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Wycliffe's labour had left only the Bible as the seed of a future life, and no trace remained in the sixteenth century of the Lollardry of the fourteenth. But now Protestantism recommenced its enterprise in the growing desire for a nobler, holier insight into the will of God. In the year 1525 was enrolled in London a society calling itself "The Association of Christian Brothers."
Some account of this movement must be given in this place, although it can be but a sketch only. "Lollardry" has a history of its own; but it forms no proper part of the history of the Reformation. It was a separate phenomenon, provoked by the same causes which produced their true fruit at a later period; but it formed no portion of the stem on which those fruits ultimately grew.
Lollardry was far from having been crushed by the Statute of Heresy.
Lollardry can have made little way among men whose grudge against the Archbishop of Canterbury sprang from his discouragement of pilgrimages.
The ruin of Lord Cobham, the formal condemnation of Wyclif's doctrines in the Council of Constance, broke the political and the religious strength of Lollardry. Henry had won the Church by his orthodoxy, the nobles by his warlike prowess, the whole people by his revival of the glories of Crécy and Poitiers.
Lollardry as a social danger was held firmly at bay, and in 1387 the king ordered Lollard books to be seized and brought before the Council. But the royal officers showed little zeal in aiding the bishops to seize or punish the heretical teachers.
But it would require positive evidence to justify the belief that from this feeling Chaucer ever passed to sympathy with LOLLARDRY, in the vague but sufficiently intelligible sense attaching to that term in the latter part of Richard the Second's reign.
New and stringent laws were passed in 1401 and 1415, several persons were burned at the stake, and a large number forced to recant, or frightened into keeping their opinions secret. This religious movement gradually died out, and by the middle of the fifteenth century nothing more is heard of Lollardry. Wycliffe had been not only a religious innovator, but a writer of much excellent English.
Wycliffism as an influence rapidly declined with the death of Wyclif himself, as it hardly could but decline, considering the absence from his teaching of any tangible system of church government; and Lollardry came to be the popular name, or nickname, for any and every form of dissent from the existing system.
The question as to Chaucer's own attitude towards the Wycliffite movement will be more conveniently touched upon below; but the tone is unmistakable of the references or allusions to Lollardry which he occasionally introduces into the mouth of his "Host," whose voice is that vox populi which the upper and middle classes so often arrogate to themselves.
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