (1870), 60-3. 4. K. B. McFarlane, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (1952), IO. 5. A study of Reformation views of Wyclif is to be found in M. E. Aston, "John Wycliffe's Reformation Reputation", Past and Present, 30 (1965), 23-51. 6. T. Waldensis, Doctrinale •.. (Venice, 1571), bk. 2, art. 3, c.60, p.326; bk. 4, art. 3, c.33, p.549. The same story was repeated by the Auditor of the Sacred Palace in 1433 at the Council of Basel to refute Peter Payne (Diary of Peter of Zatec: Monumenta Conciliorum Generalium Seculi Decimi Quinti, ed. F. Palacki and E. Birk (Vienna, 1857), I, 317). For the printed editions of the Doctrinale see note 28. 7. Ghent edition (1556-7), II, i, 1016-7. 8. S. Daniel, The Collection of the Historie of England (1618), 217-8. 9. For a discussion of this manuscript see: J. Crompton, "Fasciculi Zizaniorum", Journ. Eccles. Hist., 12 (1961), 35-45, 155-66. IO. ibid., 41. 11. J. Bale, Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Brytanniae, quam nunc Angliam et Scotiam vocant, Catalogus (Basel, 1557-9). 12. Listed W. Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (1963), 9, 251-3. 13. Pratt ed. (1877), I, 93. 14. ibid., II, 791-2. 15. Summarium, s.v. J. Wyclif; Catalogus, 450. 16. W. Camden, Britannia (1607), trans. R. Gough (1789), II, 189. 17. Its original title was Historia Ecclesiae Christi (Basel, 1559-74), 7 volumes. It was translated into German at Jena 1560-65. It was to refute this Lutheran version of Church history that the great Oratorian, Caesar Baronius, the "Father of ecclesiastical history", began his Annales Ecclesiastici. 18. J. Crespin, Acta Martyrum (Geneva, 1556-9); French text Actes des Martyrs deduits en 7 Livres depuis le temps de Vviclef et de Hus iusques a present (Geneva, 1565). 19. This was called L'Etat de L'Eglise (Geneva, 1564). The translation was dedi­ cated to Sir William Wray of Glentworth, Lincolnshire. Simon Patrick was described as "gentleman". 20. ibid., 418; A3. 21. A. G. Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York 1509-58 (1959); "Heresy and the Origins of English Protestantism", Britain and the Netherlands, ed. J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann, II (1964), 47-66; The English Reforma­ tion (1964). 22. M . E. Aston, "Lollardy and the Reformation, Survival or Revival", History, 49 (1964), 149-70. "Books and Belief in the Later Middle Ages", a paper circulated for Past and Present Conference on "Popular Religion", 7 July 1966. 23. Dr. J. A. F. Thomson's The Later Lollards, I414-1520 (1965) is geographically comprehensive and authoritative. 24. No place of printing is given. The German Wyclifite scholar, Lechler canonised Basel as the place of printing, but more recently British Museum bibliographers have suggested that it was printed at Worms (British Museum Catalogue of German Books, 1455-1600 (1962), 913); I owe this reference to the Hon. Mrs. M. E. Aston. 25. Pase. Rerum, 1535 ed., 242. JOHN WYCLIF 31

.26. It was placed on the Venetian Index in 1554. This commended it to protestant · writers. Thomas James used the Index as a librarian today would use a book­ seller's catalogue. Anything appearing on the Index he felt ought to be in his library. 27. E. Brown, The Letters of the Renowned Father Paul (1693), v. 28. Editions of the Doctrinale were printed: in Paris, in parts, 1521, 1523; in one volume, 1532; in Salamanca, 1556; in Venice 1571. A Jesuit, Blanchiotti pro­ duced a three-volume edition in Venice in 1757-9. 29. T. James, An Apologie for John Wickliffe shewing his Conformitie with the now Church of England; with Answers to such slanderous objections as have been lately urged against him by Father Parsons, the Apologist and others; collected out of diverse works of his in written hand in the Publike Library at Oxford, of the Honourable Foundation of Sir Thomas Bodley Knight (Oxford, J. Barnes, 1608), 14. He also printed Two Short Treatises against the Orders of Begging Friars (1608). In this work (p.2) James expressed satisfaction that God had prescribed such Works of Wyclif in order "to stop the mouths of lying pamphleteers which write that our religion is nothing else but a new and upstart doctrine scarcely ever heard before Luther". There is no evidence that these English Works were by Wyclif. 30. J. N. L. Myres, "Thomas James and the Painted Frieze", Bodi. Libr. Ree., 4 (1952-3), 38, 40. 31. Quoted by Myres (p.38) from T. James, An Explanation . .. of the Ten Articles (1625). This interesting reference to "Authors of the middle ages" does not seem to have attracted the attention it deserves. 32. For Abbot the problem was to decide which Church had retained the "purity of the apostles' doctrine" unmixed with dregs of error and superstition, especi­ ally in "the gloomy and dark ages before Luther". 33. T. Fuller, The Church History of Britain from the Birth of Jesus Christ until the year 1648, ed. J. S. Brewer (1845), II, 316. Fuller admitted that Wyclif had faults but "he was a man living in a dark age" and even so "envy bath fathered many foul aspersions upon him", (ibid., 316). 34. T . Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England, ed. P. A. Nuttall (1840), I, 479. 35. J. Lewis, The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Trans­ lated by J. Wicliffe, S.T.P., Prebendary of Aust, in the Collegiate Church of Westbury and Rector of Lutterworth about 1378 (1731). It was printed by John March in George Yard near the Postern on Tower Hill, and finished 6 June 1731. To it was prefixed A History of the Several Translations of the Holy Bible and New Testament into English, both in Manuscript and Print and of the most remarkable Editions of these since the Invention of Printing. The Works of the Rev. D. Water/and, ed. W. van Mildert (Oxford, 1856), III, 399. The correspondence between Lewis and Waterland printed from Rawlinson manuscripts is to be found pp. 237-405. 37. Lewis, History of Life and Sufferings (1820 ed.), xxxii. 38. ibid., xii, xvii-xviii. This is a reference to Matthias Earbery for whom vid. p.23. 39. This short pamphlet is to be found in the Bodleian Library: G. A. Eccles. Top. 4 °, 36. 91 . One hundred pounds had already been raised for the memorial by the time this pamphlet was written. A dull obelisk was raised to Wyclif's memory in Lutterworth in 1884. 40. M. Whinney, Sculpture in Britain 1530-1830 (Pelican Hist. of Art, 1964), 216. 41. N . Pevsner, Leicestershire and Rutland (Penguin Buildings of England, 1960), 181. For another judgement on Westrnacott's work see R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660-1851 (Odhams, n.d.), 428. 42. Subsequently re-issued 1870-77 by Josiah Pratt. It is now proposed to re-print this edition at a cost of £75 a set. It was in an adaptation of Foxe in 1784 by the Methodist, Paul Wright that the phrase "bloody Mary" appeared. (W. Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (1963), 253). 43. R. Vaughan, On the study of General History (1834). For Robert Vaughan see H. Hale-Bellot, University College London, 1826-1926 (1929), u6-7. Vaughan said that he travelled more than two thousand miles "in those old stage-coach days" to look at manuscripts of Wyclif's English works, before he wrote a two-volume Life and Opinions of John Wycliffe, D .D. (1828, 2nd ed. 1831) and another life in 1853). His grandson was named Wycliffe Vaughan. 44. H. Cowell, The Character and Place of Wicliffe as a Reformer (1858), 7. 32 LEICESTERSHIRE ARCH£0LOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY

45. Forshall and Madden printed two versions of the Wyclifite Bible, an earlier version attributed to Nicholas Hereford, Wyclif's chief lieutenant, and a later version, attributed to John Purvey, Wyclif's faithful Achates. The whole ques­ tion of the origin and authorship of the first English translation of the entire Bible is a highly complex and controversial question. There has recently been much criticism of Forshall and Madden's edition by Swedish philologists-vid. S. J. Fridstedt, The Wyclifje Bible, Part I (Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Studies in English 4 (1953)); "The Authorship of the Lollard Bible", Stockholm Studies in Modern Philology 19 (Uppsala, 1956), 28-41. A new edition of the earlier version, from MS. Bodley 959 is being produced in Sweden (C. Lindberg, MS Bodley 959, (Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Studies in English 6 (1959); 8 (1961); IO (1963); 13 (1965)). Most of this philological work is full of snares and pitfalls for the uninitiated and the best guide is still M. Deanesly, The Lollard Bible (1920, repr. 1966). The inspiration to make a translation probably did come from Wyclif, the actual work was done in his circle, but mostly after his death. 46. Pase. Ziz., xlvi. 47. The further revision of the catalogue undertaken by Fraiilein I. H. Stein of Berlin has never reached completion. 48. F. J. Furnivall (1825-1910), sculler, vegetarian, teetotaller, non-smoker, friend of F. D. Maurice, Ludlow and Ruskin, secretary of the Philological Society, contributor to the New English Dictionary, founded the Early English Text Society (1864), the Chaucer Society (1868), Ballad Society (1868), New Shakspere Society (1873), Browning Society (1881), Shelley Society (1886), in addition ,,to the Wyclif Society (1881). 49. D. Johannes (sic) Wiclefii wahrhafte und gegrundete Nachrichten van seinem Leben, Lehrsiitzen und Schriften (?Frankfurt, 1754) 50. Some of the teething troubles of the venture are described by R. Buddensieg in his Introduction to Wyclif's Polemical Works (1882), I. v, vi, viii. 51. Report of the Proceedings of the Quincentenary Commemoration, 21 May 1884. 52. ibid., 7. Burrows, elected to the Chichele Chair in 1882, had earlier offered incense to Wyclif in three lectures delivered in Oxford in 1881 and printed in 1882 under the title Wyclifs Place in History. 1884 brought a second edition of this book which is written with all the brio of the quarter-deck where his earlier career was spent. He thought that Wyclif merited a monument in every town in England. 53. ibid., 31. 54. ibid., 39. 55. T. W. Bushell, John Wycliffe, Patriot and Reformer (1885). 56. Wyclif was the subject of books in various series: Champions of Truth; Heroes of the Nation; Prophets of the Christian Faith; British Free Church Heroes; The World's Epoch Makers; J. Jackson Wray contributed John Wycliffe A Quincentenary Tribute (1884). Mr. Wray was also the author of Light from the Old Lamp, A Noble Vine, Matthew Mellowdew and Honest John Stallibrass. The celebrations of "The Glorious Revolution" in 1888 produced a tract by J. A. Wylie, The Revolution of 1688, A Retrospect from John Wyclifj to William of Orange (1888). The commemoration of Domesday Book in 1886 does not appear to have drawn any parallels. 57. This Report is usually found bound up with copies of J. Wyclifje, Tractatus de Civili Dominio, ed. R. L. Poole (1884/ 5). 58. R. Buddensieg, John Wyclif De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae (Wyclif Soc., 1905), I, vii. Buddensieg, a professor at Dresden, had been active in Wyclif studies since he wrote his "Studien zu Wyclif" in Zeitschrift fur historische Theologie, Heft III & IV, Neue Folge xxxviii (1874), 293-342, 501-43; xxxix (1875), 3-37. Wyclif's The Polemical Works, volume 1, the first volume issued by the Wyclif Society, was edited by Buddensieg. He had already edited Wyclif's Tractatus de Christo et suo Adversario Antichristo (Gotha, 1880). For the Wyclif Quin­ centenary he produced, in English, John Wiclif, Patriot, Reformer, Life and Writings (1884). 59. G . Lechler, Johann van Wiclif und die Vorgeschichte der Reformation (Leipzig, 1873), ii, 264-5; see also: R. Buddensieg, John Wiclif (1884), IO-II. The contributions made to Wyclif studies by these German scholars were consider­ able. Gotthard Lechler, a professor at Leipzig, was responsible for editing Wyclif's De Officio Pastorali (Leipzig 1863) and his Trialogus (Oxford, 1869). JOHN WYCLIF 33

Both these works preceded the formation of the Wyclif Society and Lechler played an important part in stimulating interest in printing Wyclif's Latin works. He had begun work on Wyclif in the eighteen-fifties. Johann Loserth, a professor first at Czernowitz and later at Graz, edited altogether thirteen volumes for the Wyclif Society between 1886 and 1922. Both scholars wrote substantial monographs on Wyclif. Lechler's Johann von Wiclif und die Vorgeschichte der Reformation (Leipzig, 1873) was translated into English by P. Lorimer under the title John Wycliffe and his English Precursors. A second edition of this was printed in 1884. Loserth's Hus und Wiclif, zur Genesis der husitischen Lehre (Leipzig, 1884) was translated into English in 1884 by M. J. Evans. S. Harrison Thomson reports that Loserth told him in 1932 that he had written his book in six weeks in 1884 (S. H. Thomson, M. Joh. Hus, Tractaius de Ecclesia (1956), viii). A second edition of the German text appeared in Munich in 1925. 60. De Verit., op. cit., xli-iii. 61. Printed at Douai, 1622. 62. ibid., 664. 63. quoted Aston, Past and Present, 30 (1965), 39. 64. Examen, 65. 65. ibid., 68. 66. A. Wood, The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford, ed. J. Gutch (Oxford 1792), I, 484; Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss (1813), I, lxxi. 67. ed. Edward Brown, 2 vols. (1690). 68. Reliquiae Hearnianae, ed. P. Bliss, 3 vols. (1869), III, 30-r. 69. J. Collier, An Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, ed. T. Lothbury (1852), III, 136. 70. M. Earbery, The Pretended Reformers (1717), vi, xii. 71. P. M. Grassi, De Ortu ac Progressu Haeresum Johannis Witclefi in Anglia Presbiteri Narratio Historica (Vicenza, 1707), introd. 72. Biographia Britannica (1766), vi, pt. 2, 4265-6. Wharton had written this in his Appendix to G. Cave, Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Historia Literaria (1688). This Appendix was printed in 1689. 73. A new u·anslation was printed in 1820. Rapin's History of England (1820), trans. H . Robertson. The sections on Wyclif are to be found I, 355, 371-3. 74. D. Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 (1875 ed., reprinting that of 1786), I, 566-7. 75. W. Gilpin, The Lives of John Wicliff and of the most eminent of his Disciples, Lord Cobham, John Huss, Jerome of Prague and Zizca (1765), 32. 76. ibid., 57, He did say, oddly enough, of that basic doctrine in Wyclif of "Dominion founded upon Grace" that it was "a strange doctrine", that Wyclif did not hold it "in a literal sense" and that "what he says upon this subject may be called whimsical" (ibid., 77). 77. C. Wordsworth, John Wiclif, his Doctrine and Work (Lincoln, 1884), 4, 13, 17. 78. ibid., 25. 79. J. N. Figgis, Typical English Churchmen, Series 2 (1909), Wyclif to Gardiner, 9, 13, 23 . So. J. Stevenson, The Truth about John Wyclif (1885), vi-vii, 5. In spite of great tendentiousness Stevenson did, in his work on the followers of Wyclif, make use of a Westminster Cathedral manuscript which had not been consulted since the time of Foxe. It has remained unnoticed again until used by a recent writer, who did not know of Stevenson's work. 81. R. L. Poole, Wycliffe and Movements for Reform (1889), 40. Poole made important contributions to the work of the Wyclif Society by editing De Civili Dominio, Liber I (1884) and De Dominio Divino (1890). He had already, in 1880, produced a pioneer work on medieval thought: Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought and Learning, which is still a useful book. Poole brought back into focus Wyclif's dependence upon the earlier teaching of Fitzralph of Armagh. This was not clear to him in 1880 when he wrote chaoter ten of Illustrations. In the next decade he worked on Fitzralph's treatise De Pauperie Salvatoris, and edited the first four books of it as an appendix to his edition of De Dominio Divino in 1890. He also wrote the article on Fitzralph for the Dictionary of National Biography. 34 LEICESTERSHIRE ARCH£0LOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOCIETY

8.2. F. J. C. Hearnshaw, The Social and Political Ideas of some Great Medieval Thinkers (1923), 199. This notion of Wyclif as the great Balliol man also appears in the dedication by R. L. Poole of his edition of De Civili Dominio to Benjamin Jowett: "In grateful recognition of his services to the Historical study of Theology, this work of a former master of his College is respectfully dedi­ cated. 83. G. G. Coulton, Medieval Panorama, vol. 2, The Horizons of Thought (1938), Fontana edition (1961), 121; Studies in Medieval Thought (1940, repr. 1944), 198. 84. H. B. Workman, 'John Wyclif (1926), i, 3, 7. 85. vid. n.4. 86. For a review of this book by the author vid. History 50 (1965), 218-9. For the sake of completeness two other books can be mentioned, neither of much significance for Wyclifian studies: J. H. Dahmus, The Prosecution of 'John Wyclyf (Yale, 1952); L. J. Daly, The Political Theory of 'John Wyclif (Loyola Press, Chicago, 1962). 87. Preface by H. Robertson to Rapin's History of England (1820). 88. In the seventeenth century in C. du Plessis d' Argentre, Collectio 'Judiciorum de Novis Erroribus (ed. Paris, 1733-6); from this source it passed, in the nineteenth century, to H. J. D. Denzinger Enchiridion Symbolorum (first edition Wiirzburg, 1854, 28th edition, ed. C. Rahner, S. J. Fribourg, 1952), 241-4. For an Ameri­ can version of this vid. R. J. Deferrari, The Sources of Catholic Dogma from Enchiridion Symbolorum (St. Louis, 1957). M. D. Knowles, "The Censured Opinions of Uthred of Boldon", The Historian and Character and other essays by Dom David Knowles (Cambridge, 1963), 129-70; repr. of Brit. Acad. Lecture of 1951). D. Knowles, Saints and Scholars (Cambridge, 1962), 142-52; repr. from The Religious Orders in England, vol. 2 (1955). 90. W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, 1955); Canterbury College, Oxford, (Oxford Hist. Soc. New Ser. 6-8 (1946-50). 91. B. Smalley, "John Wyclif's Postilla Super Totam Bibliam", Bodleian Libr. Ree. 4 (1953), 186-205; "Wyclif's Postilla on the Old Testament and his Principium", (Oxford Studies presented to Daniel Callus (Oxford Hist. Soc. New Ser. 16 (1964), 253-96; "The Bible and Eternity; John Wyclif's Dilemma", 'journ. Warburg & Courtauld Ins tit. 27 (1964), 73-89. 92. A. Gwynn, The English Austin Friars in the Time of Wyclif (Oxford, 1940). 93. P. de Vooght, Les Sources de la Doctrine Chretienne (editions Desclee de Brouwer (1954). For a contrary but not convincing case vid. M. Hurley, "Scriptura Sola; Wyclif and his Critics", repr. from Traditio (New York, Fordham Press 1960). For de Vooght's criticism of Hurley vid. "Wiclif et la Scriptura Sola", Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 39 (1963), 50-86. For another discussion of this problem vid. G. H. Tavard, Holy Writ or Holy Church (1959). 94 D. Trapp, "Augustinian Thought of the 14th Century", Augustiniana 6 (1956), 146-274. 95. G. A. Benrath, Wyclifs Bibelkommentar, Arbeiten zur K.irchengeschichte 36 (Berlin, 1966). For a review of this by the author see 'journ. Eccles. Hist. 18 1967), 263-6. J. A. Robson, Wyclif and the Oxford Schools (Oxford Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, New Ser. 8 (1961). This is a detailed study of Wyclif's Summa de Ente in the context of scholastic debates in Oxford during the second half of the fourteenth century. The Summa de Ente, Wyclif's most important philosophical work is still not completely in print. S. Harrison Thomson began to print part of it ('Johannis Wyclif Summa de Ente, libri primi (Oxford, 1930). Another section has been printed in the United States: 'johannis Wyclyf Tractatus de Trinitate, ed. A. du Pont Breck, University of Colorado Studies and Texts in Medieval Thought (1962). 97. G. Leff, "John Wyclif, The Path to Dissent", Proc. Brit. Acad. 52 (1966), 143-80. In the past twelve years there has been a spate of articles on various aspects of WyclWs thought. We may mention only a few: A. Molnar, "Recent Works on Wyclif's Theology", Communio Viatorum 7 (Prague, 1964), 186-92; R. Stalder, "Le Concept de l'Eglise selon le De Ecclesia de Wiclif'', Bijdragen 23 (1962), 38-52, 287-302; M. Schmidt "John Wyclif's Kirchenbegriff-Der Christus humilis Augustins bei Wyclif", Gedenkschrift juer D. Werner Elert, ed. F. Huebner, W. Maurer, E. Kinder (Berlin, 1955), 72-108. I have been unable to consult in this country J. W. Mirrielees, "John Wyclif's Freudian Complex", University of California Chronicle, xxxii (1930). I am deeply indebted to Professor M. Deanesly and Mr. L. H. Andrews for reading through this paper and for much helpful comment, criticism and encouragement.