8 Wyclif’s Well: , Landscape and Memory in Post- England Alexandra Walsham

The story of Wyclif’s well is firmly interwoven into the fabric of modern Leicestershire folklore. Popular compilations of the local traditions and legends of the county rarely fail to reiterate the curious tale explaining the origins of a vigorous cold spring in Lutterworth, a market town now syn- onymous with the name of the Oxford academic who inspired the late medieval heretical movement known as lollardy. Already under official investigation for his heterodox theology but enjoying the protection of a powerful royal patron in the guise of John of Gaunt, John Wyclif was allowed to retire to the obscurity of Lutterworth rectory for the last years of his life, dying here of a stroke in 1384 and being buried in the churchyard. Posthumously condemned by the Church as a heretic, in 1428 his bones were exhumed and burnt by officials from the diocese of Lincoln and the ashes scattered in the nearby River Swift.1 Taking two variant forms, the story of the well is closely connected with this event. According to the first version, its petrifying but therapeutic waters arose where one of his bones tumbled from the handcart conveying them to the site of incineration, while the second tells how it emerged spontaneously at the spot at which a member of the ‘mob’ sent to carry out this sentence picked up a bone and then immediately fell, dashing his brains out. Still flowing in the grounds of a local house, it has come to be known as St John’s Well. Incorporated into inventories of the holy wells of the region, and invigorated by bur- geoning interest in the occult, more recently it has also been enrolled in the annals of ‘Leicestershire and Rutland earth mysteries’.2 The story of Wyclif’s well is a classic example of an aetiological tale sup- plying a mythical, metaphysical explanation for a prominent landmark. It attests to the enduring capacity of the natural environment to operate as ‘a vast repository of memory’, to a tendency to spin an imagined past around visible topographical features that is deeply ingrained in human cultures.3 It also conforms with, and superficially bears a striking resemblance to, the Catholic cult of . Medieval hagiography is full of stories of springs engendered in miraculous approbation of holy personages: springs that

142 A. McShane et al. (eds.), The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2010 Alexandra Walsham 143 emerge supernaturally to relieve a drought, quench their thirst, or provide water to baptise their followers; springs that burst forth to commemorate the deeds of the heroic dead or to consecrate the ground where the inno- cent blood of is shed; springs that arise as emblems of divine wrath against those who commit heinous sins or engage in sacrilege against their sacred . Assimilating pagan motifs into a new religious framework, some such tales reflect the ongoing ecclesiastical struggle to Christianise the European landscape.4 In the case of Wyclif’s well, we find that the ancient paradigm of the fountain testifying to the sanctity of a victim of unjust violence and persecution has attached itself to a figure who has long been regarded as a valiant forerunner of the Protestant reformers. It has grafted itself onto a theologian heralded by sixteenth-century propagandists and their successors as ‘the morning star of the Reformation’ and credited with founding a sect whose role in sowing the seeds of the religious revolution that precipitated England’s decisive break with the Church of Rome in the 1530s is still the subject of heated scholarly dispute. More than a little iron- ically, it has fused with collective memory of a movement distinguished by its overt hostility to the assumptions about the materiality of the holy that lay at the heart of traditional religion – by the vociferous rejection of images, pilgrimages and veneration of the saints and their remains that also became a hallmark of Protestant thinking. This aim of this essay is to explore the significance of this apparent anomaly, to assess the ostensible incongruity of a cult of lollard sanctity. It seeks to trace the genesis and development of the legend of Wyclif’s well and to illuminate the processes of amplification and embellishment that have subtly transformed it over the centuries. More importantly, it attempts to use this intriguing example of syncretism to analyse the connections between religious consciousness and the landscape in early modern England, as well as the part played by both oral tradition and literate culture in the making of a corpus of post-Reformation and indeed Protestant folklore. It sheds further light upon the hazy interface between lollardy and evangelical- ism in the reign of Henry VIII and underlines the need to understand theo- logy and piety not as static entities, but rather as fluid, living and often inconsistent tissues of practice and belief.

We may begin by returning to 1428, the year in which Wyclif’s bones were disinterred from their grave and ceremonially consigned to the flames. Carried out on the orders of Richard Fleming, the earnestly anti-Wycliffite of Lincoln, who was himself acting on the instructions of Pope Martin V, this rite of destruction by fire represented the final fulfilment of the decree of anathema that had been pronounced on the Lutterworth rector by the Council of Constance in May 1415. The decision of that synod to condemn a list of some 267 heretical opinions found in his writings followed a series of episcopal and papal investigations of Wyclif’s views dating back to the 1370s. 144 Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England

But its denunciation of the English schoolman was also closely linked with the proceedings against the Bohemian priest Jan Hus, whose teachings betrayed the explicit influence of Wyclif, and whom it duly excommun- icated and handed over to the secular arm for execution.5 In ordaining not only a holocaust of Wyclif’s works but also the burning of his desiccated corpse, the Council revealed its determination to extinguish all trace of his accursed presence and memory. Dispersed by the fast-flowing waters of the river into which it was ritually tipped, the very dust to which he was reduced was cast into oblivion. The exhumation and incineration of his skeleton purged the consecrated ground it had defiled and symbolised the hellfire by which his soul would be consumed. At another level such acts functioned as a kind of posthumous ordeal: to destroy relics without suffering dreadful repercussions was to undermine the pretensions to sanctity of the living individuals of which they were lingering and potent residues. By this means, to echo Margaret Aston, ‘the supernatural was discredited by inertia’.6 Attempts to find concrete evidence of any tradition linking John Wyclif with a well at Lutterworth in fifteenth-century texts have (so far) proved fruit- less. William of Worcestre bypassed the town in the course of his travels in the 1480s and when Leland visited it in the early sixteenth century he men- tioned that many springs originated in the hills in its vicinity and converged into the Swift, but (unsurprisingly given his Catholic orthodoxy) said nothing about the connection of the settlement, let alone a local well, with a notor- ious heretic.7 In the 1380s, stimulated by the inflammatory preaching of two local hermits, William Smith and William Swinderby, and subsequently assisted by the residence of the Oxford schoolman himself, Leicester and the surrounding region had been a centre of lollard activity. Henry Knighton, canon of the local Augustinian abbey, wrote in his chronicle that the sect ‘grew so rapidly that you might hardly see two people, but one of them would be a follower of Wyclif’.8 However, by the 1420s heresy was a less significant and declining presence. The support it had once enjoyed among the gentry had waned after the Oldcastle rebellion and it also withered in the face of the determined efforts of Bishop Fleming to suppress it.9 It remains as difficult to assess the extent and continuity of popular sympathy for the rector of Lutterworth and his teachings in this area as it does to discover traces of a tale tying his exhumation with a minor change in the local landscape. This is not, however, the same as saying that no such tradition existed in the ephemeral realm of speech and social memory. Silence is always a sandy foundation on which to erect an historical thesis, but in an era of limited literacy oral circula- tion of a version of the story nonetheless remains a distinct possibility. It is seemingly not until 1531 that any hint of the legend enters the written record, in the form of words attributed to a draper of Much Hadham in Hert- fordshire by the name of George Bull, and preserved by the clerical scribe who prepared a table of persons who abjured their heretical opinions to insert Alexandra Walsham 145 in the register of the bishop of London. As well as questioning the necessity of sacramental confession and saying that ‘Luther was a good man’, Bull was reputed to have declared ‘that where Wickleffes bones were brent, sprang up a well or welspryng’. This was itself second-hand information, based on ‘the credence & reporte of M. Patmore Person of Hadham’.10 While little is known about Bull,11 happily rather more can be uncovered about the cited source of the rumour he was heard repeating. Taking his BA at Oxford in 1511, Thomas Patmore was ordained priest and admitted into the fellowship of Magdalen College three years later. Although Patmore was preferred to the benefice of Much Hadham by Bishop Richard Fitzjames in 1515, between 1518 and 1520 we find him at Gonville Hall in Cambridge (then a nest of heresy), where his hot-headed remark that ‘he dyd not set a bottel of hay by the Popes or Byshops cursse’ evidently left an impression, being remembered and used in evidence against him more than a decade later.12 Greatly influenced by the ferment of new ideas that were swirling in the town and university in the 1520s, he soon became a con- spicuous figure in early English evangelical circles. In particular, he is one of the few identified members of a shadowy network known as the ‘Christian Brethren’ which played a key role in importing and distributing ’s New Testament and other illicit books from the Continent.13 It was in this connection that in 1530, together with the brother of the translator, John Tyndale, and one Thomas Somer, he was apprehended and brought before the Lord Chancellor Sir and the Star Chamber. Patmore seems to have escaped the fate of Tyndale, Somer and two other offenders, who were subjected to the humilating punishment of being set upon a horse backwards and paraded at Cheapside during market time with papers on their heads proclaiming their crime and the forbidden bibles and tracts ‘pynned thick’ to their outward attire. These they were then obliged to throw onto a bonfire.14 But he did not elude the scrutiny of John Stokesley, bishop of London, by whom he was interrogated as a suspected heretic. To the charges that he had defiantly declared that ‘the truth of the Scripture hath bene kept from us a long time’, claimed that it was unlawful to burn heretics, and insisted that men could only be saved by God’s mercy and grace, were added his defence of clerical marriage and the allegation that he had personally blessed the union of his own curate and fellow student at Gonville Hill, Simon Smith and one Joan Bennore. Convinced of the doctrine of jus- tification by faith, Patmore had apparently spent a period of time ‘beyond sea’ in Wittenberg, where he was believed to have met and to have read and studied his works, as well as those of other German reformers including Oeclampadius and Melanchthon.15 Patmore became ‘so wrapt in the nettes’ and was placed under such intense pressure that he abjured and twice bore faggots at Paul’s Cross. Remaining unrepentant, in November 1531 he was deprived of his living and following payment of £100 condemned to perpetual imprisonment in 146 Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England the Lollard’s Tower at Lambeth, where he languished for three years, reput- edly ‘without fire or candle, or any other reliefe’.16 alluded to his sufferings in a letter written to refute William Hubberdine and they also did much to ensure his later inclusion in John Foxe’s famous martyrology as a witness to the ‘truth’.17 In the course of his incarceration he encoun- tered the former Benedictine monk and future Richard Bayfield, who confirmed him in the ‘doctrin’ and ‘kingdome of Christ’.18 Petitions in Parliament and supplications to the king failed to secure his release until Anne Boleyn personally intervened on his behalf in 1534.19 The following year, as the political tide was turning against the independent power of the clergy, Henry VIII set up a commission involving Cranmer, Cromwell, Audley and others to investigate his unjust treatment at the hands of Stokesley and his vicar-general Richard Foxford.20 It is manifestly clear that Thomas Patmore had friends in high places. A major player in the twilight world out of which in England first emerged in the 1520s and 30s, his activities highlight the porous bound- aries that separated lollardy and the amorphous phenomenon that was evan- gelicalism in this formative period. While claims about the geographical continuities between the two movements have proved largely inconclusive, the accumulated evidence of personal and social interconnections, especially in the melting pot of mid-Tudor London, remains very suggestive.21 It may be no accident that Patmore dined with his curate Simon Smith at the Bell in New Fish Street, which had been a lollard haunt; nor a mere coincidence that the maidservant whose marriage to Smith the vicar of Much Hadham sacramentally cemented was herself affiliated with the sect. Here we should take particular heed of the intersections and convergences to which Susan Brigden and Anne Hudson have drawn our attention, not least in relation to the clandestine fraternity of clerics and merchants that comprised the ‘Christian brethren’. The livery companies of the city functioned as secret cells of religious dissent, settings in which what Patrick Collinson calls the ‘chemical interaction of old and new heresy’ occurred spontaneously.22 The son of a draper, Patmore himself was made free of his father’s company in 1530: the same company of which Humphrey Monmouth, patron and financial backer of Tyndale, was also a member.23 Despite Foxe’s erroneous supposition that this man was a brother of the Hertfordshire vicar, it is much more likely that Thomas Patmore simply led a double life as layman and priest, moving in and out of overlapping circles of clergy and tradesmen sympathetic to reformist sentiments.24 It was probably in this context that he encountered and shared the story of Wyclif’s well with a fellow draper, George Bull. Although the evidence is chiefly circumstantial, Patmore and Bull seem to exemplify the possibilities for cross-fertilisation between lollardy and Protest- antism which some historians continue to regard with considerable scep- ticism. They re-open the question of whether Wycliffite opinions provided ‘a Alexandra Walsham 147 springboard of critical dissent’ from which some individuals were propelled to embrace the new faith. One of the most striking areas of theological congru- ence between the two movements was their mutual hostility to the reverence late medieval Catholics paid to hallowed persons, objects and places and their representations.25 A shared antipathy to idolatry and superstition could and did predispose lollards to the message preached by early reformers like Thomas Bilney, whose fierce assault on saints, pilgrimages and images was ‘almost indistinguishable’ from the colourful invective against shrines like Our Lady of (‘Falsingham’) and St Thomas Becket at Canterbury (‘Cankerbury’) that leaps from the records of heresy trials in the fifteenth century.26 Rooted in Wycliffe’s own writings, but hardened and sharpened by his later disciples, such views struck a chord with Protestant theological prior- ities. Patmore himself held strong views on this subject. ‘Why shuld we pray to Saints (said he) they are but blockes and stockes?’ Pointing to a painted cloth depicting a secular hunting scene, he declared that ‘hee had as leve pray to yonder hunter […] for a peece of flesh, as to pray to stockes that stand in walles’. He had also taken it upon himself to remove wax offerings left hanging from a tree to which a holy image was fixed, presumably because these votive gifts smacked of the sacrifices bestowed on pagan idols of old.27 Such pronounced opinions and impassioned actions make Patmore’s remarks about the well that arose where Wyclif’s bones were burnt all the more puzzling. How could a corrosive critique of the Catholic economy of the sacred co-exist with the claim that the posthumous persecution of the long- dead founder of the lollard sect had precipitated a wonder of nature so similar to those which had validated the sanctity of many medieval saints? A cult centred on the site of Wyclif’s disinterment seems blatantly at odds with what has come to be seen as one of the core features of lollard and Protestant theology. It is ostensibly hard to reconcile with the campaign to dismantle pilgrimage shrines and destroy miraculous wells, which less than five years later, would be launched by the Tudor state itself. Before confronting this problem more directly, it is necessary to stress that this manifestation of reverence for Wyclif was by no means unique. In Bohemia, veneration of the Oxford schoolman had already developed in Hussite circles in the early fifteenth century. Jerome of Prague was accused by the Council of Constance of possessing an image depicting him as a and both he and Hus would themselves very soon partake of the same charisma.28 In England, popular canonisation of Wyclif, hitherto respected simply as a ‘gret clerk’ and learned doctor, was given a considerable fillip by the exhumation of his corpse in 1428. Later that year, at his trial in , the lollard evangelist William White referred to him as ‘beatus’ and shortly afterwards William Emayn abjured the view that ‘Maister John Wyclif was holier and now is more in blisse and hier in heven glorified than Seint Thomas of Canterbury the glorious Martir’. This opinion was echoed by the Essex vicar Thomas Bagley, who was burnt at the stake in 1431. Nearly a 148 Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England century later such sentiments were still in circulation: John Stilman was indicted in 1518 for having said that ‘Wickliff is a saint in heaven’, among other offences, and in 1538 John Lambert was explicitly asked if he endorsed this idea.29 The spontaneous sanctification of the Lutterworth rector was accompanied by a growing impulse to regard other prominent lollards, including Sir John Oldcastle and William Sawtry as ‘holy martyrs’. The Norfolk matron Margery Baxter, tried in 1428, not only spoke of her recently executed teacher William White as ‘magnus sanctus in celo’ but also prayed to him daily to intercede for her with God the Father.30 No less striking is the full-blown cult which sprang up at the spot at which Richard Wych was exe- cuted on Tower Hill in 1440. Devotees carried away his ashes (sweet-smelling, after the fashion of countless earlier saints, thanks to the efforts of a local apothecary) and erected a cairn of stones and cross at the site. Before long stories of miracles began to be reported, at which point the authorities stepped in and endeavoured to suppress the unofficial shrine by turning it into a dunghill. Half a century later, in 1494, the remains of the octogenarian heretic Joan Boughton, who had herself accounted Wyclif a saint, were removed under cover of night and ‘kepydd ffor a precious Relyk, In an erthyn pott’.31 Historians have found it difficult to interpret such phenomena, remark- ing on the ‘blatant disregard for consistency’ they appear to embody and concluding somewhat unsatisfactorily that they are simply aberrations and anomalies. For Margaret Aston, Ann Hudson, Norman Tanner, and Shannon McSheffrey they are deviations from type, irregularities that suggest either an ‘imperfect understanding of Lollard teachings’, a selective acceptance of its tenets, or moments when ‘the ingrained habits of medieval piety prevailed over the recently learned theology’.32 In striking contrast, in a recent essay on the short-lived cult of Richard Wych Richard Rex has provocatively sug- gested that it should not be viewed as evidence of the veneration of an iconic lollard hero, but instead as a reflection of ‘the normal functioning of Catholic devotion’ – as an index of the vitality of orthodox rather than deviant popular piety. Wych, he insists, did not die for distinctively Wycliffite opinions and the sympathy his execution generated centred on the perception that he was an innocent victim of official persecution, a dedicated parish priest who had wrongfully been convicted of the crime of heresy.33 While Rex’s revisionist account of this incident is both clever and compelling, not all the examples cited above can be explained away so ingeniously. In seeking to understand affirmations of Wyclif’s sanctity, and indeed the story of the well that reput- edly sprang up in Lutterworth where his bones fell, we need to recognise the complexity of mainstream lollard thinking on this controverted topic. As Christina von Nocklen has argued, Wyclif and his disciples did not deny the existence of saints, they redefined them. No longer mediators between human- ity and the deity, they were rather the select company of the predestinate elect.34 Furthermore, Rex’s self-conscious search for a solution that satisfies the Alexandra Walsham 149 laws of logic and ‘rationality’ perhaps takes too little account of both the general untidiness of the human mind and the fluid and unstable nature of late medieval lollardy and its sixteenth-century Protestant successor. It is distorting, restricting and anachronistic to judge such phenomena by the standards of the theological principles artificially fossilised in the scholarly editions we now regard as canonical guides. In interpreting Thomas Patmore’s incidental remark about the Lutter- worth well that emerged where Wyclif’s bones were incinerated, important lessons can be learned from the late Bob Scribner’s memorable exploration of ‘Incombustible Luther’ and related phenomena. Reports that portraits and other relics of the Wittenberg reformer refused to burn circulated widely from the seventeenth century, but had embryonic origins in the 1520s, while folktales collected by later compilers reveal the development of a welter of myth and legend connecting him with features of the local German landscape, including many springs. The reciprocal processes by which Luther was assimilated into older paradigms of sainthood, and by which those paradigms in turn were transformed by the encounter, lead Scribner to conclude that the Reformation effected neither as radical nor as successful a break with the past as traditional historiography has led us to believe. What they highlight are the muted modifications, rather than bold transitions, that accompanied the religious upheavals of the era and the extent to which Protestantism perpetuated the notion of a providential and moralised universe in which God intervened to punish sin and to endorse the truth. Despite the discomfort such ‘subtle idolatry’ caused to some Protestant observers, Scribner argued that it is a mistake to see these merely as ‘“Catholic survivals” rooted in the “ignorance” of a peasant mentality’. This was a mythology partly perpetuated, if not created, by educated Lutheran pastors themselves.35 Such insights help to illuminate the behaviour of the Protestant hunters who scrambled over the still smouldering pyres of Smithfield in the 1550s to collect fragments of the bones and flesh of the Marian martyrs, to the glee of Catholic propagandists like Miles Huggarde, Thomas Stapleton and Nicholas Harpsfield, who presented this as evidence of the rank hypo- crisy of their enemies.36 They also provide a framework within which Thomas Patmore’s passing reference to a well linked with the site of John Wyclif’s ignominious exhumation acquires new nuances of meaning, alerting us to the independence that characterised religion as practised, rather than preached, and pointing to the role literate and learned clerics played in shaping and disseminating folk tradition. This fragment of evidence may also provide a modicum of support for the suggestion that lollardy was indeed ‘both more complex and more popular’ than some recent historians, notably Eamon Duffy and Richard Rex, have been willing to concede.37 Others, including Robert Lutton, are beginning to paint a more intricate picture. 150 Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England

Even so, much ambiguity and many unanswered questions remain. There are undoubted dangers in reading too much into a piece of hearsay, a stray second-hand remark, which has only been preserved in the historical record because it became entangled in a legal investigation for heresy. Does this intriguing wisp in the archives testify to an enduring element of oral and social memory, or was it the product of more recent and self-conscious invention, born of a context in which the corpses of other heretics were being dug from their resting place in consecrated soil and retrospectively shamed? It may not be irrelevant that, just a few months before Bull’s abjura- tion, the body of the Gloucestershire gentleman William Tracey was dis- interred from its grave and (in a fit of excessive zeal for which he was fined £300) burnt by the Chancellor of the diocese of Worcester. This followed the discovery of tell-tale Protestant sentiments in the phraseology of his last will and testament.38 We cannot ignore the century long gap between the disinterment of Wyclif’s relics and the first reference in writing to a spring bearing witness to his sanctity. We cannot establish either continuity or discontinuity with any certainty. Nevertheless, a further task confronts us and that is to account for the tenacity of this legend and its survival (and/or revival?) in subsequent centuries. How and why has the tale of Wyclif’s well persisted for nearly half a millennium? At this juncture, John Wyclif’s critical importance to the project of constructing and buttressing of Protestant identity must be emphasised. As Margaret Aston and others have shown, the figure of the Oxford reformer became a key weapon in Protestantism’s quest for historical legitimation, for evidence of a succession of true believers who had bravely repudiated the errors and corruptions of the medieval papacy and priesthood. To Protestant historians and propagandists Wyclif not only provided a telling retort to the repeated Catholic taunt ‘where was your Church before Luther?’, but gave England cause for self-congratulation in having nurtured one of the first to challenge the Romish Antichrist. Hailing him as ‘an invincible organ’ and ‘most strong Elias’, it was the former Carmelite friar who first spoke of Wyclif as a ‘morning star’ (‘stella matutina’). The same metaphors of illumination and enlighten- ment were applied to this ‘valiant champion’ by John Foxe in his Com- mentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum (1554) and Actes and Monuments (1563 and subsequent editions), the veritable foundation stone of reformed English hagiography.39 Firmly establishing the reputation of the Oxford academic as a kind of John the Baptist, Foxe was responsible for applying more than a few of the ‘layers of rich brown Protestant varnish’ upon which K.B. McFarlane famously commented in 1952.40 In particular, he did his best to stress Wyclif’s cre- dentials as a martyr, entering him under 2 January into the post-Reformation calendar that prefaced some editions of the book. The desirability of demon- strating that he too had suffered persecution not only explains Foxe’s tacit Alexandra Walsham 151 endorsement of the fiction that Wyclif had fled into exile to Bohemia before returning to die at Lutterworth, but also the prominent place he accorded the exhumation of his bones in 1428 in his grand polemical narrative. The cruelty posthumously visited upon him cemented his connection with other dead heroes who had shared the same fate in the reign of Mary, not least Martin Bucer and Paulus Phagius, whose bodies were disinterred from Great St Mary’s Church in Cambridge in 1556.41 Denouncing the brutality and malice of the officials who took up Wyclif’s corpse, Foxe triumphantly celebrated the failure of this scheme to extinguish his memory, declaring

as there is no counsaile against the Lord: so there is no keeping down of veritie, but it wil spring and come out of dust and ashes … For though they digged up his body, burnt his bones, & drowned his ashes, yet the word of God and truth of his doctrine with the fruit & successe therof they could not burne: which yet to this day for the most part of his articles do remaine.

The story was accompanied by a graphic woodcut of the episode set forth to the eyes of the ‘gentle reader’ (Figure 8.1).42 What should be stressed, though, is that no mention of a prodigious well is made in this section of the text. Nor is there any snide or scoffing reference to such a tradition in the vehement attacks on Foxe’s construction of ‘Saint Wickliffe’ as ‘the protestants great grandfather’, ‘holy patriarke’ and a ‘pseudo-martyr’ launched by Nicholas Harpsfield in the 1560s and by Robert Persons in his Treatise of Three Con- versions of England of 1603–4.43 It is also conspicuous by its absence from the Bodleian librarian Thomas James’s Apologie for John Wickliffe (1608), an attempt to demonstrate the Oxford luminary’s conformity with the Church of England and 39 Articles, strongly influenced by the tradition set in motion by Bale and Foxe.44 Nor does it feature in the surveys of Leicestershire provided by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century topographers. William Camden’s Britannia (1586; trans. 1610) and William Burton’s Description of the county published in 1622 noted that the ‘famous John Wickliffe’ had been rector of Lutter- worth and that his corpse had been ‘cruelly handled’ and ‘openly burned’ by Bishop Fleming acting on papal orders some forty years after his death. Neither recorded a local legend about a well engendered by this sacrilegious act, though Camden did remark that ‘neere to this towne is a spring so cold that within a short time it turneth strawes and stickes into stones’. This petrifying fountain, to which we shall have cause to return in a later para- graph, was also mentioned by Samuel Clarke in his Geographicall Description of all the Countries in the Known World (1657) and Joshua Childrey in his Britannia Baconica (1660).45 If such a story still existed, it remained either a dormant seed and an underground current, or was regarded by educated antiquaries as too untrustworthy or lacking in authenticity to preserve for posterity. 152 Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England

Figure 8.1 ‘The Burning of Wickliffes bones’, John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1563), p. 105.

What does appear in a work published by the Protestant divine Thomas Fuller in 1645 is a hitherto unrecorded snippet of folklore about the River Swift. Fuller had heard that the brook into which the ashes of the burnt bones of Wyclif were cast ‘never since doth drown the Meadow about it’ and went on to explain how this was variously interpreted by those on opposite sides of the Reformation divide: ‘Papists expound this to be, because God was well pleased with the Sacrifice of the Ashes of such a Heretick’, while ‘Protestants ascribe it rather to proceed from the vertue of a such a Reverent Martyr’. He himself dismissed such ‘Waxen Topicall devises’, commenting that ‘Such Accidents signifie nothing in them- selves, but according to the pleasure of Interpreters’. Fuller repeated this ‘Vulgar Tradition’ somewhat apologetically in the section on Wyclif he incorporated in his influential Church History of 1655, which defended Foxe’s description of this ‘glorious Saint’ as a martyr against the ‘snarles’ of Robert Persons, saying that, although he had not suffered a violent death or been imprisoned for his faith, the phrase ‘may be justified in the large acception of the word, for a witness of the truth’, besides which his poor body had been indeed been ‘Martyred to shame’. Fuller underlined the self- Alexandra Walsham 153 defeating character of the official dispersal of his relics in the town’s stream, transforming the episode into lyrical metaphor of the profound and lasting influence of his teaching: ‘Thus this Brook hath convey’d his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow Seas; they, into the main Ocean. And thus the Ashes of Wickliff are the Emblem of his Doctrine, which now, is dispersed all the World over’. As for the ‘silly infer- ences’ of Catholics and Protestants, these should be set aside as the side- effects of sectarian bias: ‘no solid Judgement will build where bare fancy hath laid Foundation’.46 Imported into the confessional debate about the antiquity of the Protestant religion, by the mid-seventeenth century Wyclif had also become embroiled in the factious struggles that were undermining the unity of the Church of England from within. The Laudians’ positive reassessment of the medieval Catholic Church was accompanied by their conscious rejection of the invis- ible brotherhood headed by Wyclif. The Anglican royalist Peter Heylyn declared his opinions ‘utterly unworthy to be look’d down on as a part of the Gospel’.47 By the early eighteenth century he was the mascot of low church- men like John Lewis, who produced a eulogistic biography in 1722, and of nonconformists such as Daniel Neal, whose History of the Puritans (1732–8) repolished his status as the ‘Morning-Star of the Reformation’. William Gilpin’s retelling of the lives of the reformers echoed the familiar theme of the ‘efflugence of light’ by which this learned theologian, raised up as an instru- ment of providence, had dispersed the darkness and barbarism that clouded the outlook of his contemporaries.48 John Throsby’s Memoirs of the Town and County of Leicester (1777) contained a lengthy celebration of Wyclif in the same Foxeian vein. Applauding the Oxford reformer for his reputed role in translating the Scriptures and ‘promoting that reformation, which afterwards delivered this kingdom from ignorance, superstition, and ecclesiastical tyranny’, he declared that his name held ‘a foremost rank in the register of Fame’ of those who had paved the way for the Protestants of a later genera- tion. Induced by these pious reflections he visited Lutterworth and entered the ‘sacred temple’ in which he had faithfully served his flock and spent his last days, where he saw the alleged remains of his pulpit and a fragment of his vestment: popular sentiment had by this stage engendered a set of spurious Wyclif relics, conceived of not as receptacles of supernatural power but rather curious artefacts of a distant past and a renowned divine. He also went to ‘that hardy stream’ into which Wyclif’s dust had been cast by the hand of ‘furious bigotry’, but seems to have been unaware of any tradition associated with it or a nearby spring.49 It is in 1810, in John Nichols’s monumental History and Antiquities of the county that the subterranean threads of memory we have been tracing resur- face, with some striking new variations and embellishments. After recounting the disinterment of Wyclif’s ‘dead carcase’ by the Bishop of Lincoln’s ‘vul- tures’ and quoting Fuller’s eloquent reflections on the dispersal of his ashes, 154 Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England

Nichols remarked that the ‘vulgar’ insist that ‘the stream, in ever so great a flood, will not run through that arch’ under which they were thrown. He added:

Tradition also says, that, at the time of this ceremony, one person who staid, after the rest had left his grave, in order to search as strictly after the least bit of bone that might remain of him, as he had done into the erroneous tenets of his adversaries, having found one, ran hastily to his companions with it in a triumphant manner; but, before he reached them, fell down, and dashed his brains out; and from the very place where he fell immediately gushed out a spring of water, which to this day is called St. John’s Well.50

Here, then, is a variant of the story that more closely approaches the twentieth-century versions with which we began. Reflecting the process by which oral tradition was gradually being exiled out of the intellectual mainstream and into the ‘graveyard of rural antiquarianism’,51 Nichols made clear his contempt for this foolish and flimsy legend: ‘How far the Protestant is even, with the Papist in this invention, let the reader judge.’52 Despite his scornful implication that the tale originated among rural illiter- ates, there is much to suggest that the educated heirs of the long legacy of reformed historiography were also partly responsible for its survival. Those on the right of the ecclesiastical spectrum were naturally sceptical, but evangelical Protestants on the left may well have been willing to suspend disbelief and condone it as a harmless but edifying and convenient fiction. Later in the nineteenth century, Wyclif was implicated in a new phase of internal strife over the Church of England’s theological and historical identity. Fresh manifestations of ‘Wyclifolatry’ were a by-product of reaction to the Oxford movement and rise of Anglo-Catholicism, including S.R. Cattley’s new edition of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments – the chief vehicle of his reputation as a Reformation hero. On the other hand, Wyclif and his relics were the vicarious victims of the Tractarian assault on the religious heritage upheld by their rivals: in 1861 in an address to the Leicestershire Architectural and Archaeological Society the collection of his alleged possessions at Lutterworth (which now included a portrait, chair, communion table and pair of candlesticks) was comprehensively debunked by the Gothic revivalist Matthew Holbeche Bloxham. To the dismay of many members of his audience, Bloxham declared that the items dated from later centuries in their entirety,53 though he did not pause to explode the myths of Wyclif’s well and the mysterious behaviour of the River Swift. In 1882, however, a handbook of Lutterworth, written by F.W. Bottrill, not only cautiously endorsed the relics but recounted the tradition that the Alexandra Walsham 155 water of the Swift refused to flow under the arch of the bridge, though he noted that this ‘superstition’ had withered since the old structure had been replaced by a new one built in 1778. Celebrating the ‘evangelic doctor’ and castigating the ‘impotent malice’ of the pope and council that had con- demned him in 1428, he also lifted from Nichols the ‘curious old legend’ of ‘St John’s Well’, adding the observation that it never ran dry, even in seasons of drought.54 An ardent advocate of Wyclif’s role as ‘the father of modern Protestantism’ and the source of English society’s ‘moral and intellectual emancipation’, A.H. Dyson likewise devoted a chapter to the spring in a pamphlet of 1913. In this work, we find that the story has metamorphosed once more. Dyson told how one of Wyclif’s bones had fallen from the bier in which they were being conveyed to the riverside for burning and was trampled into the soil by the crowds that followed.

Some years afterwards a man working upon the spot brought to light the missing bone, and, upon taking it from its position, forthwith there issued from the hole where it had lain embedded a fountain of the purest water, which ceased not to flow day or night to the joy of the inhabitants of the town, who regarded it as a display of Divine favour upon the remains of their local saint.

The water of the spring, he declared, was immediately looked upon as miraculous and conveyed to a stone drinking fount placed near where the discovery was made. Its capacity ‘to cure all manner of diseases’, especially those connected with the eyes, had endured through the ages.55 Wyclif’s well had thus become a holy well, in a manner uncannily similar to those linked with Celtic and Anglo-Saxon saints of old. One further feature of the delicate transpositions of the interrelated legends we have been examining deserves to be highlighted and that is the way in which these traditions both absorbed and superimposed themselves over pre- existing associations of the local landscape. It should not escape notice that Wyclif’s well was located within the grounds of a medieval hospital founded by Roesia de Verdun and her son in 1218 and dedicated to St John the Baptist.56 It is probable that there had long been a spring on this site, whose therapeutic powers were ascribed to the patron saint of the philanthropic foundation within the precincts of which it was found. Sequestered by the Crown in the sixteenth century, the lands of the hospital were first leased and then sold to a family of minor gentry. There is evidence to suggest that the fountain itself became regarded as a kind of public amenity: an entry in the Town Master’s account book in 1716 records that four shillings were ‘paid for a spout of elm 7 foot long to lay at St Johns well’.57 Over time, the distinction between John Wyclif and St John the Baptist (whose own bones were reput- edly burnt by Julian the Apostate, emperor of Rome, according to an apo- cryphal legend perpetuated by late medieval homiletic texts like John Mirk’s 156 Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England

Festial) evidently became impossibly blurred in local memory.58 So too, it would seem, has the identity of the spring in question: recent compilations of the folklore of the county seem to have conflated ‘St John’s Well’ with the celebrated petrifying well to which Camden and other early topo- graphers drew attention.59 It is now situated in the garden of a house called (appropriately) ‘The Springs’. In seeking to unravel the origins and evolution of the legend of Wyclif’s well, then, we have been frustrated by many long silences and archival absences. Over the course of six centuries its meandering streams have often remained immersed beneath the surface of the written record, re-emerging periodically in subtly different guises that defy precise and confident analysis. Nevertheless the story of the posthumous martyrdom of Wyclif’s bones and its many curious echoes has, I hope, served to yield some wider historical insights. It has underlined the extent to which both orality and literacy, speech and text, contribute to the invention of tradition and the equally important part which the advent and entrenchment of Protestantism played in the formation and transformation of a body of folklore. It has raised fresh questions about the connections between lollardy and evangelicalism in the early dynamic stages of the and enriched our understanding of the relationship between these movements and concepts of sanctity and martyrdom. It has also demonstrated the capacity of reformed theology to invest the landscape with powerful religious, if not sacred resonances and to sustain and simultaneously transform stories about the supernatural origin of striking topographical fea- tures.60 Finally, the legend of the Lutterworth spring has revealed much about the workings of what James Fentress and Chris Wickham have called ‘social memory’.61 It has provided a laboratory in which to investigate the capricious processes of accretion, infection, recontextualisation and suppression that characterise it, and to watch a game of chinese whispers in action. While such tales cannot be approached as repositories of historical fact, indirectly their transmission bears striking witness to continuities and changes in past mental- ities and cultures. We may not have reached the bottom of Wyclif’s well, but the journey into its depths has still been a modest voyage of discovery.

Notes

1 A. Hudson and A. Kenny, ‘John Wyclif’, in ODNB. 2 R. Palmer, The Folklore of Leicestershire and Rutland (Wymondham, 1985), 30–1; B. Trubshaw, Holy Wells and Springs of Leicestershire and Rutland (Leicestershire and Rutland Earth Mysteries series, pt. 2, Loughborough, 1990), 21–2; J. Rattue, ‘An inventory of ancient, holy and healing wells in Leicestershire’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society 67 (1993), 59–69, quotation at 65. J. Goodare has identified and assembled some of the evidence discussed below in ‘Wyclif in Lutterworth: myths and monuments’, Leicestershire Historian 3 (1983–4), 25–35. Alexandra Walsham 157

3 See A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), ch. 4, esp. 214–27, quotation at 215; D. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford, 2003), ch. 9, esp. 310–15. 4 See J. and C. Bord, Sacred Waters: Holy Wells and Water Lore in Britain and Ireland (1985), esp. ch. 6; S. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (5 vols, Copenhagen, 1955–8), entries A941.4–A941.55.8; F933.1; F933.6; V140–V144.2. 5 E.C. Tatnall, ‘The condemnation of John Wyclif at the Council of Constance’, in G.J. Cuming and D. Baker (eds), Councils and Assemblies (Studies in Church History 7: Cambridge, 1971), 209–18. R.N. Swanson, ‘Richard Fleming’, ODNB. 6 M. Aston, ‘Rites of destruction by fire’, in eadem, Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion, 1350–1600 (1993), 302, referring to the acts of image destroyers. Hus’s own ashes were tipped into the Rhine to prevent a relic cult. 7 William Worcestre, Itineraries, ed. J.H. Harvey (Oxford, 1969); The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years, 1535–1543, ed. L. Toulmin Smith (5 vols, 1906–10), vol. I, 19 v.222. A counter-myth about the circumstances surrounding Wyclif’s death was circulating in the fifteenth century: Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, vol. II: AD 1381–1422, ed. H.T. Riley (Rolls Series, 28:1864), 119–20, says that, on the feast day of St Thomas Becket, Wyclif, who had intended to launch a blasphemous attack on the great prelate, was struck down by the hand of God and paralysed in all his members, as a frightful spectacle to the beholders. 8 Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. G.H. Martin (Oxford, 1995), 309, 282–4, 286–8, 295–7, 307–12, 532–4. 9 R. Rex, The Lollards (Basingstoke, 2002), 89; E. Acheson, A Gentry Community: Lei- cestershire in the Fifteenth Century, c.1422–c.1485 (Cambridge, 1992), 68–9, 186–98. 10 John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1570), 1187; repeated in 1583 edn, 1044. 11 He was at neither Oxford nor Cambridge; nor was he a member of the London Drapers’ Company: no George Bull appears in P. Boyd’s Roll of the Drapers’ Company of London Collected from the Company’s Records and Other Sources (Croydon, 1934). 12 J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses (Oxford, 1891), pt. iii, 126; A.B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford, A.D.1501 to 1540 (Oxford, 1974), 436; C. Henry and T. Cooper, Athenae Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1858), 65; J. and J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1924), vol. I, iii, 24, 318; Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), 1045. 13 Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, [L&P], Addenda, vol. I, pt. i, no. 752, where he is listed as ‘Pathmere’. 14 ‘Two London chronicles from the collections of John Stow’, ed. C.L. Kingsford, in Camden Miscellany XII (Camden Society, 3rd ser., 18: 1910), 5. He is said elsewhere to have been one of those made to carry out the penance: British Library, MS Harley, 425, fo. 15r. I follow the account given by S. Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), 183–4. 15 Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), 1044–5. 16 Ibid. (1570), 1188; ‘Two London Chronicles’, 5. 17 John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (3 vols in 6pts, Oxford, 1820–40), vol. I, pt. i, 179. Anxious to gloss over evidence of an apparent loss of nerve in the face of per- secution, Foxe saw his recantations as the involuntary consequences of excessive force and ‘humaine infirmitie’: Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), 1045. Forms of pragmatic dissimulation were characteristic of both later lollardy and Henrician evangelicalism. See A. Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals and the Early English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), 79–81. Foxe may well have embellished Patmore’s orthodox Protestant credentials. 158 Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England

18 Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), 484. 19 L&P, vii, 923. His case was also raised in Parliament by his servant John Stanton: L&P, v, 982; M. Dowling, ‘Anne Boleyn and reform’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (1984), 30–46, quotation at 42. 20 L&P, viii, 1063; John Strype, Memorials of … (2 vols, Oxford, 1840 edn), 643–4. 21 Rex, Lollards, ch. 5; P. Marshall, Reformation England 1480–1642 (2003), 32–4. 22 Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), 1045; Brigden, London and the Reformation, 121, 124–3, 190; A. Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988), 482–3. See also J.F. Davis, Heresy and Reformation in the South-East of England, 1520–1559 (1983), 54; P. Collinson, ‘Night schools, con- venticles and churches: continuities and discontinuities in early Protestant ecclesio- logy’, in P. Marshall and A. Ryrie (eds), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002), 230. 23 Boyd, Drapers’ Company, 140. 24 As argued by Brigden, London and the Reformation, 206. 25 A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (2nd edn, 1989), 46–60, quotation at 59. Optimism on this point is shared by J.F. Davis, ‘Lollardy and the Reformation in England’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 73 (1982), 217–36. Rex, Lollards, ch. 5, esp. 119, by contrast, speaks of the ‘virtual irrelevance of Lollardy to the emergence of English Protestantism’. 26 Brigden, London and the Reformation, 123. The case of the lollard John Pykas, who was strongly influenced by the preaching of Thomas Bilney, is frequently cited: see Hudson, Premature Reformation, 478–80. For Lollard views on saints and pilgrimages, see ibid., 302–9; eadem ed. Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge, 1978), 83–8; Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–31, ed. N. Tanner (Camden Society, 4th ser., 20: 1977), 11–14, 18, 34, 47, 67, 74, 86–7, 100–1, 142, 148, 154, 179, 192–4, 205, for a sample of references. 27 Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), 1044. Other drapers, such as John Hewes, arrested and interrogated at the same time as Patmore and Bull, were equally vociferous in their rejection of ‘vain pilgrimages’ and the ‘false gods’ of images. 28 See M. Aston, ‘John Wyclif’s reformation reputation’, in eadem, Images and Reformers (1984), 262–3; T.A. Fudge, ‘The “Crown” and the “Red Gown”: Hussite popular religion’, in B. Scribner and T. Johnson (eds), Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–1800 (Basingstoke, 1996), esp. 48–50; B.S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 69. 29 For White, see W. Waddington Shirley (ed.), Fasciculi Zizianiorum Magistri Johannis Wyclif cum Tritico (Rolls Series: 1858), 429. Emayn, Bagley and Stilman are all quoted from Aston, ‘John Wyclif’s reformation reputation’, 263. For Lambert, see Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), 307. 30 See Hudson, Premature Reformation, 171–2; Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 70; Norwich Heresy Trials, 47. 31 J.A.F. Thomson, The Later Lollards 1414–1520 (Oxford, 1965), 148–51, 156. 32 Aston, ‘John Wyclif’s Reformation Reputation’, 263; Hudson, Premature Reformation, 172, 313; Norwich Heresy Trials, 14; S. McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities 1420–1530 (Philadelphia, 1995), 113, and see 147–8. 33 R. Rex, ‘Which is Wyche? Lollardy and sanctity in Lancastrian London’, in T.S. Freeman and T. Mayer (eds), Martyrs and Martyrdom in England c. 1400–1700 (Woodbridge, 2007), 88–106. I am grateful to Dr Rex for sharing a copy of this with me in advance of publication. Alexandra Walsham 159

34 C. von Nolcken, ‘Another kind of saint: a lollard perception of John Wyclif’, in A. Hudson and M. Wilks (eds), From Ockham to Wyclif (Studies in Church History, Subsidia 5: Oxford, 1987), 429–43. Von Nolcken nevertheless remarks there were cases (e.g. those of Margery Baxter, the cult of Joan Boughton, and indeed George Bull) where ‘individuals […] got things wrong’ and, bowing to the ‘pressures of popular piety’, viewed Wyclif as ‘the wrong kind of saint’ (436–7). It is important to note that Wyclif spoke of the Oxford theologian, biblical scholar, fierce critic of the mendicants, and later , Richard FitzRalph, as ‘Sanctus Richardus’ or ‘Sanctus Armachanus’. See K. Walsh, A Fourteenth-Century Scholar and Primate: Richard FitzRalph in Oxford, Avignon and Armagh (Oxford, 1981), esp. 457–8. 35 R.W. Scribner, ‘Incombustible Luther: the image of the reformer in early modern Germany’ and idem, ‘Luther myth: a popular historiography of the reformer’, in idem, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (1987), 323–53 and 302–22, esp. 315, 317, 318–19, respectively; quotations at 312, 352–3. 36 Miles Huggarde, The Displaying of the Protestantes (1556), 54. Stapleton’s comments in his translation of Bede’s History of the Church of Englande (Antwerp, 1566), Sig. C1r, and Nicholas Harpsfield’s in, Dialogi Sex (Antwerp, 1573 edn: first publ., 1566), 540–1, 666–8, 680–1, 688, applied to miracles associated with the martyrs more broadly. On Protestant relic behaviour, see Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 175–6 and A. Walsham, ‘Skeletons in the cupboard: relics after the English reformation’, in eadem (ed.), Relics and Remains, Past and Present Supplement 5 (Oxford, 2010). 37 E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–1580 (New Haven and London, 1991); Rex, ‘Which is Wyche?’; idem, Lollards; R. Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion in Pre-Reformation England: Reconstructing Piety (Woodbridge, 2006). 38 See J. Craig and C. Litzenberger, ‘Wills as religious propaganda: the testament of William Tracy’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44 (1993), 415–31, quotation at 423. 39 Aston, ‘John Wyclif’s reformation reputation’; J. Crompton, ‘John Wyclif: a study in mythology’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society 42 (1966–7), 6–34. John Bale, Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum … summarium ([Wesel], 1548), fo. 154v; Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), 85. 40 K.B. McFarlane, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (1952), 10. 41 Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), calendar under 2 January, and 98; (1583), 1966–8 for Bucer and Phagius. Wyclif’s exhumation was remembered by Bishop James Pilkington during the sermon he delivered at the restitution of Bucer and Phagius to their degrees and titles of honour in Cambridge in July 1560: Works, ed. J. Scholefield (Parker Society: Cambridge, 1842), 653. 42 Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), 464. 43 Harpsfield, Dialogi Sex (1566), dialogue 6, 824, and Historia Wicleffia, appendix to Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, ed. R. Gibbon (Douai, 1622); Robert Persons, A Treatise of Three Conversions of England (1603), pt. i, sig. a4r and 489, pt. ii, 184–9, 194, 196. For the Catholic counter-myth of Wyclif, see A. Kenny, ‘The accursed memory: the Counter-Reformation reputation of John Wyclif’, in idem ed., Wyclif in his Times (Oxford, 1986), 147–68. 44 Thomas James, An apologie for John Wickleffe, shewing his conformitie with the now Church of England (Oxford, 1608). 45 William Camden, Britain, or A chorographicall description of the most flourishing kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland (1610), 1st pagination, 517–18; William Burton, The description of Leicestershire, containing matters of antiquity, historye, armorye, and genealogy (1622), 186–7; Samuel Clarke, A geographicall description of all the countries in the known world (1657), 203; Joshua Childrey, Britannia Baconica: or, the natural rarities of England, Scotland, & Wales (1660), 108. 160 Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England

46 Thomas Fuller, Good Thoughts in Bad Times (Exeter, 1645), 174–6; idem, The Church- history of Britain, from the Birth of Jesus Christ, until the year M. DC. XLVIII (1655), 170–1. 47 A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 6, esp. 303–6; Peter Heylyn, Examen historicum: or a discovery and examination of the mistakes, falsities, and defects in some modern histories (1659), 65–7. Heylyn did not even dignify the story of the stream with so much as a dismissal. 48 John Lewis, The History of the Life and Sufferings of the Reverend and Learned John Wicliffe, D.D. (1720). Lewis’s biography was written against Matthias Earbery’s translation of a French work attacking The pretended reformers, or, the history of the heresie of John Wickliffe, John Huss, and Jerome of Prague (1717), which dis- missed the opinions of the Lutterworth rector as ‘wicked and abominable’ and accused him of ‘Impiety and Enthusiasm’ (pp. xii, xxx). Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans or Protestant Non-conformists (1732–8), 4 vols, vol. I, 3. William Gilpin, ‘The Life of John Wicliff’ [1766], in Select Biography, 6 vols (1821), vol. II, 49–50. 49 John Throsby, The Memoirs of the Town and County of Leicester (Leicester, 1777), vol. II, 77–116, citations at 100, 112, 113–16. The Revd J. Curtis’s A Topographical History of the County of Leicester (Ashby-de-la-Zouch, 1831) did not refer to the legend of the well or stream, but did mention the relics (122–3). For the trans- formation of relics into historical antiquities, see Woolf, Social Circulation of the Past, 191–7. 50 J. Nichols, The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester (4 vols in 8pts, 1810), vol. IV, pt. i, 297. 51 Woolf, Social Circulation of the Past, 390, and see ch. 10, passim. 52 Nichols, History, vol. IV, pt. i, 297. 53 Crompton, ‘John Wyclif’, 7–8, 15–16; Goodare, ‘Wyclif in Lutterworth’, 26. 54 F.W. Bottrill, An Illustrated Hand Book of Lutterworth, with Notes on the Neighbouring Villages (Lutterworth, 1882), 8–10, 14–15, 18–22. 55 A.H. Dyson, Lutterworth: John Wycliffe’s Town, ed. Hugh Goodacre (1913), 46–7. It is not, however, mentioned in A.H. Dyson and S.H. Skillington, Lutterworth Church and its Associations with a Chapter on John Wycliffe (Leicester, [1916]), which dis- tanced itself from the ‘ignorant credulity’ inspired by his now discredited relics, even as it celebrated Wyclif’s heroic status (quotations from 23). I am grateful to Nick Stargardt for providing me with access to Magdalen College, Oxford’s copy of this rare publication. 56 Burton, Description, 186–7. 57 Leicestershire Record Office, Lutterworth Town Masters Accounts 1707–26, /113/ 1 & 2, cited in Goodare, ‘Wyclif in Lutterworth’, 33. 58 See Theodor Erbe (ed.), Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies by Johannes Mirkus (John Mirk), 2 vols, Early English Text Society, extra series 96 (London, 1905), i, 182–6, at 185; see also Edward H. Weatherly (ed.), Speculum Sacerdotale, EETS, OS 200 (1936), pp. 197–8. I owe this point to Graham Jones, Saints in the Landscape (Stroud, 2007), pp. 98–9. 59 Trubshaw, Holy Wells, 21–2; Rattue, ‘Inventory’, 65. 60 See my The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Memory and Identity in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, forthcoming 2011). 61 J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992), esp. chaps 2, 85–6, and 200–2.