CHAPTER XX

LOLLARDY AND PECOCK AND GASCOIGNE

It may have been, as Milton says, that Wyclif's preaching "was to his countrymen but a short blaze, soon damped and stifled." Yet we shall find his true succession not merely in such lights of the subsequent reformation as Latimer and Hooper, but in the English people themselves, as in the stirrings of the Puritan movement, with its hatred of prelacy and "Judaizing" ceremonial and its insistence upon Scripture as the sum and limit of religious truth. Of a surety these tendencies had lived on after Wyclif's death, "damped to be sure, but hardly "stifled."

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His followers were soon called Lollards, a name of unknown origin. It is hard to see in them more than faintly glowing embers,— or their time was not yet come. Far and wide the realm was dominantly, but not violently, orthodox. Innovations in belief were not favored. Men and women were accustomed to being "assoiled " by priests and Friars, and needed just such solemn tinsel of assurance, especially when they came to die. Indulgences, relics, pilgrimages were popular. People are not readily disturbed in beliefs and practices which are well suited to their unenlightenment. As for the Mass, it was the central authoritative saving miracle; attack upon it or any paring down of its efficiency roused anger. Here and there men perceived the dupery by which Friars and Pardoners filled their pouches. But there was little. indignation. Few are so keen-minded as to be angered. by what is monstrous only to the mind. For wide-spread wrath, men's passions must be roused; their money must be taken in ways and for persons they dislike. Some general hatred of the popes or the priests and the prelates of the land was roused by tithes and other exactions, or

hungry eyes were cast on the fat abbey lands. Thus it had been with the tumultuous mob ranging with John Ball and Wat Tyler.

Again, the English people did not like to persecute or be persecuted. They were not cruel or intolerant in that way, nor as yet stiffnecked. In 1382, relying on an ordinance passed by the king and lords, Richard sent writs to the Bishops commanding them to arrest all Lollards. The Commons objected vigorously, till they compelled the recall of the ordinance in which they had not concurred. "Let it now be annulled, for it was 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." 1 Only after some years could the Commons be brought to take steps against the Lollard heresy, by passing the statute De Haeretico Comburendo in 1401.

Nor on their side, did the Lollards wish to be burnt for their convictions. They evaded persecution as they might, or usually recanted when caught in its grip. Conflicts were neither stubborn nor embittered, in comparison with religious wars or persecutions elsewhere. It may be that their dissenting opinions were not clear enough to die for. In fine there was little zeal either to inflict or endure martyrdom. Lollardy never spread so far in England as to invite foreign Catholic intervention. The trouble mercifully remained a family affair, and the horrible embroiling factors of national or racial hate did not burst in and make the hell of England which the invasion of northern Catholics had made of Provence in the Albigensian Crusade, or which rancor between Czechs and Germans was to make of Bohemia in the generation following Wyclif's death.

As for the substance of Lollardy, that consisted of Wyclif's teachings. But it was a Wyclifism always tend

1 Rolls of Parliament, iii, 141, cited by Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliff, p. 311.

2 See The Lollard Conclusions of about the year 1394 printed in Fasciculi Zizaniorum (Master of Rolls Series) ed. by Shirley, and in Gee and Hardy, Documents illustrative of English Church History (1914), pp. 126–

ing to disintegrate, become desultory and unreasonable. It clung to Scripture rather crudely understood; it protested against images and ceremonies; it detested popery and prelacy, and in a general way conformity. This "lay party lacked organization; its adherents lacked education and intelligence, and that enormous experience and knowledge of human nature which rounded out the Roman Catholic Church, and gave it stability even in its abuses. If Lollardy was some sort of evangelical purification of Catholic Christianity, it also afforded proof, if such was needed, that society cannot be conducted on principles which lack the wisdom of the world.

Undoubtedly as the fourteenth century passed into the fifteenth, a large number of men were known as Lollards, among whom the more intelligent held themselves Wy clif's followers. They were chiefly laity of the common sort, with here and there a priest strayed from his pasturage, or a layman of position. Such was Sir John Oldcastle, who doughtily refused to admit his errors, and with his armed friends and followers made some sort of blind assault upon authority in the reign of Henry V. He was at last executed in 1417,3 and a number of his adherents. This did much to finish Lollardy as a tangible movement, religious, social or political. Its doctrines were loosely maintained in the so-called "lay party," a term, which aptly designated a tendency among plain Englishmen to distrust priests and prelates, and think them not entitled to their emoluments when they failed egregiously in their duties; or a tendency to rely on the direct reading of Scripture and to regard excessive worship of images as idolatry.

The reading of Scripture by the laity in their own tongue, and the circulation of translations made by Wyclif, are uncertain and thorny topics. The English reading public was extremely limited, and French quite as much as English was the language of the Court and high nobility, though doubtless not of country squires. Gower wrote as lengthily in French and Latin as in English, and his English works, as well as those of Geoffrey Chaucer, 3 On Oldcastle see Gairdner, Lollardy, etc., I, pp. 72 sqq.

were not made public before Wyclif's death. Nevertheless there is some evidence of English versions of parts of Scripture possibly preceding those which probably Wyclif made and had his " poor priests use when preaching. But it is improbable that his translations extended beyond the Gospels. As for the ecclesiastical attitude, the proof is somewhat lame that the Catholic Church opposed the reading of Scripture by the laity, under proper supervision; but the Church authorities forbade as they were able the putting of unlicensed versions into the hands of ignorant persons who might be misled and mislead others. And of necessity the Church set its face against the right of the individual to interpret Scripture after his own mind, and stand by it against authority.1

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There was more learning, and occasionally a broadermindedness, among the opponents of Lollardy. One of these was Thomas Netter or Walden as he is usually called after his native town in Essex, a Carmelite and confessor to Henry V. A zealous opponent of the Wycliffites or Lollards, he has given a convenient synopsis of their teachings in his chief work against them. An opponent of the "lay party," far more interesting intellectually, was Bishop Pecock, whose character was as supple as his mind. He opposed Lollardy and defended the Church in its practices, even in its abuses, possibly with ill-judged officiousness, and certainly with dangerous arguments, which in the end brought this curious person within scorching distance of the stake. His career has its ludicrous elements.

The year and place of birth of Reginald Pecock, sometime Lord Bishop of Chichester, are unknown. He was undoubtedly a Welshman. His boyhood is alleged to have been studious. Election to a fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1417 is the first definitely known point of his career. In due time he passed from acolyte and deacon to priest. At the same time pursuing his studies

4 The matter is briefly discussed by Gairdner, Lollardy, &c. I, p. 100 sqq. Gasquet, Pre-Reformation English Bible (1895) argues that the extant versions known as Wycliffite are authorized Catholic translations. The subject is obscure and lends itself to temperamental argument.

5 See Gairdner, Lollardy, &c. I, p. 86 sqq.

sacred and profane with ardor and success, he was made Bachelor of Divinity. Afterwards summoned to court, he became useful to princes and received the first of various sleek preferments from the "good," but none too good, Duke Humphrey Plantagenet, Protector of the kingdom. Pecock now wrote many books, which refuted the errors of the Lollards, and were pleasing to those whom it was well to please. His fortunes blossomed cheerily, and he was made bishop of St. Asaph in 1444, through the Protector's influence. Two or three years later he defended somewhat over zealously or over speciously the order of bishops, to which he was pleased to belong. Not only Wyclif and the Lollards, but earnest priests of unblemished standing held that the decline of preaching was owing to the example and indeed to the precepts of the bishops led by his Grace of Canterbury. Save with themselves, the bishops were not popular. Pecock pleaded for them in a famous sermon, maintaining that their loftier duties freed them from the burden of preaching, and likewise from the obligation of residence, since Court or Parliament might need their talents. He vindicated also the papal right of provisional preferment to benefices not yet vacant. In fine he upheld what serious men regarded as the manifest abuses of the hierarchy. So pleased was he with his own discourse that he wrote it out in the form of conclusions, and sent them to his friends, deeming that they would be held true by all men learned in divinity and the Canon Law. The result proved otherwise, when denunciation rather than acclaim broke forth from both the learned and the ignorant. Attempts were made to censure him, but the episcopal authorities showed themselves lenient to his errors, even though soon afterwards it came to him to speak slightingly of the authority of the great Church Fathers.

Pecock himself was not a lazy bishop, but a preacher as well as writer. He seems to have believed in the positions taken in his argument, which in fact accorded with the practices of his order. So he continued writing, producing many tracts. His prejudices and circumstances led on to the composition of his most interesting work,