Late Middle Ages

John Wycliffe and the Lollard movement

John Wycliffe (c. 1328 – 31 December 1384) was an Oxford master of arts and doctor of theology whose career spanned the most turbulent years of the English church in the late fourteenth century. He was the most prolific English theologian of his generation, the most consequential English heretic before the Reformation, and the only medieval European thinker whose biblical translation was preserved, copied, and read throughout the century after his death with anything like the scriptural authority that the Latin Vulgate had in the schools. The movement that bears the name of his followers — the Lollards — was, in the generation after his death, the largest and most sustained heresy in medieval England, and the documentary record of its preachers, books, and conventicles is now the single richest evidence we possess for vernacular religious dissent in the later Middle Ages. The literature is large and at times ferocious; the framing questions of what Wycliffe actually believed, of how far the Lollard preachers were faithful to him, and of what the relationship is between late medieval English dissent and the continental Reformations of the sixteenth century are still live.

Oxford career and political theology

Wycliffe was born in the village of Wycliffe in Richmondshire, Yorkshire, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford; he was elected master of Balliol in 1360 and held a canonry of Aust in the West Country by the time he was a regent master in arts. His early philosophical work, beginning with the De universalibus (c. 1360s), is a sophisticated reworking of the logica modernorum — the moderni of the Oxford calculeuses school, including William Heytesbury and Richard Kilvington — and not yet theologically explosive. The De universalibus is the work of a logician who holds, against the realist tradition of Aquinas and the moderate realist Duns Scotus, that universalia are not substances in any sense but signs; the metaphysics of the later Wycliffe, which would scandalise the papacy, are already here in rudimentary form.

The political moment that made Wycliffe was the French war. From 1374, the Crown, in the person of John of Gaunt duke of Lancaster, was fighting both the pope and a section of the English episcopate over the right to tax clerical property; Edward III’s government had demanded half the revenues of the wealthier benefices to fund the war, and the pope’s representatives had replied with the annates of 1377 (Urban V, Quia dudum of 1369 and Insuper speculam of 1376) and the bulls of Gregory XI in 1377. Wycliffe, who had been a client of Gaunt since the early 1370s, was brought in to advise. The result was a series of Latin treatises — the De dominio divino (c. 1375–76), the De civili dominio (c. 1376–77), the De officio regis (c. 1379) — in which Wycliffe argued that all dominium, all rightful authority over property and persons, is founded in grace. A man in mortal sin has no right to hold authority at all, secular or ecclesiastical, and the lord who falls from grace ipso facto forfeits his lands. The treatise was directed, in the first instance, against the temporalities of the English bishops and the wealth of the monastic orders; it was immediately denounced by the higher clergy at Lambeth in 1377, and Wycliffe was saved by Gaunt’s political protection and by the famous confrontation in St Paul’s in February 1377 in which the citizens of London took his side. Walter Ullmann, in The Origins of the Great Schism (1948) and his later essays, treats the Wycliffite political theology as a decisive break with the older Gelasian theory; J. H. Burns (Lordship and Society in the Thought of John Wyclif, 1961) reads the same texts more cautiously, as works in the tradition of Marsilius of Padua and Ockham. E. D. Hunt’s The Wycliffite Bible: Origins, History and Interpretation (2017) and the older J. A. Robson Wyclif and the Oxford Schools (1961) are the necessary correctives.

The eucharistic controversy

The most explosive and most popular Wycliffite doctrine was the attack on transubstantiation. The doctrine, defined at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and refined by Aquinas in the Summa theologiae III, qq. 73–78, held that the substance of the bread and wine of the mass is wholly changed into the substance of the body and blood of Christ while the accidentia (the colour, the taste, the shape) remain. Wycliffe’s attack, beginning in the De eucharistia of 1379–80 and developed in the Confessio of 1380 and the Wycliffite Wicket (a short English polemic of the 1380s), denied the change. The bread is bread; the body of Christ is at the right hand of the Father in heaven; the sacrament is a sign of the body. The doctrine was condemned by the Blackfriars Council of London in May 1382, of which Wycliffe’s own pupil, the chancellor William Taylor, was the most prominent defender, and Wycliffe was forced into retirement at Lutterworth in Leicestershire, where he was rector from 1374 until his death.

The eucharistic controversy is the hinge of the whole English Lollard movement. The attack on the mass as a sacrifice, on the priestly mediation of the consecrated host, on the cult of the reserved sacrament (which the late medieval church treated as a devotional object of the first order, hung above the altar in a pyx or kept in a hanging sacrament house in the wall of the chancel), is the doctrine that translated Wycliffe’s metaphysics into popular religion. A. Hudson’s edition of The Works of a Lollard Preacher (2001) and the two volumes of Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (1978, 1981) make plain the variety of ways in which this translation was done. Some Lollards, like the author of the Lantern of Light (c. 1409–12), worked within the scholastic vocabulary; others, like the lay preacher William Taylor in the last years of his life, worked within the apocalyptic vocabulary of the mystical body; the most popular Lollard book of all, the Wycliffite Bible and its derivatives, worked within the vocabulary of Scripture itself.

The Wycliffite Bible

The Wycliffite Bible was a long project, probably begun in the 1380s and continued well into the reign of Henry IV (1399–1413), in which the text of the Latin Vulgate was translated into English in two main recensions. The earlier version (L or “early version”), translated from the Vulgate text of the Paris Bible, is now attributed to Wycliffe’s secretary, the Yorkshireman John Purvey, in the General Prologue to the later version; the later version (E or “later version”) was a more literary and more idiomatic English, and is now widely held to be the work of a team of which Purvey was the chief. The manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible survive in over 250 copies, an enormous number for a medieval vernacular book of any kind, and the book was clearly produced for the use of a reading public. The prologue to the Later Version, which Anne Hudson edited as a separate treatise in 1985, sets out a theory of biblical translation in which every word of Scripture is a “true word of God” and the translator’s task is fidelity to that word in the mother tongue. The book was banned in 1409 by the archbishop Thomas Arundel in the Constitutions of Oxford, and the surviving manuscripts often carry the marks of heavy use: marginal notes, dog-ears, the wear of lay reading.

The cultural consequences of the Wycliffite Bible have been the subject of the most important modern revision. E. D. Hunt (2017) argues that the translation was not the cause of Lollardy so much as its effect — that the Lollard preachers had to produce a vernacular Bible because they had a vernacular theology to teach. Margaret Aston (Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion, 1984) and the essays collected in The Wycliffite Bible, ed. E. Solopova (2016) treat the book as part of a wider explosion of late medieval English literacy, of which the Wycliffite Bible is the most spectacular example. The older view, that the Bible was the cause of Lollardy and the Reformation, is still present in some textbooks and is now tenable only in a weakened form.

The Lollard preachers and the rising of 1381

The name Lollard appears in the English sources from 1382, in the letters of Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich, and the cronica of Henry Knighton; the etymology is uncertain, and may be connected to the Dutch lollaerd (a mumbler of prayers) or to the Latin lolium (cockle, a weed among the wheat). The movement that the name covers was a loose association of lay and clerical preachers, of whom the most famous was the radical priest John Ball, the erstwhile vicar of Layham in Suffolk, who had been excommunicated for unlicensed preaching as early as 1366 and had been in and out of prison in the late 1370s. In the months before the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 Ball wrote his famous letter to the commons of Essex — the Epistola ad commones — and preached the couplet recorded by the St. Albans chronicler Thomas Walsingham: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” (Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, II, p. 32). Ball was arrested at Coventry on 15 July 1381 and hanged, drawn, and quartered at St. Albans the same day; the rising collapsed. The other great popular preacher of the moment, Wat Tyler, was killed by William Walworth the lord mayor of London on 15 June 1381 at Smithfield.

The Lollard preachers of the next generation were a different class. They were mostly men in minor orders, sometimes priests, often with a university connection: the canon John Oldcastle (Lord Cobham) who would lead the so-called Oldcastle Rising of 1414, the priest William Taylor who recanted and fled overseas, the crossbowman-turned-preacher William Smith, the tailor William Norys, the Worcester tiler Robert Burton. They moved from town to town, often in pairs (the wibbern or “prophets of the Wycliffite sect”), and they convened the conventicle, the secret Lollard meeting, in the house of a lay patron. The records of the bishops’ visitations from the 1380s to the 1420s — the register of bishops like Thomas Brunton of Rochester (1373–1389), Thomas Arundel of Canterbury (in two periods, 1396–8 and 1399–1414), John Fleming of Lincoln (1420–31), and the Local-Council records in Wilkins’s Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae — are the principal source. The most recent survey of this material is in P. S. Lewis, Later Medieval France: The Polity (1968) for the continental comparison, and in R. B. Dobson, The Lollards of Coventry (1999) and the older K. B. McFarlane, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (1952) for England.

Suppression and afterlife

The Lollard movement was suppressed but never quite extinguished. The Oldcastle Rising of 1414 — the conspiracy of Sir John Oldcastle (Lord Cobham) against Henry V — was a serious threat and was put down at the cost of Oldcastle’s life in 1417; the Constitutions of Archbishop Arundel of 1409, in the convocation at Oxford, forbade the translation of the Bible into English without licence and forbade the preaching of unbeneficed clergy. The Lollard trials of the 1420s, 1430s, and 1450s in the diocese of Lincoln (now edited in the Lollard Cases series of the Canterbury and York Society) are the most detailed records we have of late medieval English heresy, and they show a movement that had become a tight network of family and craft, with a Bible in the house, a vernacular prayer book, and an awareness of the Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards of 1395 as a public platform. The bibliography is summarised in R. N. Swanson’s Church and Society in Late Medieval England (1989) and the older J. A. F. Thomson, The Later Lollards 1414–1520 (1965). The recent revisionist work, the Wycliffite Bible and the late medieval Bible, is in the essays of Hudson, Aston, and E. D. Hunt.

Wycliffe himself was posthumously condemned. His bones were ordered to be exhumed and burned by the Council of Constance in the decree of 4 May 1415 — the famous Haec sancta session — and the remains were exhumed at Lutterworth in 1428 by the order of Pope Martin V and the bishop of Lincoln. The act was the symbolic terminus of the late medieval Wycliffite affair in England; the Lollard underground survived into the 1520s, when the first generation of English reformers — Thomas Bilney, Robert Barnes, the Cambridge scholars whose trial is recorded in the Examination of William Thorpe and the later Foxe — were reading Wycliffe’s Latin treatises and the Wycliffite Bible alongside the new Protestant books from the continent. The English Reformation, as A. G. Dickens (The English Reformation, 1964) put it, was “Bohemian to begin with” and Wycliffite to continue with.

References and further reading

  • E. D. Hunt, The Wycliffite Bible: Origins, History and Interpretation (Brill, 2017).
  • Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (Hambledon, 1984).
  • Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988).
  • J. H. Burns, Lordship and Society in the Thought of John Wyclif (Cambridge, 1961).
  • R. B. Dobson, The Lollards of Coventry (Cambridge, 1999).
  • E. Solopova (ed.), The Wycliffite Bible: Origin, History and Interpretation (Brill, 2016).