from the academic reformer; and Ball had been excommunicated in 1366. In all probability there was very little historical connection between the two movements, except in so far as both sprang out of ideas which were in the air, and in so far as it is impossible for any one to set men thinking about ultimate questions without contributing something to the social and intellectual ferment out of which such movements are born. Even those who traced the outbreak to Wycliffe's heresies thought of it rather as a judicial visitation for their impiety than as the natural consequence of Wycliffe's teaching (Chron. Angl. p. 311). It is worth mentioning that there were others who attributed the origin of the movement to the mendicants (Fasc. Ziz. p. 393; Chron. Angl. p. 312). It is alleged too, on somewhat doubtful authority, that Jack Strawe confessed to an intention of murdering all the clergy except the begging friars—certainly not a probable result of Wycliffite teaching at this period of his life (Chron. Angl. p. 309). The rebels are never accused of heresy (Réville, Le Soulèvement des travailleurs d'Angl. en 1381, p. lxiii) nor (with hardly an exception) the lollards with communism (Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe, p. 340).
Whatever the origin of the movement, it contributed of course to the increasing indignation of the ecclesiastical world, and to the growth among the laity of a reactionary spirit. Moreover, just before this crisis in the external fortunes of the Wycliffite movement, the development of its leader's theological opinions had reached the point where they placed him most incontrovertibly, most irreconcilably beyond the pale of mediæval orthodoxy. When he wrote the ‘De Civili Dominio,’ Wycliffe still accepted the doctrine of transubstantiation. It was in the summer of 1381, or more probably (at latest) of 1380 (as has been shown by Mr. F. D. Matthew, Engl. Hist. Rev. 1890, v. 328 sq.), that Wycliffe in the schools of Oxford ‘began to determine matters upon the sacrament of the altar;’ and his determination amounted to a categorical and peremptory denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation (Fasc. Ziz. p. 104). ‘The consecrated host which we see on the altar is neither Christ nor any part of him, but the effectual sign of him’ (ib. p. 104). The patristic doctrine of the real presence he continued verbally to assert in vague and general language; but, whenever he defined, the real presence tended more and more to be explained as a spiritual presence, the bread and wine ever more and more to become a sign of the reality, and not the reality itself. If for a time he still was even content to say that ‘the bread and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ,’ the admission was qualified by the words ‘in a figure,’ or ‘virtually, as a king is in the whole of his kingdom,’ or ‘as a man is created into a pope, while remaining the same man as he was before’ (ib. p. 107). To the last his views on the subject were tentative, shifting, and barely consistent. But the metaphysical dogma of the mediæval schools in which alone transubstantiation becomes a definite, clearly cut, arguable, intellectual position—the doctrine of the fourth Lateran council, of the angelical doctor, of the whole mediæval church—was now for the first time publicly challenged, dissected, ridiculed in the mediæval schools. Wycliffe, understanding much better than its conventional teachers the true meaning of realism, denied the possibility of the accidents—the sensible properties—of the bread and wine remaining while their ‘substance’ was destroyed, and replaced by the substance of the body and blood of Christ. All Wycliffe's previous aberrations from orthodoxy were not insusceptible of some defence on traditional lines; all, if eventually condemned, had been held by considerable sections of the church. Many of the Gallican opponents of the schism, for instance, were going quite as far as Wycliffe in minimising the authority of the papacy, and even in upholding that of the secular power. Wycliffe's new heresy sealed his doom in the eyes of the mediæval church. For those who conceded least to the claims of the priesthood admitted that priests and priests alone could ‘make the body of Christ.’ If they could not do that, the lay world would inevitably draw inferences which would be fatal to the whole system of hierarchical pretension. Even Lancaster was shocked at this denial of the central doctrine of mediæval orthodoxy (Fasc. Ziz. p. 318). It was Wycliffe's doctrine of the eucharist which ruined for the immediate future his chances as a practical reformer.
The natural result of these two fresh features in the situation—the peasant revolt and Wycliffe's new heresy—was a fresh outburst of ecclesiastical repression. The first attempt was made in Oxford itself. The chancellor for the time being, William de Berton [q. v.], was hostile to Wycliffe, and assembled a body of doctors of theology and canon law—not the whole of either faculty, as he admits, but ‘those whom we believed to be most expert’—which condemned Wycliffe's eucharistic doctrine, and forbade it to be taught in the university under pain of imprisonment, academical suspension, and
