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Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England Alexandra Walsham

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Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation England Alexandra Walsham 8 Wyclif’s Well: Lollardy, Landscape and Memory in Post-Reformation 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 saints. 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 martyrs is shed; springs that arise as emblems of divine wrath against those who commit heinous sins or engage in sacrilege against their sacred relics. 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 bishop 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.
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