SOURCE: Hearnshaw, F. J. C. “John Wycliffe and Divine Dominion.” In The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Medieval Thinkers, edited by F. J. C. Hearnshaw, pp. 192-223. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1923.

[In the following excerpt, Hearnshaw sketches Wyclif's life, surveys his writings, and encapsulates his thought on ecclesiastical and political subjects, concluding that Wyclif was not in any significant sense a religious thinker but rather a rationalist.]

Wycliffe was born in the north of England about the year 1320. As he grew up to manhood, the evils which had marked the opening of the fourteenth century became manifestly worse. In particular, the Papacy, exiled from Rome and established at Avignon (1309-76), having been robbed of its temporal suzerainty, lost also its spirituality, and sank into a deplorable condition of religious apathy, moral corruption, and intellectual contempt. It also passed under the control of its destroyer, the king of France, and seemed to be degraded to the ignominious position of a mere tool of his policy. At the same time its departure from Italy involved the loss of the revenues of the Papal States, and this necessitated a formidable increase in the demands for money made upon the faithful in northern lands. England, in particular, which had been recognised as a fief of the Papacy by King John, was drawn upon heavily to support the growing expenses of the papal court: French cardinals became the absentee holders of the richest English benefices; curial agents collected in this country for the advantage of Avignon a larger sum than flowed into the coffers of the king himself.¹ The exasperation which in any circumstances would have been caused by the loss of English patronage and the drain of English wealth was incalculably aggravated when the Hundred Years War broke out (1337). From that time onward it was felt that the papal overlord of England was the pliable dependent of England's most deadly foe; and that the ecclesiastical treasure of the nation was being prostituted to the comfort and encouragement of the enemy.

In the midst of these disaffections and discontents fell the Black Death (1349). This colossal catastrophe, which so well-informed a historian as Professor Thorold Rogers regarded as the most momentous event recorded in English history, had a profound and far-reaching effect in the religious sphere, as well as in the spheres of politics, economics, and society. It shook the ecclesiastical system to its foundation. It destroyed the faith of the common man in the efficacy of prayer, in the virtue of priestly ministrations, in the benefits of pilgrimages and penances, in the value of piety and the worth of good deeds. A blind, cruel, and irresistible Fate seemed to sweep away good and bad indifferently to a single swift and abominable doom. To the religious man it raised problems which had slumbered since the days when Augustine had sought to solve the mystery of the agony in which the old Roman world was perishing. Was man in any sense the arbiter of his own destiny? Was there such a thing as free will? Was not the whole course of every creature, both in this world and the next, foreknown and foreordained from the beginning? Were not the pretences of the priests to affect the welfare of any body, or the fate of any soul, by means of masses, absolutions, penances, fastings, and the like, palpable absurdities and execrable frauds? These were questions, and this was a temper, that went far deeper into the abysses of doubt than those which merely concerned papal patronage, or ecclesiastical jurisdiction, or the revenues of an alien hierarchy. While the new spirit of national patriotism menaced the temporalities of the Papacy, the revival of the Augustinian conception of the Church as the community of the predestined elect laid an axe to the root of the spiritual claims of the mediæval priesthood, and prepared the ground for the growth of Lollardy and Calvinism. Such were the circumstances in the midst of which Wycliffe grew up. It was an age wherein an old order was visibly breaking up. What part did Wycliffe play in either discerning or determining the lines along which the new order would frame itself?

Into the details of Wycliffe's life it is not necessary to enter here. Many of them still remain obscure,² owing partly to the fact that the reformer had not sufficient personal fascination to make men wish to remember much about him,³ and partly to the fact that the destructive inquisition of the later mediæval clergy went far to obliterate all traces of his abhorred activity. The sixty-odd years of his earthly span can be divided into four periods as follows: (1) his juvenile career, c. 1320-35; (2) his academic career, 1335-74; (3) his political career, 1374-78; and (4) his anti-papal career, 1378-84.

Neither the exact date nor the precise place of his birth can be determined with certainty; but evidence seems to point to the year 1320 and to Spresswell, near Old Richmond, in the North Riding of Yorkshire.⁴ Of his parentage, his home life, and his early education nothing is known; but it is probable that he lived and learned somewhere in the valley of the Tees, until, about 1335, he was enrolled as a member of Balliol College, Oxford. Balliol was the college of the Northerners: it stood for Teutonism as against Latinism; for national independence as against the ultramontane cosmopolitanism of the Respublica Christiana; for the realism of Duns Scotus as against the prevailing nominalism of William of Ockham. Its great rival and antagonist was Merton, the college of the Southerners, the champion of sacerdotium, universalism, and tradition. All Wycliffe's associations were with Balliol; his spirit was the Balliol spirit; his attitude throughout life the Balliol attitude. He rose to be Master of the college in 1361—the first sure date we have in his recorded biography. Much complication has been caused by the fact that the name ‘John Wycliffe’ (spelled variously) has been found in the contemporary registers of both Merton College and Queen's College. The older biographers of Wycliffe tried to fit all the entries into the story of the reformer's life: the result was chaos and hopeless perplexity. The recent researches, however, of Mr Courthope, Dr Reginald Lane Poole, Dr Hastings Rashdall, and others, have made abundantly clear the curious fact that in the middle of the fourteenth century there were no less than three persons of the same name resident simultaneously in the university. One was the reformer; the second was a Fellow of Merton College who for a brief period was Warden of Canterbury Hall and who finally died Prebendary of Chichester and Rector of Horsted Keynes in Sussex in 1383; the third was an obscure almonry boy of Queen's College, known only as a renter of rooms in the college, and as a person who omitted to pay his debts. It is eminently satisfactory and disembarrassing to have got the reformer clear of both the obscurantism of the Merton Wycliffe and the insolvency of his namesake at Queen's. For Wycliffe, as we have already remarked, was essentially a Balliol man. Now to be essentially a Balliol man is to be portentous. The typical Scholar of Balliol is a youth distinguished by ominous brilliance; the typical Fellow of Balliol is a meteor of high magnitude; the typical Master of Balliol—well, Wycliffe was the typical Master of Balliol, luridly luminous, heretically vaporous, the Great Nebula itself in the constellation of Lucifer.

In Oxford, during the forty years of his association with the university, Wycliffe rose to a position of the highest eminence. Even his enemy, Henry de Knyghton, acknowledged that “in philosophy he was reckoned as inferior to none, and as unequalled in the exercises of the schools,” and spoke of him as “a man of profound wit, exceptionally strong and effective in disputations—one who was regarded by the common sort of divines as little less than a god.” One of the severest of his modern critics similarly admits that he was “the leading figure in the academic circles of his day; one of the last of the great schoolmen.”⁵ He was “the Evangelical Doctor,” the teacher who increasingly tended to bring all things to the test of the Gospel, until finally, at the end of a long and painful evolution, he proclaimed the Scriptures as interpreted by human reason to be the supreme standard of verity. He was not an original thinker: he followed Plato in his exaltation of Ideas; Augustine in his conception of the Church; Grossteste (whom he considered a greater man than Aristotle⁶) in his antagonism to the Papacy; Bradwardine in his leaning toward predestination; Ockham in his insistence on priestly poverty; Fitzralph in his theory of dominion. What was original in him was the intellectual fearlessness which pushed premises to their logical conclusion, the rationalism which refused to bow to authority, and the moral courage which defied the terrors of the Inquisition. It is noteworthy that all through the academic period of his career, and indeed to within three years of his death, he carried the university with him. He was regarded by doctors and scholars alike as the champion of the freedom of the studium against the mortifying restraints of the sacerdotium; as the exponent of the claims of philosophy against the ascendancy of theology; as a defender of the rights of the secular clergy against the encroachments of monks and friars; above all, as the invincible maintainer of a lofty realism against the decadent nominalism of the rival University of Paris. This reputation became wide as Christendom itself, and he, more than anyone else, gave to Oxford the intellectual glory of this its Golden Age. It was unfortunate for Oxford that the liberty which she enjoyed in the middle of the fourteenth century should have become associated with deadly heresy on Wycliffe's part, with Lollard schism, with the Peasants' Revolt, and with world-disorder generally. For these things made it possible for Archbishop Courtenay to establish in 1382 an Inquisition which effectively stifled freedom of thought. From that date Oxford ceased to be the national centre of progressive ideas; she became, what she has since remained, “the home of lost causes and impossible beliefs.”

To return to Wycliffe. During the years when he was teaching philosophy at Oxford stirring events were transpiring in the larger world. In particular, the Hundred Years War was running its evil and lamentable course, involving the English nation in ever-widening circles of animosities. Among these animosities the most serious was that which sundered England from the Papacy. The Papacy had been growing in unpopularity throughout England ever since that fatal year, 1213, when Innocent III had extorted from the renegade King John a recognition of the papal suzerainty over his realm. The increasing claims to jurisdiction and the insatiable demands for money which resulted from John's surrender had roused a swelling indignation among the people. The annual tribute of 1000 marks (700 for the kingdom of England, 300 for the lordship of Ireland) which John had agreed to pay to the papal court as a symbol of his submission was frequently withheld after 1272, and in 1333 was wholly suspended. In 1343 Parliament petitioned the King against papal provisions, and in 1351 passed the Statute of Provisors. The year 1353 saw the first Statute of Præmunire, designed to restrict foreign jurisdictions in England; in 1365 this general statute was pointed by another which expressly prohibited the carrying of suits to papal courts. This direct challenge roused Pope Urban V to action: he demanded payment of the tribute, together with arrears due since 1333. A special Parliament was called by Edward III to deal with this demand. It met in May 1366, and after due deliberation rejected the papal claim on the ground that John's surrender, with its attendant promise, was ultra vires and in violation of his coronation oath. Urban V felt it inadvisable to press the matter farther in face of the strenuous national resistance. Not so, however, his successor, Gregory XI, eight years later.⁷

In 1374, when the papal demand for the tribute (with its implication of feudal dependence) was renewed, the position of England was appreciably weaker. On the one hand, the nation was no longer united: a formidable conflict was raging between a clerical party, headed by William of Wykeham, and an anti-clerical party, headed by John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and son of King Edward III. On the other hand, the French were recovering victory in the great war, and were rapidly driving the English out of their land. In these circumstances, the Papacy, with French support, resumed the practice of provisions, ignored the prohibitions of præmunire, and redemanded the Johannine tribute. The once glorious King of England, hero of Crécy and Poictiers, now rapidly sinking into senile incompetence, was eager for tranquillity on almost any terms. Hence in 1374 he sent two missions to Bruges, one, under John of Gaunt, to treat of a truce with the French; the other, under the Bishop of Bangor, to reach an accommodation with the Papacy. With the Bishop of Bangor went John Wycliffe. This event probably marks his first emergence from academic into political life.

Neither of the two missions of 1374 achieved any conspicuous success. We are not now concerned with the humiliating terms which the Duke of Lancaster had to accept from the French king. As to the Bishop of Bangor's business, so little did he press the matter of provisors, and so agreeable did he make himself to the papal representatives, that on his return to England he was at once ‘provided’ by the Pope with a more lucrative bishopric than the one he held! The question of the tribute and its feudal implication was, however, better managed. This, apparently, was Wycliffe's special concern. He had made himself master of both the law and the philosophy inherent in the idea of dominion, and he put up an unanswerable case against the papal overlordship. Behind his logic, moreover, making it doubly effective, was the passionate resolve of the English nation not to admit its political subjection to the court of Avignon—which was regarded as itself subject to the king of France. Wycliffe's arguments against the feudal dominion of the Papacy over England are summarised in a document entitled Determinatio quædam Magistri Johannis Wyclif de Dominio contra unum Monachum—a document to which Dr Loserth conclusively assigns a date subsequent to 1374.⁸ It appears that a certain monk—probably William Wadford, the opponent with whom Wycliffe crossed swords in his De Ecclesia and his De Civili Dominio—had had the temerity to support the papal claim to feudal suzerainty over England, and to contend that, as the Pope had conferred the government of England upon the king on condition of the payment of the annual tribute, and as the tribute had ceased to be paid, the king had forfeited his title to the crown. Wycliffe, as the expert on this problem of dominion, was commissioned to answer the audacious ecclesiastic. He did so in this remarkable Determinatio, wherein he describes himself as peculiaris regis clericus talis qualis—a curious expression which probably means no more than that he had been the King's representative at Bruges in 1374. The Determinatio is constructed in the form of a series of speeches delivered in Parliament by seven lords.⁹ At one time it was thought to be a veracious report—the earliest extant—of a genuine parliamentary debate. It is, however, too good to be true. It is too logical for lords; too consecutive and coherent; too free from tautology and irrelevance. It resembles those admirable eighteenth-century parliamentary reports which Dr Johnson wrote after he had been sound asleep during the whole evening, when (having escaped the distraction of the speeches) he woke up refreshed and full of lusty resolve that the Whig dogs should not have the best of the argument. The Determinatio is Wycliffe pure and undiluted. The seven secular lords are but a ghostly body-guard arrayed before him in the hope of averting from himself the dreadful thunderbolt of papal excommunication. He was not yet a rebel against the Papacy; he had not yet challenged any article of the Catholic faith; he still (in this very document) described himself as humilis et obedientialis filius Romanæ Ecclesiæ.

The arguments advanced against the papal suzerainty were briefly these: first, the kingdom of England had been obtained by conquest and not by papal grant; secondly, feudal relations were mutual, the lord was bound to protect his vassal, and the Pope gave the king of England no such protection; thirdly, so far was he from protecting him that he actually fostered and encouraged his mortal enemies; but fourthly, so vast were the estates of the Church in England that the Pope was rather the subtenant of the king than his suzerain; fifthly, if the Pope pardoned John in 1213 in consideration of his promise to pay 700 marks a year he was guilty of simony; sixthly, 700 marks was an absurdly inadequate sum for a fief so magnificent as the kingdom of England; finally, John had no right or power to pledge his monarchy, or to surrender its independence. This utterance is obviously that of the peculiaris regis clericus rather than of the filius Romanæ Ecclesiæ, and when he followed it up by formal and formidable dissertations De Dominio Divino and De Civili Dominio he could not possibly hope to escape papal censure and episcopal condemnation. No camouflage of secular lords could conceal or protect his irreverent and revolutionary head. From covertly denying the particular papal claim to lordship over England he had gone on to assail the whole system under which religious men exercised temporal power and possessed mundane property. This general attack on ecclesiastical politicians and clerical wealth excited immense interest. It was an assault led, not by an obscure fanatic like John Ball, but by the foremost schoolman of the age. It was couched, not in wild vernacular tirades, but in the ponderous logic of the latest and most approved academic Latin. It commanded attention, and it demanded energetic repulse. Its menace to the hierarchy was all the more formidable because, although Wycliffe's theory of dominion was unintelligible to the multitude, his denunciations of the worldliness and wealth of the clergy were greeted with the warmest approval by the party of John of Gaunt, by the majority of the Parliament, and by the commonalty generally. Hence in 1377 it was necessary for the Church to act, and to act with decisive vigour.

The year 1377—the year of Edward III's death and Richard II's accession—was the culminating point of Wycliffe's career. He was at the height of his powers. He had not as yet broken with the Church or committed himself to either heresy or schism. He was the idol of Oxford University, the hero of London City, the protégé of the Duke of Lancaster, the adviser of the House of Commons, and even the ally of the friars in their advocacy of apostolic poverty. So strong was his position that the first attempt to silence him entirely failed. It was made in February 1377 by the masterful and inquisitorial Courtenay, Bishop of London, who summoned him to appear in the cathedral church of St Paul, in order to answer for his anti-clerical teachings. He duly came, but he brought with him not only friars of the four orders to assist him in his arguments, but also the Duke of Lancaster and the Earl Marshall with a company of armed men to guard him from perils more imminent than failure in debate. The sacred court speedily became a scene of furious wrangling, in which the fiery bishop and the impious duke were the protagonists. It broke up in wild disorder before ever its cause of convocation had been so much as stated. Wycliffe, who seems to have been a passive spectator of the unseemly brawl, was conveyed into safety by his anomalous friends.

The second attack came from the Papacy itself. No doubt it had been inspired by the clerical party in England; but apparently not by either Courtenay of London or Sudbury of Canterbury, for both were roundly rebuked for slackness in dealing with this dangerous rebel. On May 22, 1377, Pope Gregory XI (lately returned to Rome from Avignon) issued no less than five bulls directed against Wycliffe, who was accused of reviving and disseminating the perverse opinions and unlearned doctrine of Marsilio of Padua, damnatæ memoriæ, and his collaborator, John of Jandun. Three of the five bulls were addressed to the prelates of Canterbury and London. They provided them with three different courses of action. According as circumstances suggested, they were authorised and commanded to arrest and imprison Wycliffe; or to get the King to do so; or to cite him to appear at Rome. The situation was evidently a delicate one: the anti-clerical party was strong and vigilant, and the penalties of præmunire were not to be lightly incurred. The fourth of the bulls was addressed to the King: it exhorted him to aid the bishops in their pious task. The fifth was directed to the delinquent University of Oxford: it sternly rebuked the Chancellor and his Fellows for permitting tares to grow amid the pure wheat of their doctrine, and ordered them, on pain of the loss of their privilege, to extirpate the pernicious vegetation, and to hand over the sowers of it to the papal commissioners, viz., the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London.¹⁰

Accompanying the bulls was a list of nineteen articles (reduced in subsequent recensions to eighteen) culled from Wycliffe's works and declared to be damnable. It is notable that all but one of these obnoxious propositions were derived from the treatise De Civili Dominio. It is further remarkable that no questions of Catholic faith were involved in them; they referred exclusively to problems of politics, principles of property and power, relations of Church and State.¹¹ They were not arranged in any logical order; they were not criticised or explained; the grounds of their condemnation were not stated. It must be confessed that, like much of Wycliffe's writing, the meaning of some of them is extremely obscure. This much is clear, however. They exalt the State above the Church; they subject the clergy to the judgment of the laity; they recognise the right and proclaim the duty of secular lords to confiscate ecclesiastical property when it is abused.¹² It will be seen that two tremendous issues were raised by this controversy of 1377—the one by Wycliffe himself, the other by his opponents. On the one hand, Wycliffe called upon the State to reform a Church corrupted by worldly power and temporal possessions. On the other hand, in self-defence, the menaced Church sought to introduce the papal Inquisition into England, with power to arrest, imprison, try, and punish those who thus assailed its prerogatives.

The five bulls and the nineteen articles probably reached Canterbury some time in June 1377; but for six months nothing was done with them. The occasion was not auspicious for their publication. Edward III died on June 21, and a regency was established much less disposed than the old King had been to act as jackal to the Papacy. In October a Parliament was called which declared itself emphatically on Wycliffe's side. It received from Wycliffe a paper in which he stated and defended his position.¹³ It further consulted Wycliffe respecting the lawfulness of withholding treasure from the Pope, and when he replied that—according to natural reason, the command of the Gospel, and the law of conscience—it was lawful, it welcomed and accepted his opinion.¹⁴ Not until this anti-papal Parliament was prorogued did the papal commissioners venture to act. Then, on December 18, 1377, they sent a mandate to the University of Oxford, together with the bull and the articles, ordering the university (1) to inquire into Wycliffe's opinions, and (2) to cite him to appear to answer for his views before the papal commissioners in St Paul's.¹⁵ The university intensely resented this papal and episcopal interference with its liberties, and this attack upon its most illustrious teacher. It held the inquiry, however, and declared its finding to be that what Wycliffe said was true, though not very happily expressed: his nineteen propositions are pronounced veras esse sed male sonare in auribus auditorum! With this qualified benediction Wycliffe was sent by the university to appear before the papal commission at St Paul's.

For some reason or other, however, the commission did not sit at St Paul's. It sat at Lambeth; probably because the attitude of London was disquieting. Both populace and government were in fact alive to the menace of the papal Inquisition. An anonymous tract in the English language, usually attributed to Wycliffe himself, had been widely circulated in the city, calling upon all good Christians to rally in defence of the conclusions of Wycliffe and the independence of the English Church. The appeal was effective. No sooner was the court set (early in 1378) than it was surrounded, filled, and overawed by a howling multitude which had poured over London Bridge and made its way tumultuously through the Borough into the Liberties of the Archbishop. Not only was the timid Sudbury terrified into ineptitude, but even the haughty and domineering Courtenay was too much scared to act. Their discomfiture was completed when a messenger arrived from the mother of the young King, prohibiting the court from pronouncing any sentence upon Wycliffe. Hence, as Walsingham indignantly tells us, the words of the two would-be inquisitors were “softer than oil, to the public loss of their own dignity, and to the damage of the Universal Church.” Wycliffe was merely ordered to refrain from preaching and lecturing on the subjects embodied in the nineteen propositions before the court. Then he was allowed to go forth a free man.

The rebuff to the Papacy and its agents was a severe one. Wycliffe had been merely irritated and alienated, not in the least injured, by the feeble performances of the five bulls and of the two commissioners in charge of them. The measure of Wycliffe's immunity was no doubt also the measure of the exasperation of the baffled Sudbury and Courtenay. What next they intended to do remains in doubt; for on March 27, 1378, Pope Gregory XI died, and their commission lapsed. Wycliffe thus secured a further term of impunity. The death of Pope Gregory XI, moreover, had another important effect upon his career. It gave rise to the awful schism of the Papacy which for the next thirty-nine years (1378-1417) rent in suicidal civil war an already distracted Christendom. Before the end of 1378 there were two rival Popes, Urban VI at Rome, and Clement VII gravitating toward Avignon, engaged not in tending the sheep of the Church, but in tearing one another, anathematising one another, and calling one another ‘Anti-Christ’—which was the fourteenth-century equivalent to ‘Bolshevik.’ Hitherto Wycliffe had been, at any rate in profession, humilis et obedientialis filius Romanæ Ecclesiæ. In 1378 he ceased to be such. He repudiated the Papacy, and applied to both the Popes the epithets which they were applying to one another. They became, in his increasingly lurid language, “monsters,” “limbs of Lucifer,” “vicars of the fiend,” “men glowing with Satanic pride,” “sinful idiots,” “horrible idols.” Their trains of conflicting cardinals were described by him as “incarnate devils” and “hinges of Satan's house.”

The remaining six years of Wycliffe's life were a headlong rush, with gathering velocity, down the steep place of heresy into a sea of a protestantism much more profound than ever Luther's became. No sixteenth-century reformer, indeed, ever divested himself so completely of the whole mediæval system as did Wycliffe during this brief delirious span. Into the details of Wycliffe's career as a religious revolutionary we are not here called upon, or indeed permitted, to enter. Suffice it to say that this closing period of his life (1378-84) was one of almost incredible activity and productivity. He poured forth pamphlets in the vernacular; he composed massive theological treatises in Latin; he organised a translation of the Bible; he trained a band of itinerant agitators. He ultimately laid his axe to the root of the whole sacerdotal overgrowth when he denied and denounced the doctrine of transubstantiation—a doctrine (comparatively recent in its formulation) which he attributed to the direct inspiration of the devil, after he had been let loose to deceive men at the close of the first Christian millennium.

This closing period of Wycliffe's career added very little that is new to his social and political teaching. He was absorbed in theological controversies and ecclesiastical conflicts. His Trialogus (1382), which contains incomparably the best exposition of his ultimate religious negations, is almost silent on the doctrine of dominion and its implications, which had played so large a part in the utterances of the years when he was peculiaris regis clericus. Another cause, besides theological preoccupation, moreover, may have tended to keep him quiet respecting dominion. The Peasants' Revolt had broken out in 1381, and the sanguinary communism of the revolutionary boors was by many attributed to the pernicious working of the Lollard leaven, which seemed to increase in virulence as it passed from Latin into English, and from the lecture-rooms of Oxford into the hovels of the villanage.¹⁶ Now Wycliffe, like Luther after him, was a strong believer in order and in firm authoritarian government. He did not admit that his doctrine of dominion had properly any such application as John Ball and the raging peasants gave to it. But he recognised that it was difficult to safeguard it from misapprehension and abuse; hence he ceased to press it or proclaim it. Nevertheless he could not escape the odium which the subversive tenets and violent deeds of the rebels brought upon him, and this, when added to the odium generated by his deadly heresy, soon alienated from him all his early supporters and friends. John of Gaunt, the young King and his mother, the Council of Regency, the Parliament, all felt it impossible to continue to countenance a man whose teachings tended toward revolution in this world and perdition in the next. The friars turned against him with transubstantial fury. The University of Oxford, which protected him as long as it dared, and followed him as far as it could, was at length forced to stop, as it contemplated with horror the abysses of rationalism into which he was descending. Even of his own Poor Priests—the Lollard preachers of the new revolt—the more cultured leaders fell away and made their peace with the Church. He was left at the end of his life a very lonely man, in the midst of alienated friends and ravening foes.

How did he escape destruction? It is not easy to say. Some of his biographers—for example, Foxe, the martyrologist, and Burrows, his quincentenary eulogist—evidently regret that he was not called upon to make an edifying termination at the stake. His story thus concluded would have pointed a more effective moral of the sort which they desired. The fact, however, remains that, stricken down by paralysis in his church at Lutterworth, he died a natural death on the last day of the year 1384. But, though he was spared the fiery trial by martyrdom, his followers were not. In 1382, amid the alarm caused by the Peasants' Revolt and the horror generated by the Lollard attack upon the sanctities of the Mass, Courtenay—now Archbishop in the place of Sudbury, murdered by the peasants—was able to retrieve his discomfiture of 1378. Describing himself as per totam nostram provinciam Cantaburiensis Inquisitor hæreticæ pravitatis, he summoned a synod to the Blackfriars in London. As the result of eight sessions (May 17 to July 12, 1382) he secured the condemnation of twenty-four of Wycliffe's conclusions—ten as heretical, fourteen as erroneous. Further, on May 26, 1382, he obtained from the King and the Lords an ordinance ordering the sheriffs throughout England to arrest, imprison, and hand over to the bishops, any persons whom they might accuse of heresy. Here, indeed, was the Inquisition in full force. Fortunately for the liberties of the country, the Commons, who had not been consulted, took alarm, and when Parliament met in October they compelled the withdrawal of the obnoxious ordinance, saying in notable words: “It is not the intention of the Commons to be tried for heresy, nor to bind over themselves or their descendants to the prelates, more than their ancestors had been in time past.” It is an interesting example of the instinctive English appeal to precedent (invented, if necessary, for the occasion). By a succession of such appeals, as has been remarked by Tennyson and others, English freedom has broadened down. In this instance, Courtenay, checked in his hope of commanding secular aid in his hunt for heresy, had to content himself with a royal writ authorising the bishops themselves to arrest heretics if they could catch them. But this was a far inferior concession; for the bishops lacked the secular paraphernalia of the chase. All the same, he was able to exercise a pressure which before his death in 1396 laid Lollardy very low.

The accusations brought against the Lollards, however, were exclusively theological in character. Hence they lie outside our present sphere. All that now remains for us to do is first to attempt a summary of Wycliffe's social and political ideas, and secondly to form an estimate of his character and achievement.

It has been remarked that all Wycliffe's significant activities lay within the last ten years of his life. If he had died in 1374 his name would have passed into complete oblivion; even if he had lived but till 1378, with his works on dominion composed, he would have been recollected dimly and uncertainly, merely as a second and inferior Marsilio, damnatæ memoriæ. It was the enormous and feverish output of the years 1378-84 which made him an everlasting portent and a purging power. Not often does it happen that a man radically changes his profession, materially alters his mode of life, or effectively shakes the world out of its old form, when he is sixty years of age!

The political and social ideas of Wycliffe, therefore, formulated as they were for the most part during the penultimate period of his career, are not among those thoughts of his which have had the greatest influence upon mankind. They are in the main academic in character; they are expressed in highly technical scholastic Latin; they are obscure both in substance and in accidents. Nevertheless, one of them, viz., the doctrine of dominion, which was at the basis of them all, is recognised as an important and curious contribution to sociological theory. The only trouble is that no one can quite understand what the doctrine is, or on what principle Wycliffe applied it.¹⁷ It was not, however, a doctrine original to Wycliffe. He had learned it from Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh, who had developed it in his conflicts with the friars; while Fitzralph himself claimed for his views the venerable authority of St Bernard, St Augustine, and the Gospels. Only gradually, moreover, did Wycliffe unfold the doctrine of dominion. He was an ecclesiastical politician before he was a political philosopher. He arrived at theory by way of practice. His early utterances, therefore, are clearer than his later. Hence to understand him it is best to watch his ideas as they grew in the hothouse of circumstances and in the forcing-ground of political controversy.

First and foremost, then, he was a nationalist. Brought up during the Hundred Years War, and at a time when the Papacy appeared to be merely a French institution, he seems to have had no conception of Christendom as a whole, or of a Universal Church; still less of a united Humanity. His ideal was a national State with a national Church subordinate to it. He spoke of endowments as given non cuicunque ecclesiæ sed singulariter ecclesiæ Anglicanæ. He ended by urging that the English Church should reassert its independence of Rome and should live more Græcorum sub propriis legibus. It was his nationalism and his exclusively insular patriotism which commended him to the court of Edward III, and caused him to be sent as the English champion to the Conference of Bruges.

Closely allied to his nationalism was his ‘étatism.’ In the exaltation of the State and the ascription to it of sovereignty his writings anticipated The Prince of Machiavelli, the Republic of Bodin, the Von Weltlicher Oberkeit of Luther, and The Leviathan of Hobbes.¹⁸ He based the duty of obedience to the civil authorities, not on his abstract theory of dominion—this he reserved exclusively for ecclesiastical purposes—but on the clear commands of Scripture and on the unequivocal examples of Christ and the Apostles. He agreed with Augustine and the Fathers generally that the fall of man necessitated and caused the institution of the State.¹⁹ He regarded it as part of the divine scheme to bring man back to righteousness. So emphatic appeared to him to be the inspired injunction to obey “the powers that be” on the ground that they were “ordained of God,” that he held it to be obligatory on Christian men to reverence the authority of even wicked tyrants, even as St Paul reverenced the authority of Nero. Nay, he went so far as to say, in words which scandalised the elect, that in certain circumstances Deus debet obedire diabolo. As to the form of government: in a better state of affairs a theocracy such as that depicted in the Book of Judges would be the ideal; but in the actual sinfulness of the world a strong monarchy was essential.²⁰

Appendant to his ‘étatism’ was his Erastianism. He was Erastian both in the exact and in the popular sense of the term. In the exact sense he was Erastian in that he held that persuasion and not force was the proper method of the Church. In the popular sense, also, he was Erastian in that he held that the State was omnicompetent, having authority in all causes whether temporal or spiritual. This latter view—which Professor Maitland rightly calls Byzantine rather than Erastian—was expressly set forth in his De Officio Regis (1379). It portrays and advocates a relation of Church and State essentially identical with that later established by Henry VIII: it displays the king as supreme over ecclesiastical persons, ecclesiastical property, ecclesiastical courts. It exalts the State as against the Church, even going so far as to say that the State represents the divinity of Christ, while the Church represents but His humanity. The king is God's vicar in the government of his people, and bishops derive whatever authority they may have through him and him alone. This is more than even Hooker urged.²¹

From this extreme utterance it will be further evident that Wycliffe was not merely an Erastian but also an anti-sacerdotalist. His mind, for all its mediæval trappings, was essentially the lay mind. It instinctively revolted against all the pretensions of priestly authority. It was the Renaissance mind not yet disentangled from the meshes of scholasticism. It came to the conclusion that the root of all sacerdotal superstition lay in the illusion that a person upon whom episcopal hands had been placed was anything which a layman was not; or could do anything which a layman could not do. This conclusion led inevitably to the repudiation of the whole sacramental system, and particularly to the denial of transubstantiation—that daily miracle of the Mass, the performance of which raised the lowest priest above the highest king.

Wycliffe's anti-sacerdotalism was only another aspect of his intense individualism. Wholly abandoning the common mediæval conception of the Church as an ark manned by a clerical crew busily engaged in rescuing a perishing humanity from a devil-infested flood, he reverted to the Augustinian idea of the Church as the communion of the elect, known only to God, and bound each one of them immediately to his Maker by the personal tie of grace. This indeed was the vital principle which underlay the obscure verbiage of the doctrine of dominion. Every man who rightfully exercised any authority or possessed any property held it directly, without any intervening lords, from the supreme Dominus Capitalis, the Creator of the Universe, to whom alone properly belonged all might, majesty, dominion, and power.

Wycliffe's individualism—perhaps his most remarkable characteristic in that age of old-established collectivism—was intimately associated with a passion for righteousness. The theory of dominion was not only a theory of personal relation; it was also a theory of moral responsibility. The condition under which every creature held property and power from God was obedience to His holy will. Hence mortal sin entailed entire forfeiture. Peccans mortaliter non habet dominium was one of his striking sayings; and, again, he contended quod nullus existens in peccato mortali est dominus, sacerdos, vel episcopus, and even quod si papa sit præscitus et malus homo ac per consequens membrum diaboli, non habet potestatem supra fideles Christi ab aliquo sibi datam, nisi [shades of Innocent IV and Boniface VIII!] forte a Cæsare. Here again was another blow at the sacerdotal system. For who could tell where and how often by mortal sin the chain of sacramental efficacy had been broken? The truth seems to be that nothing scandalised Wycliffe's righteous soul more in that sinful age than the dissociation of religion from ethics, and the spectacle of corrupt priests (whose every act proclaimed their devotion to the world, the flesh, and the devil) maintaining that the validity of their official performances was not affected by their unofficial depravities. “By life been preestes known,” he contended.

This brings us to another prominent article of Wycliffe's creed, viz., his strong and reiterated insistence on the duty of the clergy to withdraw themselves from secular concerns and to surrender their mundane possessions. They were to give themselves to good works and sound teaching, and to live by the charity of their flocks. He dated the decadence of the Church from the day of the Donation of Constantine, when the devil “bi Silvestre preest of Rome brought in a new gile and moved the Emperour of Rome to endowe the Churche in this preest.” He contended again and again that the spheres of clergy and laity are distinct and separate. The functions of the clergy are purely spiritual; to them not dominium but ministerium is assigned as a duty; they should abjure earthly lordship and devote themselves to the service of their flocks. So urgent did Wycliffe regard the divestment of the spirituality of their terrestrial endowments that he called loudly upon the secular lords, to whom mundane property and power had been committed as an inalienable trust, to strip the clergy of their entangling wealth, if they would not strip themselves thereof. The secular lords, headed by John of Gaunt, indicated their readiness to render this little service to their religious brethren.²²

This sketch of Wycliffe is already too long. But it must not be brought to a close without some brief attempt to estimate the character and influence of the reformer. Much traversing of the dull and dreary wastes of Wycliffe's writing has brought me to the suspicion—I might even say the conviction—that Wycliffe was not a religious man at all. This, I submit, is also the opinion of the Christian world—the Catholic section of it explicitly; the Protestant section tacitly. For though ‘Wycliffe Halls’ may be founded for the training of Protestant clergy, no one dreams of studying Wycliffe's works therein; though ‘Wycliffe Preachers’ may be instituted to combat the teachings of Rome, no one of these preachers ever thinks of quoting a word that Wycliffe said; though ‘Wycliffe Societies’ may be founded to put the multitude of his manuscripts into print, no single tract is ever considered edifying enough for general circulation. In fact, two separate ‘Wycliffe Societies’ (1844 and 1884) have already languished in the effort to get people to read, or even to buy, the soulless stuff he wrote. Much of it, after five centuries, is still unprinted, and (probably to no one's loss) likely to remain so.

Wycliffe, it is true, dealt largely with religious topics, and quoted Scripture freely to his purpose. But that does not compel us to call him religious. He was an academic theologian, a scholastic philosopher, a thinker whose interest in his theme was purely moral and intellectual. He seems to have had no religious experience; no sense of sin; no consciousness of conversion; no assurance of salvation; no heart of love; no evident communion with God. He made no emotional appeal; he roused no spiritual response in the souls of those to whom his dry syllogisms were addressed. He was, indeed, a rationalist, born before his due season.²³ His affinities were with the eighteenth century, and in the eighteenth century not with John Wesley but with David Hume. If he had lived in the nineteenth century he would have been the head, not of the Evangelical Alliance, but of the Rationalist Press. His definition of revelation would have satisfied the French Encyclopædists: revelation to him was merely a higher power of reason—lumen supernaturale est forma perfectiva luminis naturalis.²⁴

The motive force behind the enormous activities of his closing decade was antagonism to Rome. He was anti-papal, anti-clerical, anti-monastic, anti-sacramental, all but anti-Christian. He was merely negative and destructive. His Bible was but a weapon of offence; his pamphlets were violent polemics; his Poor Priests were not evangelists but revolutionary agitators. The hungry sheep whom temporarily he drew from their old pastures looked up to him and were not fed; and most of such as did not perish in their disillusionment made their way back to the fold where at any rate some scanty nutriment could begained. Wycliffe belonged to the Renaissance rather than to the Reformation. Not, of course, to the Renaissance of Southern Europe with its art, its poetry, its music, its soft and tender humanities; but to the Renaissance of Northern Europe with its passion for truth, its instinct for science, its anarchic freedom, its stern zeal for righteousness.

He was a dour fighter, and he had to contend against foes of limitless malignity and power. To stand, as he did at the end of his life, almost solitary yet entirely undismayed, in the midst of enemies so many, so merciless, and so mighty, argues a courage little less than sublime. That he failed to appreciate the good qualities of his opponents was in the circumstances natural. It no doubt is difficult rightly to estimate the virtues of people who are plotting your destruction in this world and predicting your perdition in the next. Nevertheless it is regrettable that he should have called the clergy “fiends of hell,” without recognising the greatness of the work which they had accomplished in civilising mediæval Europe; and that he should have denounced the monks as “gluttonous idolaters” without taking into account all that the monasteries had stood for through long centuries of rapine and war. Above all, it is regrettable that in his far-sighted anticipations of the remote future, with its national states, its Erastian churches, its autocratic monarchs, and its civil clergy, his very modern mind should have had so small a conception of the grandeur of those mediæval ideals of the Christian Commonwealth and the Church Universal which had filled the vision and inspired the pens of thinkers such as St Thomas Aquinas and dreamers such as Dante.

Notes

1. “At Salisbury in 1326 the dean, the precentor, the treasurer, two archdeacons, and twenty-three prebendaries, were papal nominees” (Capes, English Church, p. 86). Fifty years later “The income of the French clergy alone accruing from English livings was estimated at £60,000 a year” (Lechler, John Wycliffe, p. 168). Absentee French cardinals held the deaneries of York, Carlisle, and Lincoln; the archdeaconries of Canterbury, Durham, Suffolk, and York; besides many prebends and other benefices (Lewis, John Wicliffe, p. 34).

2. It is reported that at a recent examination the only thing about which one of the candidates was quite certain was that Wycliffe was “the editor of the Morning Star”!

3. We have no record of any friendships of his. Among his numerous writings not a single letter is to be found.

4. See discussion in Lechler's John Wycliffe, pp. 79-84.

5. W. W. Capes, The English Church in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, p. 110.

6. “Plato, Augustinus, Lincolniensis, sunt longe clariores philosophi.”

7. See the continuation of Eulogium Historiarum, iii, 337.

8. Loserth, in English Historical Review, April 1896. The document itself is printed, not very correctly however, by Lewis in his John Wicliffe (1720), pp. 363-371. Emendations in the text are made by F. D. Matthew, English Works of Wyclif (1880), p. v. Summaries of the arguments will be found in R. Vaughan's Tracts and Treatises of John de Wycliffe (1845), pp. xix-xxiv, and in G. Lechler's John Wycliffe (1884), pp. 124-130.

9. “Primo ergo transmitto doctorem meum reverendum ad solutionem hujus argumenti quam audivi in quodam consilio a dominis secularibus esse datam.”

10. The text of the bulls is to be found in Walsingham, Hist. Ang., i, 345 et seq.; also in the St Albans Chronicon Angliæ, p. 174 et seq.; and again in the appendix to Lewis's Wicliffe, pp. 254-264. Summaries of their contents are given in Lechler's Wycliffe, pp. 162-165, and in Sergeant's Wyclif, pp. 175-177.

11. For the text of the articles see Walsingham, Hist. Ang., i, 353, or Lewis, Wicliffe, pp. 266-267. Compare also Shirley, Fasciculi Zizaniorum, p. 484. Lewis translates the articles with comments, pp. 42-46; and he further gives, from Walsingham, a paper purporting to set forth Wycliffe's own explanation of their meaning, pp. 54-63. Summaries are provided by Lechler, pp. 165-167, and by Sergeant, pp. 177-179.

12. Perhaps the three most offensive articles were No. 6, “Domini temporales possunt legitime ac meritorie auferre bona fortunæ ab ecclesia delinquente”; No. 17, “Licet regibus auferre temporalia a viris ecclesiasticis ipsis abutientibus habitualiter”; and No. 19, “Ecclesiasticus imo et Romanus Pontifex potest legitime a subditis et laicis corripi, et etiam accusari.”

13. Libellus Magistri Johannis Wycclyff quem porrexit Parliamento regis Ricardi contra statum Ecclesiæ. See Shirley's edition of Fasciculi Zizaniorum, pp. 245-257.

14. Responsio Magistri Johannis Wyccliff ad dubium infrascriptum quæsitum ab eo per Dominum Regem Angliæ Ricardum secundum et Magnum suum Consilium, anno regni sui primo. See Shirley, op. cit., pp. 258-271.

15. For the mandate see Spelman, Concilia, i, 625, or Wilkins, Concilia, iii, 123, or Lewis's Wicliffe, p. 264. It will be noted that the course pursued was not any one of the three indicated in the bulls.

16. There is, as a matter of fact, no communism in Wycliffe's works. Those who have supposed that there is have merely—by giving a material meaning where Wycliffe intended a spiritual one—misinterpreted such passages as “Fidelis hominis totus mundus divitiarum est, infidelis autem nec obolus.” In Wycliffe's view every Christian man ideally possesses everything. This is not communism. It is merely individualism gone mad.

17. The best discussions of Wycliffe's doctrine of dominion are to be found in the following works: R. L. Poole, Illustrations of the History of Mediæval Thought; W. W. Shirley, introduction to Fasciculi Zizaniorum; R. L. Poole, preface to Wycliffe's De Dominio Divino; R. L. Poole, Wycliffe and Movements for Reform; W. A. Dunning, History of Political Theories; G. V. Lechler, John Wycliffe and his English Precursors.

18. Note particularly De Civili Dominio, Book I, ch. xxviii, and the tract De Dominis et Servis.

19. “Dominium civile est dominium occasione peccati humanitus institutum” (De Civ. Dom., Book I, ch. xviii).

20. See De Civili Dominio, Book I, ch. xxvi and xxvii.

21. The following is a significant passage from the De Officio Regis (ch. vi): “Episcopi, sui officiales et curati sui, tenentur in qualicunque tali causa spiritualiter cognoscere auctoritate regis; ergo rex per illos. Sunt enim tales legii homines regis.”

22. Two notable tracts on this topic are printed by F. D. Matthew in his English Works of Wycliffe, pp. 359-402 and pp. 405-457.

23. To Wycliffe, though in a non-Hegelian sense, the real was the rational, and the rational the real.

24. De Dominio Divino, Book I, ch. xi.

Bibliography

A. Primary Sources

Wycliffe. De Dominio Divino. Ed. Poole, 1890.

———. De Civili Dominio. Ed. Poole and Loserth, 1885–1905.

———. De Ecclesia. Ed. Loserth, 1886.

———. De Officio Regis. Ed. Pollard and Sayle, 1887.

———. English Works. Ed. Matthew, 1880.

Fasciculi Zizaniorum. Ed. Shirley, 1858.

Concilia Magnæ Britanniæ. Ed. Wilkins, 1736.

B. Secondary Works

Bigg, C.: Wayside Sketches. 1906.

Brown, E. (editor): Fasciculus Rerum Expetendarum Fugiendarum. 1690.

Buddensieg, R.: Johann Wiclif und seine Zeit. 1885.

Capes, W. W.: The English Church in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. 1900.

Creighton, M.: History of the Papacy, vol. i. 2nd edition, 1897.

———.: Historical Essays and Reviews. Ed. L. Creighton, 1902.

Dunning, W. A.: A History of Political Theories, Ancient and Medieval. 1910.

Figgis, J. N.: “John Wyclif” in Typical English Churchmen, Second Series, 1909.

Lechler, G. V. (translated by P. Lorimer): John Wycliffe and His English Precursors, 1878.

Lewis, J.: Life of Wicliffe. 1720.

Loserth, J.: Article “Wiclif” in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie.

Lyte, H. C. M.: History of the University of Oxford, 1886.

Poole, R. L.: Illustrations of the History of Mediæval Thought and Learning. 2nd edition, 1920.

———.: Wycliffe and the Movements for Reform. 1888.

———.: Article “Wyclif” in the Encyclopedia Britannica. 1911.

Rashdall, H.: The Universities of the Middle Ages. 1895.

———.: Article “John Wycliffe” in Dictionary of National Biography. 1900.

Sergeant, L.: John Wyclif. 1893.

Trevelyan, G. M.: England in the Age of Wycliffe. 1899.

Vaughan, R.: Life and Opinions of Wycliffe. 1828.

Workman, H. B.: The Dawn of the Reformation, vol. i. 1901.