L0LL4BD8
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LOLLABBS
determined effort was made to purge the university.
Chdord, jealous as ever of its privileges, resisted, but
ultimately the leading WycliflStes, Hereford, Reping-
don, and Ashton, had to appear before the archbishop.
The two latter made full abjurations, but their subse-
quent careers were very different. Repingdon be-
came in course of time Abbot of Leicester, Bishop of
Lincoln, and a cardinal, while Ashton returned to his
heretical ways and to the preaching of Lollardy.
Nicholas Hereford must have been a man of an un-
common spirit, for at Oxford he had been much more
extreme than Wyclif , justifying apparently even the
murder of Archbishop Sudbury by the rebels, yet he
went off to Rome to appeal to the pope against Cour-
tenay, was there imprisoned, found himself at liberty
again owing to a popular rising, returned to England
and preached Lollardy in the West, but finally ab-
t'urea and died a Carthusian. Though the Wycliffite lold upon Oxford was broken by these measures, the energy of the Lollard preachers, the extraordinary lit- erary activity of Wyclif himself in his last years, and the disturbed conditions of the time, all led to a great extension of the movement. Its chief centres were London, Oxford, Leicester, and Coventry, and in the Dioceses of Hereford and Worcester.
Lollard Doctrines. — In the fourteenth century the word "Lollard" was used in a very extended sense. Anti-clerical knights of the shire w^ho wished to dis- endow the Church, riotous teijants of an unpopular abbey, parishioners who refused to pay their tithes, would often be called Lollards as well as fanatics like Swynderby, the ex-hermit of Leicester, apocalyptic visionaries like the Welshman, Walter Brute, and what we may call the normal Wycliffite who denied the au- thority of the Church and attacked the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist. Never was Lollardy so wide- spread as in its early days; the Leicester chronicles wrote that every second man was a Lollard. But this very extension of the name makes it difficult to give a precise account of the doctrines connected with it, even in their more extreme form. Probably the best summary of Lollardy, at least in its earlier stages, is to be found in the twelve "Conclusions" which were pre- sented to Parhainent and affixed to the doors of W est- minster Abbey and St. Paul's in 1395 (see for a Latin form "FasciculusZizaniorum", pp. 360-8: the original English form is analyzed in Dr. uairdner's "Lollardy and the Reformation," I, pp. 43-6; see also H. Cronin, "The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards" in "Eng. Hist. Review", 1907, 292-304). They complain of the corruptions by appropriations etc. from Rome, "a step-mother"; they attack the celibacy of the clergy ana the religious orders, the "feigned miracle of the sacrament", the "feigned power of absolution", and "feigned indulgences; they call the sacramentals jug- glery, and declare that pilgrimages are "not far re- moved from idolatry". Prayers for the dead should not be a reason for almsgiving, and beneficed clergy- men should not hold secular offices. There is no al- lusion in these conclusions to Wyclif's doctrine that "dominion is founded on grace", yet most of the early Lollards taught in some form or another that the va- lidity of the sacraments was affected by the sinfulness of the minister.
This refusal to distinguish the official from the pei^ Bonal character of the priesthood has reappearea at different epochs in the history of the Church. It is to be found, for instance, among the popular supporters of ecclesiastical reform in the time of Pope St. Gregory VII. Reforming councils forbade the faithful to ac- cept the ministrations of the unreformed clergy, but the reforming mobs of Milan and Flanders went much further and treated with contumely both the priests and their sacraments. Wyclif gave some kind of philosophic basis to this point of view in his doctrine of dominion", though he applied it more to the property and authority of the cler^ than to their sacramental
powers. To make the validity of baptism or the oon-
secration of the Holy Eucharist depend on the vir-
tue of the priest could only be a stepping-stone to a
complete denial of the sacramental system, and this
stage had been reached in these conclusions of 1395.
Thus the doctrine of transubstantiation became the
usual test in trials for Lollardy, and the crucial ques-
tion was usually, "Do vou believe that the subsUmee
of the bread remains after consecration?" The here-
tics were often ready to accept the vaguer expressions
of the orthodox doctrine, but at times they would de-
clare quite frankly that "the sacrament is but a
mouthful of bread". Pilgrimages and other pious
practices of Catholics often came in for very violent
abuse, and Our Lady of Walsin^ham was known
among them as the " Witch of Walsmgham ".
There is at least one striking omission in the " Con- clusions " of 1395. Nothing is said of the Bible as the sole rule of faith, yet this doctrine was probably the most original which the movement produced. As the chief opponents of Lollardy in the fifteenth century, Thomas of Walden and Richard Pecock both pointed out that the belief in the sufficiency of Scripture lay at the basis of Wycliffite teaching, for it provided an al- ternative to the authority of the Churcn. It occupied, however, a less important position among the earlier than among the later Lollards, for there was at first much confusion of mind on the whole question of au- thority. Even the most orthodox must have been Cuzzled at the time of the Schism, as many were later y the struggle between pope and coimcils. The un- orthodox were still more imcertain, and this may partly account for the frequent recantations of those who were summoned by the bishops. In the fifteenth century the Lollards became a more compact body with a more definite creed, or rather with more definite negations, a change whicn can be explained by mere lapse of time whicn confirms a man in his beliefs and by the more energetic rem^ession exercised by the ecclesiastical authorities. The breach with the tradi- tion of the Church had now become unmistakable and the Lollard of the second generation looked for support to his own reading and mterpretation of the Bible. Wyclif had already felt the necessity of this. He had dwelt in the strongest language on the sufi&ciency of Scripture, and had maintained that it was the ulti- mate authority even in matters of civil law and poli- tics. Whatever may have been his share in the work of translating it into English, there is no doubt that he urged all classes to read such translations, and that he did so, partly at any rate, in order to strengthen them in opposition to the Church authorities. Even the pope, he maintained, should not be obeyed unless his commands were warranted by Scripture.
As the Lollards in the course of the fifteenth century became less and less of a learned body we find an in- creasing tendency to take the Bible in its most literal sense and to draw from it practical conclusions out of all harmony i^ith contemporary life. Objections were made for instance to the Christian Sunday or to the eating of pork. Thus, Pecock urged the claims of reason and common sense against such narrow inter- pretations, much as Hooker did in a later age against the Puritans. Meanwhile the church authorities had limited the use of translations to those who had the bishop's licence, and the possession of portions of the English Bible, generally with Wycliffite prefaces, by unauthorized persons was one of the accepted evi- dences of Lollardy. It would be interesting, ddd space permit, to compare the Ix)llard doctrines with earlier medieval heresies and with the various forms of six- teenth-centurv Protestantism; it must, at least, be pointed out that there are few signs of any construc- tive system about Ix)llardy, little beyona the belief that the Bible will afford a rule of faitii and practice. Much empha.sis was laid on preaching as compared with liturgy, and there is evident an inclination
