Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 14, 2025
Neither the cost of the valuable manuscript nor the opposition and vigilance of an almost omnipresent inquisition were able to suppress it. Wyclif was now about fifty-eight years of age. He had rendered a transcendent service to the English nation, and a service that not one of his contemporaries could have performed, to which only the foremost scholar and theologian of his day was equal.
With the formal denial of the doctrine of Transubstantiation which Wyclif issued in the spring of 1381 began that great movement of religious revolt which ended more than a century after in the establishment of religious freedom by severing the mass of the Teutonic peoples from the general body of the Catholic Church. The act was the bolder that he stood utterly alone.
Wyclif denied transubstantiation, disapproved of auricular confession, opposed the payment of Peter's pence, taught that kings should not be subject to prelates, translated the Bible into English and circulated it among the people, and even denounced the reigning pope as Antichrist; yet he was not put to death, because there was as yet no act of parliament for the burning of heretics, and in England things must be done according to the laws which the people had made.
Many causes had concurred to excite the insurrection which temporarily destroyed the influence of John of Gaunt, and which for long cast a deep shade upon the effects of the teaching of Wyclif.
The white masonry had hardly grown grey under the buffetings of a hundred years ere Lollard was no longer a word of shame, and the reformation that Wyclif had begun sat enthroned within the walls of the chapel where he had battled for his life. The attitude of the primates indeed showed that sooner or later such a reformation was inevitable.
If Wyclif escaped the wrath and vengeance of Rome because of his high rank as a theological doctor, his connection with the University of Oxford, opposed to itinerating beggars with great pretensions and greedy ends, and his friendship and intercourse with the rulers of the land, his followers did not. They became very numerous, and were variously called Lollards, Wyclifites, and Biblemen.
But even if the Peasant Revolt had not deprived Wyclif of the support of the aristocratic party with whom he had hitherto cooperated, their alliance must have been dissolved by the new theological position which he had already taken up.
Already in the French "Roman de la Rose" the rivalry between the Friars and the Parish Priests is the theme of much satire, evidently unfavourable to the former and favourable to the latter; but in England, where Langland likewise dwells upon the jealousy between them, it was specially accentuated by the assaults of Wyclif upon the Mendicant Orders.
He merely protested against the corruptions which good men lamented; and that is nearly all that great men can do when they are beyond their age. The year following, 1361, Wyclif was presented to the rich rectory of Fillingham by Baliol College, and was promoted the same year to the wardenship of that ancient college.
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.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking