The Lollards

The lollards, as Wyclif’s followers came to be called, may be divided roughly into three main groups—the scholars who had supported him at Oxford; a number of humbler disciples, both clerical and lay; and some of the landed gentry. Oxford lollardy was given its death-blow by the archbishop's determination to enforce the decrees of the Blackfriars council of May 1382 within the university. Six days before the council was due to meet, the university chancellor—a fellow of Merton, named Robert Rigg—had allowed Nicholas Hereford, a prominent Wyclifite, to preach an inflammatory sermon at St. Frideswide's on Ascen­sion Day; and he had invited another, Philip Repingdon, to deliver the university sermon on 5 June, the feast of Corpus Christi. When Courtenay ordered him to publish the Black­friars decrees, the chancellor chose to interpret this at a violation of academic privilege. No bishop or archbishop, he i erroneously declared, had any jurisdiction over the scholars of Oxford, not even in matters of heresy; and he underlined his defiance by going in procession to St. Frideswide's to hear Repingdon defend Wyclif’s opinions and declare publicly that the duke of Lancaster would stand by those who professed them. Courtenay made short work of this recalcitrance. Summoning the chancellor and proctors to Lambeth, he brought them before a Small synod which found them guilty of condoning heresy and error in the persons of Wyclif, Hereford, and Repingdon. Rigg was also found guilty of contempt of the archbishop's man­date and had to ask pardon on his knees, the magnanimous Wykeham interceding for him. When he protested that he dared not publish the Blackfriars decrees in Oxford, Rigg was summoned before the king’s council and sharply ordered to obey his metropolitan. His fears were not unfounded, however; for the publication of the mandate on the following day caused an academic uproar. Hereford and Repingdon betook themselves to Tottenhall to seek out Gaunt who seems to have been ready to listen to them; when a body of orthodox doctors appeared, they were given a cool reception. But after hearing both sides, the duke swung round completely and stigmatized the Wyclifites as demons. A few days later the opinions of Hereford an Repingdon were formally condemned at Canterbury and they themselves pronounced contumacious and excommunicate.

These strong measures had the desired effect; and Courtenay drove the lesson home by arranging to hold the convocation of Canterbury at Oxford, in November. Here Repingdon and another Oxford lollard, John Aston, made full submission to authority, Repingdon’s rеpentencе seems to have been genuine. He returned to the fold and lived to become, successively, abbot of his own house of St. Магу-of-the-Meadows at Leicester, chancellor of his university and, finally, bishop of Lincoln. Aston, however, relapsed and a little later is found disseminating lollard doctrines along the borders of south Wales; but it is possible that he too conformed in the end. Meanwhile, Hereford, with extraordinary temerity, had gone to Rоmе to pursue his appeal to the pope in person. He was thrown into prison by Urban VI but was lucky enough to escape and, returning to England, he joined forces with Aston; in the dioceses of Here­ford and Worcester they and their friends gave the authorities plenty of trouble. But, early in 1387, Hereford was taken at Not­tingham and, at some date before 1391, he too recanted finally. He became chancellor of Hereford cathedral and a zealous ham­mer of heretics, and died at a ripe old age in the Carthusian house of St. Anne at Coventry. With the flight or recantation of the leading Wyclifites, Oxford was lost to lollardy and such hopes as Wyclif may have entertained of winning the Church to share his views were finally defeated. Some Oxford scholars con­tinued to interest themselves in the project for a vernacular Bible; but the movement as a whole had been cut off from its intellectual roots and deprived of the opportunity to influence men destined for high ecclesiastical office. It could now hardly fail to become the preserve of semi-literate clerical enthusiasts and their lay sympathizers. Moreover, the orthodox party with­in the university hastened to fill the breach left by the routing of the Wyclifites, old opponents of Wyclif, like Uhtred of Boldon and William Wodeforde, pouring forth many tracts and treatises in the last two decades of the century. It may be of some signi­ficance, however, that the bishop of Worcester should have submitted the heresies of William Swinderby to a body of Cambridge doctors and that it should have been the chancellor of Cambridge who presided over the learned committee that condemned the eccentric opinions of Walter Brute.

Walsingham's assertion that Wyclif dispatched a number of missionaries from Oxford is now largely discredited. There can be no doubt that he attached the utmost importance to preach­ing; and there is abundant evidence that towards the end of the century unlicensed preachers, variously described as 'poor priests', 'poor clerks', idiotae et simplices, and so forth, were per­ambulating much of the country. The vernacular sermons, suitable for delivery on village greens, which have come down to us show, moreover, that many of these preachers were dis­seminating Wyclif’^!s ideas. But there is no reason to suppose that he had any direct responsibility for them and few, if any, can have been his personal disciples. His intimates were scholars, like Nicholas Hereford and John Aston; and, though both of these were active preachers, their missionary endeavours are more likely to have been a consequence of their enforced depar­ture from Oxford than to have formed part of a large-scale mis­sionary enterprise devised by Wyclif himself. Had Wyclif been actively concerned in anything of the kind, Lutterworth would have been its natural focus.

William Swinderby is the most remarkable figure among the non-academic lollards of the first generation. Beginng in Leicester as the leader of a small group of heretics which early established itself in the chapel of St. John the Baptist near the leper hospital, Swinderby was condemned by his bishop, in July 1382, to make public recantation. But he soon departed to the country beyond Severn, and in August 1387 he was one of five lollards whom the bishop of Worcester prohibited from preach­ing in his diocese. Swinderby seems to have been popular with the local gentry; for it was at their request that the him a safe-conduct when he appeared at Kington, in June 1391, to hear the charges against him. Excommunicated by his bishop and his arrest ordered by the king, be made good his escape into the marches of Wales and was never brought to justice. Swinderby had been responsible for making many converts in part of the country where John Oldcastle, the son of a Hereford­shire squire, was then growing up; and, though he was better educated and certainly abler than some of them, he was forerunner of the semi-literate unbeneficed clerks who were to be the typical lollards of the next generation. Associated with him in the same area were the Oxford clerks, John Purvey (who was probably not a graduate), a layman named Stephen Bell, and a loquacious Welshman, Walter Brute, who was later to join Oldcastle. This south Welsh march was the most important field of lollard activities outside Oxford; but some of mid-land boroughs were also troublesome to the bishops. Lollardy did not die at Leicester with Swinderby’s enforced recantation; seven years later, when Courtenay visited it, eight persons were denounced as teachers of heresy and excommunicated forthwith. At Northampton the mayor, one John Fox, was said to have given asylum to a strange assortment of heretics, including a former archdeacon of Sudbury, a runaway London apprentice and an Oxfordshire squire named Thomas Compworth.

Compworth was representative of a class from which the lol­lards clearly hoped much. Among the parliamentary knights, there were always some anti-clericals attracted by schemes of disendowment and Swinderby, as has been seen, received some protection from the gentry. Yet it is not easy to be sure which, or how many, of the knight class had fully committed themselves to Wyctifite opinions. Walsingham and Knighton between them supply the names of ten knights believed to have been guilty of heresy; but Sir Thomas Latimcr is the only one of these for whose lollardy we have firm evidence. A kinsman of Lord Latimer and, like him, with Lancastrian affinities, Sir Thomas was brought before the king's council in 1388 on a charge of possessing heretical books; and his seat at Braybrooke in Northamptonshire became a centre for lollard teaching. Sir John Montagu, whom Walsingham considered the worst of the lollard knights, is said to have removed the images from his chapel and harboured lollard preachers, Nicholas Hereford among them. But Montagu's lollardy, if such it was, must have been only a temporary aberration, for he is found crusading in Lithuania by 1391. Clifford and Stury, who were members of the household of the princess of Wales, may have been interested in Wyclif when he was her protege;¹ and both Clifford and Cheyne were closely connected with Latimer. But Walsingham's allegation that the lollard manifesto affixed to the doors of Westminster Hall during the parliament of 1395 was the work of Clifford, Stury, Latimer, and Montagu, has been shown to be un­founded; and, except for Latimer, the careers of most of the knights named are hard to reconcile with open adherence to heresy.

There is no evidence that the lollard broadsheet of 1395 was ever discussed in parliament; but it probably contributed to the mounting alarm of the ecclesiastical authorities who were be­ginning to regard the existing machinery for the repression of heresy as altogether inadequate. Before the rise of the lollards, if a bishop found himself unable to deal with any isolated case of heresy that might arise, he could apply for the writ significant which instructed the sheriff to keep the offender in prison until he had made his peace with the Church, but this procedure was not well adapted for dealing with heretics in large numbers, par­ticularly when they moved rapidly from shire to shire, and in 1382 the sheriffs had been authorized to arrest and imprison unlicensed preachers, pending their examination by an eccle­siastical court. Six years later the Merciless Parliament author­ized new commissions, designed to secure the seizure of heretical writings; to teach or maintain lollard doctrines became an offence at common law rendering the offender liable to imprison­ment and forfeiture. It is likely to have been the demonstration of 1395 which convinced the bishops that yet sterner measures were needed. A copy of the lollard manifesto was sent to Boni­face IX and it was after his reply had been received that, early in 1397, the bishops of both provinces came out into the open, asking parliament to authorize the death penalty for heresy ii England, 'as in other realms subject to the Christian religion'. But for this they had to wait until Richard II had been deposed and Archbishop Arundel's support of Henry of Lancaster had put him in a position to make his own terms with the new king.