SOURCE: Hudson, Anne. “Wyclif and the English Language.” In Wyclif in His Times, edited by Anthony Kenny, pp. 85-103. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1986.

[In the following essay, Hudson stresses Wyclif's promotion of the use of written English in the fourteenth century, regardless of whether or not he personally translated the Latin Bible into the English vernacular.]

In the introduction to the first paper in the series of Balliol lectures, the Master spoke of two things concerning Wyclif which were familiar to him as a schoolboy: that Wyclif caused the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and that Wyclif translated the Bible, both ‘facts’ that many would now feel to be discredited. It is not within the brief for this paper to reinstate Wyclif as a cause, if not the cause, of the Peasants' Revolt, though I believe that a credible case can be made for this now unfashionable view.¹ The second question is more nearly relevant to the topic in hand. Whether Wyclif himself actually translated a word of the surviving versions of the English Bible made in the late fourteenth century is dubious; but again a credible case can be made to suggest that, if not the immediate cause, Wyclif was the ultimate effective cause of the versions that have come to be known as the Wycliffite Bible.² This name is open to two interpretations: translation done by Wyclif, or translation done by Wyclif's followers, the Wycliffites, and under his inspiration. Here it is worth looking again at the nature and origins of that translation and considering the related questions of when and why Wyclif and his disciples turned to the vernacular as their main, if not their only, medium of communication.³

Before turning to the main topic of the paper, one piece of terminology should be explained. It has been fashionable to distinguish the names Wycliffite and Lollard, to use the former for the academic disciples of Wyclif, a group which in the view of those who make the distinction had largely disappeared by about 1390, and to use Lollard to name the much larger and much more amorphous group of religious dissenters persecuted by the episcopal and later the secular authorities from 1382 until the 1530s. The latter group of heretics was predominantly artisan, educated if at all in English alone, knowing little of Wyclif himself and, according to such critics, showing only the most distant reminiscences of his ideas. According to this view, Wyclif's influence was short-lived; Lollardy owed much more to economic forces than to the schoolman, as Wyclif is perceived.⁴ There is not space here to set out all the arguments against this view. Significant evidence that the distinction is inappropriate is provided by the fact that the first use of the term Lollardi to describe the heretics was by Henry Crumpe in Oxford in 1382; Crumpe used the word to apply to those of his academic colleagues who favoured Wyclif, and for his abuse was suspended from academic activities by the chancellor.⁵ Some forty years later the Carmelite Thomas Netter, writing his enormous Doctrinale Antiquitatum Fidei Ecclesiae Catholicae, spoke of Wyclif as the inventor or patronus prophani ordinis … et tota plenarie religio Lollardina, calls him Wicleffus Lollardus and uses Wiclevistae-Lollardi as a composite term and the two elements as synonymous alternatives;⁶ the whole argument of his work is based on the supposition that in confuting Wyclif, Netter was removing the basis of Lollardy. To the implications of Netter's work I will return later. But these two pieces of evidence may serve as justification for the use here of the terms Lollard and Wycliffite as synonyms.

Consideration of the topic of Wyclif and the English language may conveniently start from the question of the evidence for Wyclif's use of and interest in, the vernacular. John Bale in the mid-sixteenth century was convinced that Wyclif wrote prolifically in English as well as Latin; W. W. Shirley in the mid-nineteenth century provided a catalogue of Wyclif's writings, its first half in Latin, its second in English.⁷ Prominent amongst Bale's account is the translation of the Bible, the first complete rendering of Scripture into English. Bale does not detail the evidence for the assertion of Wyclif's responsibility, but it is not negligible. The first statement is the often quoted lament by the chronicler Henry Knighton.⁸ Admitting that Wyclif in philosophy was considered supreme and that he was without peer in the exercises of the schools, Knighton continues,

This master John Wyclif translated the gospel, which Christ had entrusted to clerks and to the doctors of this church so that they might minister it conveniently to the laity and to meaner people according to the needs of the time and the requirement of the listeners in their hunger of mind; he translated it from Latin into the English, not the angelic, idiom [in Anglicam linguam non angelicam], so that by this means that which was formerly familiar to learned clerks and to those of good understanding has become common and open to the laity, and even to those women who know how to read. As a result the pearls of the gospel are scattered and spread before swine, and that which had been precious to religious and to lay persons has become a matter of sport to ordinary people of both.

Knighton placed his outraged comment under the year 1382, a dating that is only approximate, where it serves as an introduction to his account of the Lollard movement. Knighton's statements about matters Wycliffite, however, should not lightly be dismissed: Leicester was one of the earliest centres of Lollardy, and a fellow canon at his Augustinian house in Leicester (indeed the abbot by 1394, the approximate date of Knighton's writing) was Philip Repingdon, one of Wyclif's most prominent Oxford disciples up to the autumn of 1382.⁹ In many ways Knighton's observations are, despite their exaggerated rhetoric, extraordinarily acute.

Yet this allegation of Wyclif's responsibility for the biblical translation finds strangely few echoes. John Hus in Bohemia in the early years of the fifteenth century knew that per Anglicos dicitur that Wyclif had translated the whole Bible into English,¹⁰ but despite Hus's words few of Wyclif's countrymen, friend or foe, repeat Knighton's charge. When the legitimacy of biblical translation was debated in Oxford in 1401, neither side in the argument mentioned Wyclif's name, though it is clear that the issue had arisen in connection with the vernacular versions of Scripture made at the end of the fourteenth century and by then becoming well distributed.¹¹ Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions of 1407, which were devised specifically to meet the Lollard threat to theological and ecclesiastical order, do not specify any one individual as responsible for the origination of the translations mentioned.¹² The Constitutions forbade the making of new biblical versions, and the ownership or reading of existing versions made in the time of John Wyclif or later; but, though this would seem to have been the easiest way to damn the English translation, neither Wyclif nor his followers are overtly stated to have produced it. After the Constitutions had been issued ownership of vernacular Scriptures became one of the most important ways in which Lollards were detected by the authorities.¹³ But despite this, and despite the firm tenacity with which Lollards clung to their right to read the Bible in English, few claims are made about the specific origins of it. There is the isolated reference to ‘oure translacioun’,¹⁴ but otherwise a dispassionate distance—distance which extends to the virtual absence of quotations from the versions in Lollard writings, whose authors apparently preferred to make their own new renderings.

Before considering the Wycliffite Bible in more detail, it is worth looking at the evidence for Wyclif's own involvement in any other vernacular writing. It is quite clear that Wyclif used the native language to propagate his own views, even if the only certain record of those views surviving now are in Latin. The chroniclers are agreed that Wyclif preached in London, that he gained the enthusiasm of the Londoners at his sermons, and that he did not conceal his unorthodox views when he taught outside the schools.¹⁵ Though this testimony may owe something to hindsight, it is unlikely to be entirely unreliable. Walsingham's account of Wyclif's sermons is dated 1377, and since the chronicler specifies that in them Wyclif condemned the monastic orders but ‘supported the mendicant orders, praising their poverty’ it is unlikely that his chronology can be badly wrong, because from 1381 Wyclif turned against the friars, calling them, because of their opposition to his Eucharistic views, the limbs and tail of Antichrist.¹⁶ The enthusiasm roused by Wyclif amongst the Londoners must have been engendered by vernacular eloquence, despite the fact that the whole of his surviving output of sermons is in Latin.¹⁷ Very occasionally Wyclif speaks of having set out his views on a topic in Latin and also in English: thus in the Trialogus, written during his final years at Lutterworth, he comments in the course of a diatribe against the mendicancy of the friars, ‘feci autem contra hoc in vulgari multiplices rationes’.¹⁸ There are also a few manuscript claims for English texts to be by Wyclif. Knighton includes two vernacular confessions on the Eucharist which he states to be Wyclif's; though the second is expressed as a group statement of faith, the first is more difficult to dismiss.¹⁹ One manuscript of the long Wycliffite cycle of English sermons attributes two groups of them to the Doctor Evangelicus, Wyclif's Latin byname; one other manuscript has a tract connected with this cycle enigmatically ascribed to M.J., an abbreviation which can be expanded to Magister Johannes, with Wyclif suppressed in prudence, but which is capable of many other interpretations.²⁰ Netter refers several times to Wyclif's statements in barbarizatione cujusdam Evangelii, quoting then in Latin extracts from these same vernacular sermons.²¹ Equally there are a few shorter Lollard texts which in a single manuscript are ascribed by name to Wyclif; the texts themselves certainly purvey ideas that are characteristic of the heretic.²²

It is not clear that any of these attributions has any force. The shorter texts have no more of Wyclif's ideas than other works where no manuscript links with the heresiarch are found, and they survive in other copies which are anonymous. Netter's attribution, like Knighton's of the Bible translation, may well owe its origin not to firm information lost to us but to a desire to discredit the work in question as speedily and unambiguously as possible. More interesting than precise attribution, or than the effort to see Wyclif's individual influence on the vernacular language, is the evidence that Wyclif's ideas inspired others to turn to the medium of English and to use that language to express notions of a complexity unattempted in the vernacular at least since the time of Alfred's translation of Boethius. To some extent, of course, Wycliffite interest in English was shared by other writers of the time, by Gower and the poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, not to mention the more dubious ground of Chaucer and Langland where connections with Wycliffite thought are more arguably in question. But, as Wyclif and his followers were well aware, the purposes for which they wished to use the vernacular were more audacious, not to say dangerous: they were attacking the whole edifice of clerical domination in theology, in ecclesiastical theory, indeed in academic speculation generally. Wycliffism in more than one way spelt the end of scholasticism.

Wyclif's own attitude towards the technical problems of this assault was amazingly nonchalant. Language, he asserted, was a habitus; whatever the language, whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or English, the same gospel message should, and could be delivered.²³ What precisely he meant by habitus is not explained, but the context in which the word is applied to language would suggest a sense of ‘clothing’ as much as ‘condition’—almost an ‘accident’ as opposed to the ‘substance’ of the gospel message. Wyclif explained, albeit tendentiously, why his opponents did not use English and had no wish to: the four sects of Antichrist, Caesarean clergy including the pope, monks, canons, and friars, did not wish to allow the ordinary people to discern the full gospel message, lest in discerning it they should also perceive the discrepancy between the way of life which Christ and the apostles had taught and the way of life practised by themselves.²⁴ But, though Wyclif in his later writings spoke of the need for disabusing the laity by revealing Christ's gospel directly to them in the vernacular, he seems to have ignored, or been unaware of, the enormous difficulties of the undertaking. To a considerable extent this was due to the insufficiency of his understanding of language, a failure in which during the medieval period he was far from unique. During the Oxford debate on translation in 1401 Richard Ullerston, an orthodox proponent of the notion, showed a more perceptive awareness: he mentioned the fact that whilst interpretation is possible without translation, translation conversely cannot proceed without interpretation.²⁵ Despite this realization, however, the implications were not fully observed, and Ullerston like Wyclif finally seems to have regarded English as straightforwardly equatable with Latin.

Nevertheless, indirectly Wyclif's desire for the use of the vernacular and his assurance of its complete sufficiency for the gospel message led to the discovery by some of his followers of a much more sophisticated view of language. The fullest evidence for this is to be found in the so-called ‘General Prologue’, written at the end of the processes of Bible translation and revision probably in the 1390s.²⁶ The final chapter of the Prologue makes clear the ambitious scope of the enterprise; the writer there speaks of ‘diverse fellows and helpers’ in the work and distinguishes four stages in it. The first was the effort to establish a reliable Latin text, because, as the author rightly observes, there was wide divergency of readings between different copies of the Vulgate and especially between recent copies of it. This first stage was helped by the second, the examination of the Bible text against the Glossa Ordinaria and the commentaries of the fathers and of more recent schoolmen, especially Nicholas of Lyra. This comparison revealed the inadequacy of the contemporary Vulgates, since the comments of writers such as Jerome or Augustine showed them to have had wording in their bibles that do not survive in fourteenth-century copies; it is, the Wycliffite observed, more likely that the wording available to Jerome or Augustine was correct. Equally, the fathers could help the translators to understand the force of obscure passages within Scripture. Lyra's commentaries often explained the implications of Hebrew readings in the Old Testament obscure in the Vulgate Latin; some of these were noted in marginal comments found in some copies of the Wycliffite Bible.²⁷ The General Prologue remarks upon the particular problems in the Psalter where, as is correctly observed, the liturgical text used in the contemporary Church was not the final translation of Jerome, but an earlier, less reliable version. As modern critics have noted, efforts to correct the Latin by whatever means were inadequate; many places remain where the translators were using a corrupt version.²⁸ This should surprise us less than that the effort was made at all and that some understanding of the means available for improvement was reached. The third stage in the work was a further scrutiny of the Latin text, to elucidate textual difficulties, particularly those of syntax and vocabulary. Finally came the actual translation and its correction.

All of the stages claimed in the General Prologue are traceable to some extent in surviving versions of the Wycliffite Bible and its associated texts. The enterprise was enormous; indeed, its very magnitude reveals the futility of attempting to attribute the whole to a single person, whether Wyclif or another. In the light of later efforts at translation, one omission is striking: the failure to mention any comparison with earlier vernacular versions. But this was because of the absence of any useful models for any but a very few of the biblical books. There exist medieval English versions of the Psalms, of the gospels, and of parts of the epistles, some of which might have been available; but many of these were paraphrases rather than strict translations, and for the bulk of the Old Testament no earlier model could have been found.²⁹ Apart from the magnitude of the enterprise, the other thing to emerge from the General Prologue is the scholarship that went into it, an attitude of academic enquiry that necessitated access to a multitude of books.

The author of the General Prologue summarized the final stage of the collaborative enterprise briefly in his review of its progress—translation and correction. But the reality of both parts must have been much more arduous, and later in the chapter he describes some of the individual problems encountered. From this description, and from the earliest stages traceable in manuscripts such as MS Bodley 959, it is clear that the first rendering, one that has come to be known as the Early Version, had aimed to reproduce as exactly as possible Latin idiom and vocabulary in English. So constructions such as various absolute uses of the participles or the resumptive use of the relative pronoun were transferred into English, even though they were alien to that language; many words were crudely anglicized and certain adverbs and connectives frequently used in the Vulgate, such as autem or vero, were invariably translated in the same fashion every time they occurred. These features, together with an attempt to retain the word order of the Vulgate even when this led to obscurity or even incomprehensibility in the relatively uninflected native language, make the Early Version difficult to follow.³⁰ The unsatisfactory nature of the version was evidently perceived by the translators, and the General Prologue mentions some of the changes that it was decided should be made: constructions unfamiliar in English were to be replaced by more normal ones, even when this meant considerable expansion in wording; English word order was to be followed, vocabulary was to be that of current contemporary usage as far as possible; recurrent Latin adverbs or connectives were to be replaced by a variety of English substitutes. Again the few sentences of the Prologue disguise an immensely laborious process, a process which must have required a return to the Vulgate text and its commentators since differences of meaning could be made by such substitutions. Because the main alteration was the departure from a rule-of-thumb set of equivalences to variable renderings, the overall sense of the passage was vital to any change. Yet these changes that produced the so-called Later Version were carried through with remarkable regularity: it is hard to discern any discrepancy between one part of the Bible and another in idiom, and indeed between one manuscript of that version and another, numerous though these copies are.

The writer of the General Prologue gives a number of examples of the changes made in revision. From these it emerges that the involvement with the problems of translation had revealed much both generally about the nature of language and more particularly about the peculiarities of English. In crude terms what the translators had come to observe was that language could not so easily be dismissed as mere habitus, as Wyclif had done. They had perceived that two languages are never mirror images of each other, but that what one leaves vague another insists upon specifying, that the range of association carried by a word in one language may differ from those contained in its most obvious rendering in another, that the possibilities for emphasis available in an inflected language by use of word order are hardly transferable into a language that depends upon word order to convey basic meaning. If the Prologue gives insight into the developing theories of the translators, the Later Version itself provides proof of the skill with which they used their insights. The Version is entirely idiomatic, uses Latinate vocabulary only for those words of peculiarly biblical nature that have remained limited to scriptural occurrence, but keeps as faithfully to the original text as it is possible for a translation to be.

The translation is also entirely uncontroversial, entirely lacking in any Wycliffite slant or polemical twisting.³¹ Why then was Arundel so adamant about banning it? Why did Lyndwood's gloss to Arundel's Constitution go even further and imply that any translation, even of short passages of Scripture quoted within an independent frame, was covered by the prohibition?³² Events of the later fifteenth century make it clear that the Constitution was not merely a pious or, as Lollards saw it, an impious hope: its terms were used to persecute many Lollards and indeed were interpreted so widely that possession of any English work, even of the Canterbury Tales, might be used as evidence of heresy.³³ Use or defence of vernacular Scriptures had evidently become the most obvious social mark of the Wycliffite heresy, and was seen as the key to all the other errors of its adherents.

If Wycliffism became in the minds of opponents such as Arundel and Netter a heresy peculiarly associated with the use of the vernacular, it is the more remarkable that Wyclif himself should have refrained from using it in his writings. At what date did his followers realize the importance of English? And at what point did they abandon the use of Latin? Earlier critics of the Lollard movement would hardly have understood these questions, since they assumed that Lollard use of the vernacular was the unavoidable result of the heretics' ignorance of Latin, that no conscious choice was therefore available. The summary above of the processes involved in the translation of the Bible should make it clear that dismissal of the topic along those lines is unconvincing. The answer to the first question is to be found if anywhere back in Wyclif's lifetime. Though the three sets of sermons which Wyclif put together at Lutterworth, described by him as sermones rudes ad populum, are all in Latin,³⁴ his Oxford followers Philip Repingdon and Nicholas Hereford preached in the vernacular to appreciative congregations of secular as well as clerical persons in May and June 1382 in St Frideswide's churchyard in Oxford.³⁵ Repingdon's sermon was on Corpus Christi day, and he apparently used the occasion to praise Wyclif and his teaching.³⁶ Of Hereford's earlier Ascension Day sermon there is a fuller notarial account made on the instructions of Archbishop Courtenay.³⁷ After deploring the extent of clerical wealth in England, the litigious quarrels of the clergy that endowment fostered and the increasing preoccupation of the Church with wealth, Hereford went on to urge that the possessioners should be disinherited, the friars not allowed to beg, and that the king should confiscate temporalities and so satisfy his need for taxes. Although the sermons were given at the invitation of Robert Rygge, chancellor of the university,³⁸ they were an evident bid for popular support. Hereford's sermon concluded with an appeal to the laity to take action against the Church's temporalities if the king hesitated and there is some evidence that Repingdon repeated this appeal.³⁹ Hereford certainly, and Repingdon probably, used English for his inflammatory discourse. When these two and a third Oxford disciple, John Aston, were called to London to the Blackfriars' Council to answer for their opinions to the archbishop and his subordinates, all three again provocatively used the vernacular. Courtenay in the course of questions to Aston about his views on the Eucharist demanded that Aston should use Latin, because of the presence of lay persons—to whom his opinions would presumably cause scandal. Aston impertinently prevaricated, distributing the subsequent explanation of his views in leaflet form though the streets and squares of London in English.⁴⁰ Repingdon and Hereford similarly appealed against the sentence of Courtenay against them, nailing their objections to it on schedules to the doors of St Mary's and St Paul's in London.⁴¹ The eventual recantation of both Hereford and Repingdon, a betrayal that was particularly hasty in the case of the latter, has, I would suggest, obscured the importance of both to the subsequent Wycliffite movement. Hereford in particular was perceptibly more radical than his master: his call for disendowment was more extreme than anything that Wyclif himself expressed; his incitement of the laity to revolutionary action, coming less than a year after the Peasants' Revolt, stands in striking contrast to Wyclif's guarded comments on that event; his use of English was consciously an acknowledgement that Wyclif's ideas could not be confined within Latin-speaking academia if they were to be put into practice.

Though this makes it clear that Wyclif's academic disciples had realized well before Wyclif's own death the necessity of using English, it is equally plain that a complete switch to the vernacular took a good deal longer. Many of the earliest datable Wycliffite texts are still in Latin, even though some of them were declaredly intended for the benefit of those far from the university. The long commentary on the Apocalypse, known from its first words as the Opus Arduum, was composed in Latin between Christmas 1389 and Easter 1390 whilst the author was imprisoned by the bishops on charges of adherence to Lollardy.⁴² The text itself reflects academic methods of discussion and shows familiarity with a wide body of texts; its author's declared support for vernacular translations and his glee at the replacement of confiscated English sermons by others ipse multo forciores did not lead him to compose his own tract for the times in the native language.⁴³ Nor is there any trace of an English translation of it or of debt to the text in later Lollard works; its legacy, as its preservation, was entirely in Hussite circles.⁴⁴

More overtly directed towards the propagation of Wycliffite doctrines is the Floretum, an alphabetical set of distinctiones, using biblical, patristic, and canonistic sources along with Wyclif's own writings, on a number of theological, ecclesiastical, and moral topics.⁴⁵ The prologue to this vast compilation explains its purpose: to provide poor preachers, who lack money and also lack access to books because the friars and monks have shut up all the necessary volumes in their own libraries, with a single tool to aid their preaching of the gospel. Yet interestingly the language used is still Latin, the date of composition some time between 1384 and 1396. The method of the work is again entirely academic: references to authorities are given in full detail, of book, chapter, and alphabetical division within chapter, or for canon law in traditional form with division, section, and the incipit of the chapter. The surviving eight English manuscripts of the Floretum are all in Latin; so are all but one of the fifteen copies of the abbreviated form of the text known as the Rosarium. Significantly, a vernacular translation of this abbreviation survives in a single copy, testimony to the realization that times for the Lollard preacher were changing.

The third extensive Latin Lollard work is a long set of sermons identified by Christina von Nolcken and now known to have survived in six manuscripts.⁴⁶ The date of these sermons is unfortunately far from clear, though the absence of specific mention of execution for heresy suggests a date before 1401. Again, as with the Opus Arduum, the writer's advocacy of vernacular Scriptures and his outrage that Antichrist, and particularly the false friars, should deplore the laity's interest in the Bible and their desire for teaching in their own language, did not lead him to the apparently logical conclusion, the composition of his own sermons in English.⁴⁷ This writer seems to have shared Wyclif's optimistic outlook on language: he observed, ‘Although idioms are various, nonetheless the articles of faith and the truths of the gospel remain the same everywhere even if language is changed. Therefore the gospel can be written and spoken in Latin and in Greek, in French, in English, and in every spoken language.’⁴⁸ One might guess that this preacher, despite his enthusiasm for vernacular Scriptures, had probably not participated in the actual work of translation, or he would hardly have dismissed the problems so cursorily.

In 1391 Walter Brut was brought before Bishop Trefnant of Hereford, accused of heresy.⁴⁹ Brut was a layman, such is specified repeatedly, but he was, albeit called at one point laycus agricola, also clearly laicus literatus. Brut stated that he had been required to write his answer to the charges brought against him in Latin; this task he performed, as the episcopal register shows, with complete competence and at great length.⁵⁰ So erudite were his answers felt to be that lengthy refutations were prepared for them by the orthodox side, again in Latin.⁵¹ The first edict against Wyclif and his followers that specifically mentions writings in English seems to be in 1388.⁵² So three years before Brut's trial, the significance of the vernacular was beginning to be perceived by the authorities. But it is, I think, important to remember two points. In the first place, the heretics' transference of material from Latin to English was not regularly accompanied by any popularization of the subject matter of that material or of its methods of procedure—the sole change was the ‘accident’ of language. Secondly, it seems that this transference of language was an accommodation to the audience, and not for some long time a necessity because of the ignorance of the writers—in other words, the Lollard authors remained for many years after 1388 fully capable of writing and of reading in Latin, even if they chose to put out their works in English.

As evidence of the continuing erudition of Wycliffite writings, even when the medium was English, the so-called Glossed Gospels may be taken as an example. These aimed to foster understanding of the evangelical message by the provision of commentaries on each of the four Gospels; the four commentaries differ somewhat in their surviving forms, but that on Luke may be taken as typical.⁵³ Instructions given to the workers who actually compiled this commentary must have run along these lines: divide each chapter into groups of verses that belong together and use as translation of each group the Early Version (in a slightly revised form); for commentary go to Ambrose and Bede on Luke and translate the whole of their exegesis, omitting one only if there is substantial overlap; note where either, and particularly Bede, is repeating the view of an earlier authority; go to Aquinas's Catena Aurea for passages from the Greek fathers and use that assemblage to trace other fathers who commented on Luke—do not just copy from the Catena but go back to the originals and make sure that the whole discussion is translated, not just the bit that Aquinas thought relevant; check a harmony of the Gospels and use the commentaries on parallel passages from the other three Gospels for amplification; add in Bernard and Grosseteste, particularly where the biblical material offers any opportunity for criticism of the clergy; in translating, include the origin of each author's comment, the work and the chapter, and indicate whether the author was directly observing on the verse in question or whether he was talking more generally. The scribes who copied out the commentaries must have been given equally detailed instructions: the biblical translation should be engrossed and rubricated, the individual words that are the subject of comment should be similarly rubricated, the names of the authorities underlined—in this fashion the reader can readily perceive the degree of authority he should attach to any word.⁵⁴ These instructions, to compilers and to scribes, were to be observed meticulously; and no word of comment was added by these fourteenth-century workers. This description, even if it appears rather frivolous, may give some idea of the enormity of this undertaking, both in scope and in scholarly impetus.

Here erudition is dominant, and the individual viewpoint, whether heterodox or not, only emerges through the selection of other men's words. That the technique was deliberate is clear from numerous Lollard writings where the author is more outspoken: even the ecclesiastical authorities, even Courtenay or Arundel, could not impugn the words of Augustine or Gregory; yet Augustine and Gregory, or even canon law, can be found to support a Wycliffite standpoint.⁵⁵ The Thirty-Seven Conclusions of the Lollards is a far more controversial text than the Glossed Gospels; here, however, the interest is not the author's heresies, but his method. Each conclusion is divided into corollaries and the main manner of demonstration is by a manipulation of carefully chosen extracts from Scripture and canon law. Thus the proposition that ministers of religion should be satisfied with modest provision of the necessaries of life is supported by various scriptural citations; the first corollary is less uncontentious, that tithes and offerings may be withheld from prelates or curates habitually failing in their spiritual duty. This is backed up by four references to canon law, which, it is admitted, deal with the case of a priest known to be a fornicator. But this is countered by the claim that avarice is a worse sin than lechery and therefore it is even more necessary that tithes be withheld for this more grievous sin; two commentators, Innocent IV and Hostiensis, are advanced in support of this claim. These references are very precise: that to Innocent ‘de restoracione spoliatorum capitulo “In literis” in 1 colum in þe ende’, that to Hostiensis ‘in Summa de decimis in þe paraf “Quid si clericus”’.⁵⁶

It might be objected that the Conclusions are by their nature designed to confront the opposition and that therefore this display of learning is intended not for the ordinary Lollard but for the orthodox academic. This can, however, by no means explain all the English texts. I have described elsewhere the erudition, perhaps even pedantry, of a Lollard author of two long texts written between 1407 and 1414.⁵⁷ The text of his sermon, the author says, is to be left with the congregation for them to discuss at leisure; he will answer questions on his next visit and will then deal with any objections that may have been raised against it by any opponents. Yet here, and in his longer tract, the writer translates numerous pasages from the fathers and canon law, considers various understandings of the words hoc and est in the words of Eucharistic consecration, and uses the language of grammar and logic. He alludes to differences of view amongst the ancients concerning the continuum, a piece of erudition that is entirely outside the main argument, but one that the writer apparently thought his audience could comprehend without full explanation.⁵⁸ Alongside these two works it is worth placing one further Lollard text, the Lanterne of Liȝt written between 1407 and 1415; the interest of this text lies in the fact that we know something about at least one member of its actual audience.⁵⁹ The case for heresy against the London skinner John Claydon in 1415 was based largely upon his ownership of this text and his affirmed agreement with the many unorthodoxies it contained. Claydon, it is said, was illiterate; but he had commissioned the writing of a copy, had presided over the two-day checking of the text by his literate servant and the scribe, had then paid to have it handsomely bound, and ordered it to be read to him repeatedly.⁶⁰ Yet the Lanterne quotes numerous patristic sources, as well as biblical and canonistic ones; more remarkably, each quotation is given in Latin first and only then in English translation.

These few examples may serve to illustrate the sophisticated nature of Lollard writing. The second claim, that the Lollard preference for English was a deliberate rather than a forced choice, is to a fair degree substantiated by the evidence given for the first. The opposition to Lollardy reinforces this. Netter's Doctrinale was written in the 1420s and was unfinished at the time of its author's death in 1430.⁶¹ It is worth asking what Netter thought he was doing in this inordinately long and detailed work. To a certain extent the Doctrinale was a propaganda exercise: if England had produced the heresiarch Wyclif, whose disciples were troubling not only his native country but also Bohemia, then England could also provide a refutation of Wyclif, a refutation at erudite length. This purpose is plain in the dedicatory epistles to Pope Martin V,⁶² and its success is attested by the circulation of the Doctrinale on the Continent. But Netter had at least one other audience nearer home. The surviving copies in England of monastic and fraternal origin reveal that the text was used to bolster the resolve of those most hostile to Wyclif's views.⁶³ The Doctrinale, however, is not only concerned with Wyclif's views of predestination and the nature of the Church, or of the Eucharist, but also with the Wycliffites' regrettable advocacy of women preachers, with Lollard iconoclasm, with the notion of the suspects investigated by Bishop Alnwick of Norwich that children born to Christian parents needed no baptism, or with William Taylor's views on the illegitimacy of prayers to the saints.⁶⁴ Hardly topics, one would have thought, on which other Carmelites needed instruction. Yet, if the Doctrinale were (on the usual assumptions) to reach its Lollard target, it would have had to be translated into English, of which there is no sign and for which Netter would have had unmitigated abhorrence, or those Lollards—at least some of them—would have had to be able to read Latin. Perhaps Netter was over-optimistic in thinking that any Lollard would read through the vast length of his complete work; but it seems that he may not have been entirely unrealistic in envisaging that some Lollards could still understand its language.⁶⁵

It is in the light of all this evidence, complex and even conflicting as some of it is, that the question of Wyclif and the English language should be considered. Whether any word of Wyclif's in English survives seems to me properly a matter of indifference. What is important, I would suggest, is the impetus he gave towards the use of the vernacular, but use for purposes and with methods that involved little diminution of scholarly enquiry. The one text whose title enshrines the name of the man, Wyclif's Wicket, may serve as an epitome of the situation: the text survives only in prints of the Reformation period and not at all in medieval manuscripts, it is mentioned by name only from the very end of the fifteenth century, but it sets out in English some of the ideas on the Eucharist that Wyclif had expressed in Latin in the 1380s.⁶⁶ There is little chance that the Wicket is actually by Wyclif. But it does confirm Knighton's astonished and outraged comment that the Lollards used the vernacular, the vulgar tongue, because it seemed to the lay people better and more worthy than the Latin language.⁶⁷ For this view John Wyclif was responsible.

Notes

1. For the basic material on the Revolt see R. B. Dobson, ed., The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (London, 2nd edn. 1983), and for modern interpretations of it, with references to the further criticism, R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston, eds., The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge, 1984).

2. The standard edition of both versions is that edited by J. Forshall and F. Madden, The Holy Bible … made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his Followers, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1850). For a useful survey of the versions and of the prolific work of various critics see H. Hargreaves, ‘The Wycliffite Versions’, in The Cambridge History of the Bible ii, ed. G. W. H. Lampe (Cambridge, 1969), 387-415.

3. Six months after this paper was delivered, Margaret Aston gave a paper entitled ‘Wyclif and the Vernacular’ to a conference in Oxford; her paper will be published in Studies in Church History, Subsidia 5 (1986). The material in this necessarily overlaps with that here, but as the paper is not yet available in print I have not provided cross references.

4. The most influential proponent of this view was K. B. McFarlane in his book John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (London, 1952), though his later, posthumously published book Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972) suggests that he might by his death have wished to modify his earlier opinions.

5. Fasciculi Zizaniorum, ed. W. W. Shirley (Rolls Series, London, 1858), 311-12.

6. Ed. B. Blanciotti, 3 vols. (Venice, 1757-9), i. 801, 72, 11.

7. John Bale, Illustrium Maioris Britanniae scriptorum … summarium (Ipswich, 1548), fos. 154^v-158^r and Scriptorum Illustrium maioris Brytannie … Catalogus, 2 vols. (Basle, 1557-9), i. 450-6; W. W. Shirley, A Catalogue of the Original Works of John Wyclif (Oxford, 1865).

8. Chronicon, ed. J. R. Lumby, 2 vols. (Rolls Series, London, 1889-95), ii. 151-2.

9. For the authorship and date of the Chronicon see V. H. Galbraith, ‘The Chronicle of Henry Knighton’, in Fritz Saxl … A Volume of Memorial Essays, ed. D. J. Gordon (London, 1957), 136-48; for Repingdon, A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1957-9), 1565-7.

10. Contra Iohannem Stokes, in Polemica, ed. J. Ersil (Prague, 1966), 61-2; the text can be dated 1411.

11. For this episode see my paper ‘The Debate on Bible Translation, Oxford 1401’, English Historical Review 90 (1975), 1-18.

12. The Constitutions are printed by D. Wilkins ed., Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, 4 vols. (London, 1737), iii. 314-19. Arundel's letter of 1412 to Pope John XXIII (Wilkins iii. 350) does mention that Wyclif had ‘novae ad suae malitiae complementum scripturarum in linguam maternam translationis practica adinventa’.

13. Some details about this are outlined in my paper ‘Lollardy: the English Heresy?’, Studies in Church History 18 (1982), 261-83.

14. Remonstrance against Romish Corruptions (more commonly known as Thirty-Seven Conclusions of the Lollards), ed. J. Forshall (London, 1851), 19.

15. See Eulogium Historiarum, ed. F. S. Haydon, 3 vols. (Rolls Series, London, 1858-63), iii. 348; Thomas Walsingham Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, 2 vols. (Rolls Series, London, 1863-4), i. 363; Chronicon Angliae, ed. E. M. Thompson (Rolls Series, London, 1874), 116-17, 189.

16. For Wyclif's relations with the fraternal orders see A. Gwynn, The English Austin Friars in the Time of Wyclif (London, 1940), 225-79.

17. The Sermones were edited by J. Loserth, 4 vols. (London, 1887-90). The first three volumes contain sermons that were put together, if not originally composed, after Wyclif retired to Lutterworth late in 1381; in the fourth volume are to be found the Sermones Quadraginta, which originated earlier, and some of which are likely to have been preached in London. For these see W. Mallard, ‘Dating the Sermones Quadraginta of John Wyclif’, Medievalia et Humanistica 17 (1966), 86-105.

18. Trialogus cum Supplemento Trialogi, ed. G. Lechler (Oxford, 1869), 342/10.

19. Knighton (above, n. 8), ii. 157-8, 161-2.

20. English Wycliffite Sermons i, ed. A. Hudson (Oxford, 1983), 58, 77.

21. Doctrinale i. 118, 701, 739, 802, 803, 874, ii. 515, iii. 411.

22. See English Wycliffite Sermons i. 76, British Library MS Harley 2385, fos. 3^r, 5^r, 5^v.

23. De Contrarietate Duorum Dominorum, in Polemical Works, ed. R. Buddensieg, 2 vols. (London, 1883), ii. 700/29. Note also ‘Lingua enim tam in via quam in patria a sentencia et lege Domini est remota, cum in penam peccato superbie edificancium turrim Babel est divisio lingwarum a Deo et per dyabolum introducta.’

24. For example, De Nova Prevaricantia Mandatorum, in Polemical Works i. 126/14; De Quattuor Sectis Novellis, Polemical Works i. 255/19; Opus Evangelicum, ed. J. Loserth, 2 vols. (London, 1895-6), ii. 115/4.

25. Ullerston's text is preserved in Vienna Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 4133, fos. 195^r-207^v; here fos. 196^r-7^v; for the text see the paper cited above n. 11.

26. Forshall and Madden (above, n. 2), i. 1-60.

27. For example, the marginal material recorded in Forshall and Madden iii. 1-241.

28. See Hargreaves (above, n. 2), 412-13 and the same author's paper, ‘The Latin Text of Purvey's Psalter’, Medium Aevum 24 (1955), 73-90.

29. Middle English versions are surveyed by L. Muir in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050-1500 ii, ed. J. Burke Severs (Hamden, Conn., 1970), 381-409, 534-52.

30. The Prologue writer's own example (Forshall and Madden (above, n. 2) i. 57) of the last is the rendering of ‘Dominum formidabunt adversarij ejus’ (1 Sam. 2: 10) as ‘the Lord hise aduersaries shulen drede’; in fact this is already an improvement upon the actual Early version translation ‘The Lord shulen drede the aduersaries of hym’, where only the ending of the auxiliary verb (an ending that would not have been preserved by many fifteenth-century scribes) shows the correct sense.

31. In all the hostility to the Wycliffite Scripture there never ensued any debate upon the rendering of individual words such as marked the appearance of Tyndale's New Testament.

32. W. Lyndwood, Provinciale (Oxford, 1679), 286 where it is indicated that translation of biblical passages quoted in the fathers is illicit, along with the use in works of English origin of any scriptural text.

33. For this example see Lincoln register Chedworth fo. 62^v, a case in 1464.

34. Sermones, i. Preface.

35. Of these events a fuller account is given in chapter 4.

36. Fasciculi Zizaniorum (FZ), ed. W. W. Shirley (Rolls Series, London, 1858), 296-7.

37. MS Bodley 240, pp. 848-50.

38. FZ, 306.

39. MS Bodley 240, p. 850; FZ, 299.

40. FZ, 329-33, Lambeth reg. Courtenay fo. 29^r-v in Wilkins (above, n. 12), iii. 163-4.

41. FZ, 318-28, Knighton (above, n. 8), ii. 170-1 and MS Bodley 647, fo. 70^r.

42. For this text and Hereford's possible authorship of it see my paper ‘A Neglected Wycliffite Text’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 29 (1978), 257-79.

43. Brno University Library MS Mk 28, fos. 136^r, 161^v, 166^v, 174^v.

44. A fragment of a Czech version of the text survives: see B. Ryba, ‘Strahovské Zjevenie, Ceský husitský výklad na Apokalypsu …’, Strahovská knihovna 1 (1966), 7-29.

45. For the text and its abbreviated form see A. Hudson, ‘A Lollard Compilation and the Dissemination of Wycliffite Thought’, Journal of Theological Studies NS 23 (1972), 65-81; ‘A Lollard Compilation in England and Bohemia’, Journal of Theological Studies NS 25 (1974), 129-40; C. von Nolcken, The Middle English Translation of the ‘Rosarium Theologie’ (Heidelberg Middle English Texts x, 1979).

46. Her paper, entitled ‘An Unremarked Group of Wycliffite Sermons in Latin’, is published in Modern Philology 83, 233-49. The most complete form of the sermons known is that in Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 200.

47. MS Laud Misc. 200, fos. 19^v-20^r, 24^v-25^r, 32^v, 41^v, 66^r-67^v, 92^r-v, 134^v.

48. MS Laud Misc. 200, fo. 201.

49. The case is recorded at length in Registrum Johannis Trefnant, ed. W. W. Capes (London, 1916), 278-365. A brief biography of Brut is given by Emden, Oxford, 270-1, though Emden apparently regarded his chief claim to inclusion to be the erudition of the replies mentioned here.

50. Trefnant Register, 285-358.

51. For some of them see Trefnant Register 368-94 (wrongly marked in the edition as replies to Swynderby); others are in British Library MSS Harley 31, fos. 194^v-205^r, 216^r-218^r and Royal 7 B. iii, fos. 1^r-4^v. See M. Aston, ‘Lollard Women Priests?’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980), 445-51.

52. Calendar of Patent Rolls 1385-1389 (London, 1900), 448, 468, 536; all of these relate to the same series of mandates. Cf. Knighton (above, n. 8), ii. 263 who mentions under 1388 a measure that ‘librosque eorum Anglicos plenius examinarent’.

53. The best recent account of these is to be found in H. Hargreaves, ‘Popularising Biblical Scholarship: the Role of the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels’, in The Bible and Medieval Culture, ed. W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (Louvain, 1979), 171-89.

54. These instructions can be deduced from the format of most of the surviving manuscripts of the commentaries, MSS Bodley 143, 243, Laud Misc. 235, British Library Additional 41175, Additional 28026 (though this is less handsomely presented), Cambridge University Library Kk. 2. 9 and Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland 6124.

55. As The Apology for Lollard Doctrines (ed. J. H. Todd (London, 1842)), 46 observes, having cited Augustine and canon law, ‘And syn þer wordis are canoniȝed and approuid of holi kirk, oiþer behouiþ to graunt þer wordis or to denay þe canoniȝing and aprouing of þe kirk.’

56. Remonstrance (above n. 14), 12-15; the citations of canon law are in Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. E. Friedberg, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1879-81), i. 117, 284, ii. 455, 457; for Innocent see the edition (Venice, 1578), fos. 94-5, and for Hostiensis his Summa Aurea (Lyons, 1597), fos. 209-10.

57. ‘A Wycliffite Scholar of the Early Fifteenth Century’, in The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Memory of Beryl Smalley, ed. K. Walsh and D. Wood (Studies in Church History, Subsidia 4 (1985)), 301-15.

58. The writer was, like Wyclif, an indivisibilist; see above pp. 31-66.

59. The text was edited by L. M. Swinburn, EETS OS 151 (1917).

60. The Register of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury 1414-1443, ed. E. F. Jacob, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1938-47), iv. 132-8.

61. The date of the various books is sorted out by M. Aston in a note to her paper ‘William White's Lollard Followers’, Catholic Historical Review 68 (1982), 474 n. 22.

62. Doctrinale i. 3-4, ii. 2.

63. Of the extant English manuscripts, British Library Royal 8 G. x and Worcester College Oxford 233 were given by Abbot Whethamstede of St Albans to Gloucester College Oxford; the scribes of Cambridge University Library Dd. 8. 17, Magdalen College Oxford 153, and Merton College 319 were Carmelites; Lincoln College Oxford 106 was a Carmelite production given to the College by its founder Richard Flemyng.

64. For these latter topics see Doctrinale i. 619, 637-8; iii. 902-52; iii. 342; iii. 729-31, 743, 755.

65. It is worth considering whether Netter's polemic, and indeed that of earlier opponents, may not have had the unintended effect of publicizing Wyclif's views and of providing a convenient access to the heresiarch's voluminous treatises. The modern critic can certainly use Netter very readily as an index to Wyclif. F. Šmahel has drawn attention to the publicizing effect of condemnations of Hussite views in Bohemia in ‘“Doctor Evangelicus super omnes evangelistas”: Wyclif's Fortune in Hussite Bohemia’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 43 (1970), 16-34 at 22.

66. It was published first in 1546 (STC 25590), and was reprinted several times; for details about these, and references to the text, see my paper ‘“No newe thyng”: The Printing of Medieval Texts in the Early Reformation Period’, in Middle English Studies Presented to Norman Davis, ed. D. Gray and E. G. Stanley (Oxford, 1983), 153-74 at 157, 172-3. Further investigation and a critical edition of this text are needed.

67. Chronicon ii. 155 the Lollards ‘qui mutaverunt evangelium Christi in evangelium aeternum, id est, vulgarem linguam et communem maternam, et sic aeternam, quia laicis reputatur melior et dignior quam lingua Latina’.