cellor and proctors owe their formal appointment as ‘inquisitores hereticæ pravitatis’ by the royal writ of 1381, which ordained a monthly inquisition for Wycliffites and Wycliffite books through the colleges and halls of Oxford. The title suggests at once how favourable to the spread of Wycliffe's opinions had been the absence in England of that cunningly devised institution the papal inquisition, by which the earlier thirteenth-century revolt against mediæval orthodoxy had been effectually repressed. Even the measures now taken by the state against the lollards were of a comparatively mild description. Imprisonment was the severest penalty which they involved, and, in spite of all of them, it is clear that Wycliffism continued in force in Oxford and in many parts of England, especially in the great towns like London and Bristol (Adam of Usk, Chron. ed. Thompson, p. 3) and in the country round Leicester, till the reign of Henry IV brought with it a fresh and far more rigorous renewal of the alliance between the court and the hierarchy for the preservation of the status quo against subversive and revolutionary opinions in church and state. The Wycliffite rising of 1399 enabled the enemies of his doctrine to stamp it out in blood. According to Adam of Usk (Chron. ed. M. Thompson, p. 3) twenty-three thousand Wycliffites were put to death—of course an enormous exaggeration. The reform movement in Bohemia, if not in the first instance due to the influence of Wycliffe's writings, had owed to them its definitely heretical character; the writings of John Huss are largely transcripts from those of Wycliffe (see Loserth, Wiclif and Hus); and the violent form assumed by the movement in Prague turned the suppression of lollardy from an English into a European question. In 1401 the secular arm was strengthened in its efforts to assist the humane persuasions of mother church by the statute ‘de hæretico comburendo,’ which for the first time gave the force of statute to the punishment of burning for heresy, though it is possible that this punishment would in theory have been recognised by the common law (Maitland, Canon Law in the Church of England, pp. 176 sq.). In 1411 the university of Oxford was forced, with extreme difficulty, to submit to a visitation ‘de hæretica pravitate’ by Archbishop Arundel, and to condemn the opinions of Wycliffe, an event which may be regarded as closing the history of really vital scholastic thought in that university (Rashdall, Universities, ii. 432–5, 542). The work was completed by the measures of the council of Constance in 1415–16. From this time Wycliffism could only survive in hole-and-corner fashion. But it may be broadly asserted that lollardy never quite died out in England till it merged in the new Lutheran heresies of the sixteenth century (see Trevelyan's admirable chapter on the later ‘History of the Lollards’ in England in the Age of Wycliffe, p. 333; cf. Rashdall, Universities, ii. 543).
Wycliffe's bible was extensively copied up to about 1450, and even then the copies which had been made did not disappear. It is certain that the Reformation had virtually broken out in the secret bible-readings of the Cambridge reformers before either the trumpet-call of Luther or the exigencies of Henry VIII's personal and political position set men free once more to talk openly against the pope and the monks, and to teach a simpler and more spiritual gospel than the system against which Wycliffe had striven.
Of Wycliffe's personal appearance we only know that his frame was spare and emaciated (William Thorpe's examination reported in Fasc. Ziz. p. xlv, n. 3) None of the extant portraits (as to which see Sergeant, Life of Wycliffe, p. 16) can be supposed to represent more than some faint tradition of his personality, and are more probably quite imaginary. His enemies apparently ascribed the fascination which he exercised to studied asceticism, and he thinks it necessary to reply that his conscience is troubled by nothing so much as that he might have consumed the goods of the poor by excessive eating and drinking (De Veritate S. S. c. 12, quoted by Shirley, Fasc. Zizan. p. xlvi). Such a self-accusation is a sufficient defence. If any charge of inconsistency could plausibly have been preferred against this preacher of evangelical poverty and simplicity of life, it would assuredly have been made. Some other penitent expressions of his are quoted as suggestive of a quick temper (Shirley, loc. cit.); and the tone of his writings is certainly trenchant and uncompromising enough. The malicious suggestion that his zeal against clerical endowments was due to his disappointment at losing the bishopric of Worcester, eagerly adopted by Father Joseph Stevenson [q. v.] (The Truth about John Wyclif, 1885), seems traceable to Walden (Doctrinale, pt. iv. cap. 33; the printed text (Venice, 1571) ‘in Reygorinensi Ecclesia’ is supposed to represent ‘Vigornensi’). The charge of personal timidity sometimes made against him is sufficiently refuted by his whole career. Short of actually insisting on being persecuted, his protests against the abuses which he denounced could hardly have been bolder than they were up to the very date of
