John Wyclif.
In the year when gunpowder was first burned in battle, and when Rienzi was trying to poise himself with a good balance on the rocking shoulders of the Roman people, John Wyclif, the great English reformer and the first translator of the Bible, was just turned of twenty and poring over his books, not improbably in that Balliol College, Oxford—of which in the ripeness of his age he was to become Master.
We know little of his early personal history, save that he came from a beautiful Yorkshire valley in the North of England, where the Tees, forming the border line of the County of Durham, sweeps past the little parish of Wyclif, and where a manor-house of the same name—traditionally the birthplace of the Reformer—stands upon a lift of the river hank. Its grounds stretch away to those “Rokeby” woods, whose murmurs and shadows relieve the dullest of the poems of Scott.
But there is no record of him thereabout: if indeed he were born upon that lift of the Tees bank, the proprietors thereof—who through many generations were stanch Romanists—would have shown no honor to the arch-heretic; and it is noteworthy that within a chapel attached to the Wyclif manor-house, mass was said and the Pope reverenced, down to a very recent time. John Wyclif, in the great crowd of his writings, whether English or Latin, told no story of himself or of his young days. We have only clear sight of him when he has reached full manhood—when he has come to the mastership of Balliol Hall, and to eloquent advocacy of the rights and dignities of England, as against the Papal demand for tribute. On this service he goes up to London, and is heard there—maybe in Parliament; certainly is heard with such approval that he is, only a few years thereafter—sent with a commission, to treat with ambassadors from the Pope, at the old city of Bruges.
This was a rich city—called the Venice of the North—and princes and nobles from all Europe were to be met there; its great town-house even then lifted high into the air that Belfry of Bruges which has become in our day the nestling-place of song. But Wyclif was not overawed by any splendors of scene or association. He insisted doggedly upon the rights of Englishmen as against Papal pretensions. John of Gaunt, a son of the king, stood by Wyclif; not only befriending him there, but afterward when Papish bulls were thundered against him, and when he was summoned up to London—as befell in due time—to answer for his misdeeds; and when the populace, who had caught a liking for the stalwart independence of the man, crowded through the streets (tall Will Langlande very probably among them), to stand between the Reformer and the judges of the Church. He did not believe in Ecclesiastic hierarchies; and it is quite certain that he was as little liked by the abbots and the bishops and the fat vicars, as by the Pope.
I have said he was befriended by John of Gaunt: and this is a name which it is worth while for students of English history to remember; not only because he was a brother of the famous Black Prince (and a better man than he, though he did not fight so many battles), but because he was also a good friend of the poet Chaucer—as we shall find. It will perhaps help one to keep him in mind, if I refer to that glimpse we get of him in the early scenes of Shakespeare’s tragedy of Richard II., where he makes a play upon his name:
O, how that name befits my composition!
Old Gaunt, indeed! and gaunt in being old.
Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast
And who abstains from meat, that is not gaunt?
A good effigy of this John, in his robes, is on the glass of a window in All-Souls’ College, Oxford.
But such great friends, and Wyclif numbered the widow of the Black Prince among them, could not shield him entirely from Romish wrath, when he began to call the Pope a “cut-purse;” and his arguments were as scathing as his epithets, and had more reason in them. He was compelled to forego his teachings at Oxford, and came to new trials,[38] at which—as traditions run—he wore an air of great dignity; and old portraits show us a thin, tall figure—a little bent with over-study; his features sharp-cut, with lips full of firmness, a flowing white beard and piercing eyes—glowing with the faith that was in him. This was he who blocked out the path along which England stumbled through Lollardry quagmires, and where Huss, the Bohemian, walked in after days with a clumsy, forward tread, and which Luther in his later time put all alight with his torch of flame.
The King—and it was one of the last good deeds of Edward III.—gave to the old man who was railed at by Popes and bishops, a church living at Lutterworth, a pleasant village in Leicestershire, upon a branch of that Avon, which flows by Stratford Church; and here the white-haired old man—some five hundred years ago (1384) finished his life; and here the sexton of the church will show one to-day the gown in which he preached, and the pulpit in which he stood.
Even now I have not spoken of those facts about this early Reformer, which are best kept in memory, and which make his name memorable in connection with the literature of England. In the quiet of Lutterworth he translated the Latin Bible (probably not knowing well either Greek or Hebrew, as very few did in that day); not doing all this work himself, but specially looking after the Gospels, and perhaps all of the New Testament.
The reader will, I think, be interested in a little fragment of this work of his (from Matthew viii.).
“Sothely [verily] Jhesus seeynge many cumpanyes about hym, bad his disciplis go ouer the watir. And oo [one] scribe or a man of lawe, commynge to, saide to hym—Maistre, I shall sue [follow] thee whidir euer thou shalt go. And Jhesus said to hym, Foxis han dichis or borrowis [holes] and briddes of the eir han nestis; but mannes sone hath nat wher he reste his heued. Sotheli an other of his disciplis saide to hym—Lord, suffre me go first and birye my fadir. Forsothe Jhesus saide to hym, Sue thou me, and late dede men birye her dead men.”
It is surely not very hard reading;—still less so in the form as revised by Purvey,[39] an old assistant of his in the Parish of Lutterworth; and it made the groundwork of an English sacred dialect, which with its Thees and Thous and Speaketh and Heareth and Prayeth has given its flavor to all succeeding translations, and to all utterances of praise and thanksgiving in every English pulpit.
Not only this, but Wyclif by his translation opened an easy English pathway into the arcana of sacred mysteries, which in all previous time—save for exceptional parts, such as the paraphrase of Cædmon, or the Ormulum, or the Psalter of Aldhelm and other fragmentary Anglo-Saxon versions of Scripture—had been veiled from the common people in the dimness of an unknown tongue. But from the date of Wyclif’s translation—forward, forever—whatever man, rich or poor, could read an English ordinance of the King, or a bye-law of a British parish, could also—though he might be driven to stealthy reading—spell his way back, through the old aisles of Sacred History, where Moses and the prophets held their place, and into the valleys of Palestine, where Bethlehem lay, and where Christ was hung upon the tree.