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One cannot view but with a pathetic interest these sacred relies of an age that was hungering for the Word of God. The origin of these early German Bibles has been traced by scholars to Wycliffite and Hussite influences, which Rome never stamped out, though her inquisitors tried their best to do so. The earliest of these Bibles do not state the place nor the year of publication.
But though, in the "Parson of a Town," Chaucer may not have wished to paint a Wycliffite priest still less a Lollard, under which designation so many varieties of malcontents, in addition to the followers of Wyclif, were popularly included yet his eyes and ears were open; and he knew well enough what the world and its children are at all times apt to call those who are not ashamed of their religion, as well as those who make too conscious a profession of it.
He must recant his heretical Wycliffite opinions, especially those set forth in his treatise on the "Church." What need, said the Council, could there be of any further trial? The man was a heretic. His own books convicted him, and justice must be done. And now, on the last day of the trial, John Hus stood before the great Council. The scene was appalling.
So long as Wyclif's movement consisted only of an opposition to ecclesiastical pretensions on the one hand, and of an attempt to revive religious sentiment on the other, half the country or more was Wycliffite, and Chaucer no doubt with the rest.
During his reign it lay dormant the old Wycliffite plant violently uprooted, the new Lutheran shoots not yet visible above the ground. He was one of the very few men divinely taught without ostensible human agency, within whom God is pleased to dwell by His Spirit at an age so early that the dawn of the heavenly instinct cannot be perceived.
But the one as well as the other proves him to have perceived much of what was noblest in the Wycliffite movement, and much of what was ignoblest in the reception with which it met at the hands of worldlings before, with the aid of the State, the Church finally succeeded in crushing it, to all appearance, out of existence.
But of course they wished it to be understood that it was for her Wycliffite heresies. It was about the beginning of February, 1393, that the Duchess died. Her husband never awoke fully to his irreparable loss until long after he had lost her. But he held her memory in honour at her burial, with a gentle respect which showed some faint sense of it.
But whenever Ball or anyone else is accused of being a follower of Wycliff, nothing else is probably referred to than the professor's well-known opinion on the sacrament of the Eucharist. Hence it is that the Chronicon Angliae speaks of John Ball as having been imprisoned earlier in life for his Wycliffite errors, which it calls simply perversa dogmata.
Though, then, from the whole tone of his mind, Chaucer could not but sympathise with the opponents of ecclesiastical domination though, as a man of free and critical spirit, and of an inborn ability for penetrating beneath the surface, he could not but find subjects for endless blame and satire in the members of those Mendicant Orders in whom his chief patron's academical ally had recognised the most formidable obstacles to the spread of pure religion yet all this would not justify us in regarding him as personally a Wycliffite.
This, then, seems the appropriate place for briefly reviewing the vexed question WAS CHAUCER A WYCLIFFITE? Apart from the character of the "Parson" and from the "Parson's Tale," what is the nature of our evidence on the subject?
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