With lovynge hert and high devocion,
In thyne honour he wroot many a lyne,
For he thi servant was, mayden Marie,
And let his love floure and fructifie.
Contemporary with Chaucer, the father of our poetry, was Sir John Mandeville, who commonly enjoys the credit of being the father of English prose, and whose travels let into the popular mind a glimmering light as to the whereabouts of Tartary, Persia, Armenia, Lybia, Chaldea, and Ethiopia, all which he visited, besides some Eastern lands that he calls by the name of “Amazoyn,” “Ind the Less and the More,” and “many isles that be abouten Ind.” In his “Itinerary” he describes his visit to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, apologising for possible inaccuracies by reminding the indulgent reader that “thynges passed out of long time from a man’s mynd turnen soon into forgetting; because that the mynd of man ne may not be comprehended ne withholden for the freelty of mankind.” The “Itinerary” was written in Latin, and translated by the author first into French, and from thence into English, and enjoyed great popularity. And the publication of these travels, together with those of Marco Polo, stimulated an interest in the study of geography, so that we begin to find more frequent mention in the catalogues of monastic libraries of maps and charts. The whole science of map-drawing, it may be observed, had developed in the cloister; the German monks showing themselves indefatigable in improving this branch of science. About the year 1370 Prior Nicholas Hereford of Evesham Abbey, after collecting a fine assortment of books, caused a great map of the world to be executed, at the cost of six marks, for the use of his convent. And a certain Camaldolese monk, named Fra Mauro, made use of the information derived from the writings of Marco Polo, and produced a grand Mappamondo, wherein he depicts the sea rolling round the southern extremity of Africa. On the margin of his map appear some learned notes, referring the phenomena of the tides to the moon’s attraction—a piece of natural philosophy, however, which, as we have seen, was not unknown to Bede.
It has been already said that during the reign of Edward III. the English universities had to sustain the twofold attack of Lollardism and the Black Death, by the united effects of which they were reduced to so low a condition, as at one time to have ceased to be regarded as seats of learning. Nine tenths of the English clergy are said to have been swept away by the terrible plague, together with the population of entire cities, and the necessity of the case obliged the bishops to fill the vacant benefices with men of inferior education, a practice which for the moment told severely on the state of the schools. But the effects of the pestilence were less fatally disastrous than those caused by the heresy of Wickliffe. When in 1361, that celebrated man, then master of Baliol College, Oxford, first made himself notorious by his attacks on the mendicant orders, he seems to have done little more than repeat the old threadbare calumnies of William de St. Amour and Richard Fitz Ralph. His views were of course exceedingly relished by the secular doctors, and his reputed talents induced the primate, Simon Islip, to offer him the wardenship of Canterbury Hall, then newly founded, partly for secular and partly for monastic students. In order to make room for him, the former warden, Woodhal, a Canterbury monk, had to retire, and three other monastic students who held scholarships in the college were at the same time removed. Langham, the successor of Islip, pronounced these proceedings irregular, and restored Woodhal to his post. The matter was referred to the decision of Pope Urban V., who decided in favour of Woodhal, and from that day Wickliffe became the deadly enemy of the papal power. The university, or rather the secular regents of the university, immediately took part with him against the Pope and the Friars, and in 1372, to mark their adherence to his cause, elected him Professor of Divinity. He succeeded, moreover, in obtaining the powerful support of John of Gaunt, and on occasion of a congress, held at Bruges, to settle various points in dispute between the English Government and the Holy See, the name of John Wickliffe appears in the list of Royal Commissioners. All this time there had been no whisper of heresy, nor was it until after his return to England, when he was promoted to a prebend in the collegiate church of Westbury, and a little later was presented by John of Gaunt to the rectory of Lutterworth, that he began to disseminate his pernicious doctrines. Besides his peculiar views regarding the possession of property, he had started views on the subject of predestination, analogous to those afterwards embraced by Calvin, and attacked the supremacy of the Pope, and the doctrines of penance, indulgences, the worship of the saints and of holy images, and prayer for the dead. He and his followers propagated their opinions by a sort of popular preaching suited to the tastes of the common people, and accompanied by a certain low buffoonery, in all ages specially attractive to rude audiences of the Anglo-Saxon race. The coarse invectives levelled against the clergy found eager reception among such hearers; for there is perhaps to most men an irresistible fascination in doctrines which aim at bringing down any dominant class of society to a lower level. The English commons were at this period seething in a chronic state of insurrection, and the Lollard denunciations of the priests and land-holders were extremely to the taste of the Socialists of the fourteenth century. It is therefore quite easy to understand how it was that Hob Miller and Colin Lout should have thought it an excellent joke to ridicule and despise their betters; but that Wickliffe should have found warm supporters in the university of Oxford is a fact that may well surprise and startle us. But Lollardism had a double aspect, its theological heresies were at first as little relished at Oxford as at Rome, but its enmity to the religious orders happened to chime in with the views of the secular faction, and therefore they gave it their support. An appeal had already been made, not to Rome, but to Parliament, for a law to prohibit any member of the university joining a religious order before his eighteenth year, and the Oxonian divines were not ashamed to accept, together with the desired statute, a prohibition to carry the matter to Rome. They next established the rule that no religious, whether monk or friar, should be admitted to graduate in arts, while at the same time, by the university statutes, no one could fill a theological professorship without so graduating. The monks appealed to the Holy See, and obtained a dispensation from this unjust law, and thus increased the ill-will of their thwarted and malicious adversaries. The struggle was at its height when Wickliffe raised his cry against the mendicant orders, whom he declared to be Antichrist, and proctors of Satan; and he at once found plenty of grave divines who were willing to regard him as a useful ally, and forgive both his heresies and his nonsense for the support he furnished to their side of the quarrel. Hence, in 1377, when Gregory XI. sent Bulls to the Archbishop of Canterbury the Bishop of London, and the university of Oxford, calling on them to take active measures for the condemnation of the heresiarch, we are assured by Walsingham that the heads of the university deliberated whether or no they should receive the Bull, nor does it appear certain that it ever was received. At last, however, in 1381, Wickliffe startled even his Oxford allies by his attack on the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, and a decree was drawn up, and signed by William de Burton, the chancellor, and twelve of the chief divines, condemning his errors, and forbidding them to be promulgated in the university. Hereupon Wickliffe scrupled not to appeal to the Crown and Parliament, but the English people were not yet quite prepared for such a step, and the act caused general scandal. Even John of Gaunt, who had hitherto, from political motives, given him his countenance, now withdrew his protection, and declared his teaching on the Sacrament of the Altar to be a “doctrine of devils.”
Oxford, however, had not yet entirely given up his cause. In 1382, when Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury, set on foot vigorous measures for the eradication of the new heresies, he met with stout resistance from Rigge, who had succeeded De Burton in the office of chancellor of the university, and who flatly refused to silence a Lollard professor. Courtenay at last obtained a royal mandate, in virtue of which Wickliffe and his most obstinate adherents were expelled the university, a good number of professors purchasing immunity, however by a ready recantation of their errors, for few evinced any desire of becoming martyrs in the cause.
The steps taken by Courtenay vindicated the authority of the Church but they were far from being sufficient to purge the university from the heretical leaven, or remedy the evils caused by these internal troubles. So far is Ayliffe’s statement that the Wickliffites restored sound learning at Oxford, from possessing a shadow of truth, that the period when this heresy was rampant among her doctors was precisely that when her schools had confessedly sunk to their very lowest state of decay. The authorities were themselves perfectly aware of the fact, and represented it as one of the unhappy effects produced by papal provisions. But the statutes of Provisors, passed in the reign of Edward III., by which all such provisions were forbidden under severe penalties, instead of applying a remedy to this evil, only hastened the decline of learning. It was found that the Crown was far less disposed to promote men of learning than the Popes had been; and, to quote the words of Lingard, “experience showed that the statutes in question operated to the depression of learning and the deterioration of the universities.” Accordingly in the year 1399 petitions were presented to Convocation from Oxford and Cambridge, setting forth that while the Popes were permitted to bestow benefices by provision, the preference had always been given to men of talent and industry, and that the effect of such preference had been to quicken the application and increase the number of the students; but that since the passing of the Act against Provisors, their members had been neglected by the patrons of livings, the students had disappeared, and the schools were nearly abandoned.[290] Sixteen years later the House of Commons awoke to a sense of the suicidal character of their own policy, and petitioned King Henry V. that, to save the universities from destruction, he would suffer the statutes against Provisors to be repealed. The King referred the matter to the bishops, who, however, had no wish at all to interfere with the existing legislation, and contented themselves with passing a law in convocation obliging every patron of a benefice for the next ten years to present a graduate of one of the universities.
These facts may serve as sufficient reply to the vaunted “restoration of learning” achieved by the Lollards. The effect of their influence in the universities, coupled with that of an anti-Roman course of legislation, had been to bring those institutions to the very verge of ruin, and that in spite of the extraordinary efforts which were being made by private munificence to enlarge and perfect the collegiate system of education. Indeed, though Wickliffe himself was a man of undoubted ability, the attempt to convert him into a restorer of humane letters, savours of the absurd.[291] His learning was precisely the same which, when found in the possession of friars and other scholastics, earns for them such bitter taunts and gibes as “locusts,” who devoured all the green things in the land, and darkened it with bad Latin and captious logic. Wickliffe’s Latin was not better than that of his adversaries, and his logic was of that true Oxonian temper which Wood qualifies as “frivolous sophistry whereby scholars could at any time be for or against anything proposed.” The well-known ballad in which an Oxford student puzzles his simple-minded parent by proving a pigeon and an eel pie to be convertible terms, seems hardly a caricature when we read the shifts, or, as Wood terms them, the “screws” by which the Lollard chief sought to prove that he meant the precise contrary of what he had been convicted of saying. “He so qualified his doctrines with conditions,” says Lingard, “and explained them away by distinctions, as to give an appearance of innocence to tenets the most mischievous. On the subject of the Holy Eucharist he intrenched himself behind unintelligible distinctions, the meaning of which it would have puzzled the most acute logician to detect.”[292] And Rohrbacher observes that instead of appealing to the Scriptures explained by the Fathers, he took refuge in “arguments and dialectic subtleties, wrapped up in an obscure and barbarous phraseology;” in other words, he exhibited precisely the same description of learning, the display of which has earned so many hard epithets for the academic “locusts.”
Wickliffe’s literary fame rests chiefly on his translation of the Bible into the vulgar tongue, often incorrectly spoken of as the earliest English version. It is not clear that he himself ever translated more than the Gospels, for of the various manuscripts which bear his name, some are now admitted to have been the production of later Lollard writers. His English is declared by Mr. Craik to be “coarse and slovenly,” and far more harsh and obscure than that of Mandeville or Chaucer. His version was made the vehicle for conveying his peculiar tenets, by means of corruptions of the Sacred Text, and was accompanied by certain Prologues or Glosses, explaining it in an heretical sense. On this account it was enacted by Archbishop Arundel, in a Provincial Synod held in 1408, that “no one should hereafter translate any text of Holy Scripture into English by way of a book, and that no such book, composed lately, in the time of Wickliffe, or since his death, shall be read.” This decree has been erroneously interpreted as a prohibition to the laity to read the Scriptures. But its real meaning is very clearly explained by the Canonist Lyndwood,[293] a contemporary of Arundel’s, as being, first, a prohibition to any private person to translate the Scriptures into English without authority; and secondly, a prohibition to use or read any such unauthorised and incorrect versions. And he expressly adds that from the terms “newly composed, in the time of Wickliffe, or since his death,” it is evident that the Lollard versions only are prohibited, but that every one is still at liberty to read those formerly translated from the text of Scripture into English or any other modern idiom. Lyndwood died in 1446, and was living when the decree in question was first published. His testimony as to its meaning as then understood and interpreted, as well as to the fact that other earlier versions did exist at that time, cannot therefore be called in question. Moreover, Fox the Protestant martyrologist, tells us, on the authority of Polydore Vergil, that this same Archbishop Arundel, who is so often accused of prohibiting the reading of the Scriptures, preached the funeral sermon of Queen Anne of Bohemia, and mentioned among other things in her praise that she was a diligent reader of the Four Gospels written in Bohemian, English, and Latin, with divers expositions, which book she had sent to him to be viewed and examined.