teach these doctrines in the schools or the pulpit, ‘on account of the scandal [i.e. against the clergy] which they excited among the laity’ (Chron. Angl. p. 190; Eulog. Hist. iii. 348). To these precepts he paid, so far as we can judge, not the slightest attention.
During the autumn parliament of 1378 John of Gaunt had incurred fresh unpopularity among the clergy, and probably the people at large, by a peculiarly high-handed violation, not merely of the right of sanctuary attaching to the precincts of Westminster Abbey, but of the sanctity of the church itself. Two English squires, Robert Hale and John Schakyl, though required to do so both by the marshal's court and by parliament, had refused to surrender a Spanish hostage (whose custody they claimed as a right by the then accepted laws of war) to the Duke of Lancaster, whose interference was based upon his claim to the crown of Castile. They were imprisoned in the Tower, but managed to escape to Westminster. Schakyl was recaptured by a ruse, but Hale was murdered in cold blood by the duke's emissaries, as was also the servant of the church who had attempted to prevent the arrest. The matter was discussed in the parliament which was summoned to meet at Gloucester in October 1378, when Wycliffe employed his pen, and apparently his voice (Continuation of Adam of Murimuth, Engl. Hist. Soc. p. 234; Rot. Parl. iii. 37), in defending the outrageous proceeding (in a tract afterwards embodied or expanded in the ‘De Ecclesia,’ cap. viii. sq.) It was the misfortune of his position that he had to attack abuses at a time when their abolition was but too likely to be followed by worse abuses, and to defend the rights of the state at a time when its rights were likely to be asserted in practice for the satisfaction of a clique of lay nobles, greedier, more unscrupulous, and more incompetent than the respectable ecclesiastical statesmen who failed so conspicuously to realise Wycliffe's evangelical ideal of a Christian ministry. There are, however, two sides to the present question. There was a real legal doubt as to whether the privilege of sanctuary extended to pleas of civil debt, and Wycliffe's case was that the men were killed owing to their violent resistance to a legal arrest. The language used by the lords in reply to the petition of the bishops and clergy is obviously inspired by Wycliffe, and is really a summary of the tractate laid before them by Wycliffe in pursuance of the royal commands. They asserted: ‘Que Dieux, salvez sa perfection, ne le Pape, salve sa saintitee, ne nul Roi ou Prince, purroit granter tiel privilege’ (Rot. Parl. iii. p. 37).
A few months after Wycliffe's appearance at Lambeth occurred the great schism in the western church. The cardinals of the French party, declaring that the election of Urban VI was due to the violence of the Roman mob, renounced their allegiance to him and elected a separate pope, who assumed the title of Clement VII and established a rival curia at Avignon, where the predecessors of Gregory XI had already sojourned for nearly seventy years. Such an event could not but exercise an immense effect on minds already indignant at the abuses of the papacy, and puzzled by the difficulty of reconciling its claims with the New Testament, with the earlier history of the church, and with the growing sense of national independence. When facts demonstrated with daily increasing clearness that there might be two popes without either side being visibly the worse for its apostasy, men could not help asking themselves whether catholicity necessarily involved adherence to either. No doubt, as has been pointed out by Shirley, the fact that the papacy with which Englishmen had to reckon was no longer an ally of France tended to diminish the purely political antagonism to its claims and its unpopularity with the mass of the clergy; but such was not the effect of the schism upon minds like Wycliffe's. It was from this time that Wycliffe's mind began to move out of the groove already marked out by the politico-ecclesiastical debates of the fourteenth-century schools, and to question not merely the accidental abuses of the existing church system, but its underlying principles and the theological doctrines upon which they were based. All along Wycliffe had been a preacher as well as a scholastic divine, something of a pastor as well as a politician and controversialist. From this time, largely owing to the failure of his political hopes, his activity becomes almost entirely religious.
At about this period, though we can assign no precise date, he began, it would seem, a systematic effort to fight against the popular ignorance of the essentials of vital and evangelical religion. This effort assumed two forms—the institution of his ‘poor preachers’ and the translation of the Bible. The former certainly belongs to the crisis in Wycliffe's life which followed his first collision with ecclesiastical authority; the other may have begun now, but is generally associated with the last three years of his life.
To assist him in preaching the simpler gospel which he desired to diffuse among
