The archbishop, having the power of the throne behind him, attacked that stronghold of Lollardy the university of Oxford. In 1406 a document appeared purporting to be the testimony of the university in favour of Wycliffe; its genuineness was disputed at the time, and when quoted by Huss at the council of Constance it was repudiated by the English delegates. The archbishop treated Oxford as if it had issued the document, and procured the issue of severe regulations in order to purge the university of heresy. In 1408 Arundel in convocation proposed and carried the famous Constitutiones Thomae Arundel intended to put down Wycliffite preachers and teaching. They provided amongst other things that no one was to be allowed to preach without a bishop’s licence, that preachers preaching to the laity were not to rebuke the sins of the clergy, and that Lollard books and the translation of the Bible were to be searched for and destroyed.
When Henry V. became king a more determined effort was made to crush Lollardy. Hitherto its strength had lain among the country gentlemen who were the representatives of the shires. The court and clergy had been afraid to attack this powerful class. The new king determined to overawe them, and to this end selected one who had been a personal friend and whose life had been blameless. This was Sir John Oldcastle, in right of his wife, Lord Cobham, “the good Lord Cobham” as the common people called him. Henry first tried personal persuasion, and when that failed directed trial for heresy. Oldcastle was convicted, but was imprisoned for forty days in the Tower in hope that he might recant. He escaped, and summoned his co-religionists to his aid. A Lollard plot was formed to seize the king’s person. In the end Oldcastle was burnt for an obstinate heretic (Dec. 1417). These persecutions were not greatly protested against; the wars of Henry V. with France had awakened the martial spirit of the nation, and little sympathy was felt for men who had declared that all war was but the murder and plundering of poor people for the sake of kings. Mocking ballads were composed upon the martyr Oldcastle, and this dislike to warfare was one of the chief accusations made against him (comp. Wright’s Political Poems, ii. 244). But Arundel could not prevent the writing and distribution of Lollard books and pamphlets. Two appeared about the time of the martyrdom of Oldcastle—The Ploughman’s Prayer and the Lanthorne of Light. The Ploughman’s Prayer declared that true worship consists in three things—in loving God, and dreading God and trusting in God above all other things; and it showed how Lollards, pressed by persecution, became further separated from the religious life of the church. “Men maketh now great stonen houses full of glasen windows, and clepeth thilke thine houses and churches. And they setten in these houses mawmets of stocks and stones, to fore them they knelen privilich and apert and maken their prayers, and all this they say is they worship.... For Lorde our belief is that thine house is man’s soul.” Notwithstanding the repression, Lollardy fastened in new parts of England, and Lollards abounded in Somerset, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Lincoln and Buckinghamshire.
The council of Constance (1414-1418) put an end to the papal schism, and also showed its determination to put down heresy by burning John Huss. When news of this reached England the clergy were incited to still more vigorous proceedings against Lollard preachers and books. From this time Lollardy appears banished from the fields and streets, and takes refuge in houses and places of concealment. There was no more wayside preaching, but instead there were conventicula occulta in houses, in peasants’ huts, in sawpits and in field ditches, where the Bible was read and exhortations were given, and so Lollardy continued. In 1428 Archbishop Chichele confessed that the Lollards seemed as numerous as ever, and that their literary and preaching work went on as vigorously as before. It was found also that many of the poorer rectors and parish priests, and a great many chaplains and curates, were in secret association with the Lollards, so much so that in many places processions were never made and worship on saints’ days was abandoned. For the Lollards were hardened by persecution, and became fanatical in the statement of their doctrines. Thomas Bagley was accused of declaring that if in the sacrament a priest made bread into God, he made a God that can be eaten by rats and mice; that the pharisees of the day, the monks, and the nuns, and the friars and all other privileged persons recognized by the church were limbs of Satan; and that auricular confession to the priest was the will not of God but of the devil. And others held that any priest who took salary was excommunicate; and that boys could bless the bread as well as priests.
From England Lollardy passed into Scotland. Oxford infected St Andrews, and we find traces of more than one vigorous search made for Lollards among the teaching staff of the Scottish university, while the Lollards of Kyle in Ayrshire were claimed by Knox as the forerunners of the Scotch Reformation.
The opinions of the later Lollards can best be gathered from the learned and unfortunate Pecock, who wrote his elaborate Repressor against the “Bible-men,” as he calls them. He summed up their doctrines under eleven heads: they condemn the having and using of images in the churches, the going on pilgrimages to the memorial or “mynde places” of the saints, the holding of landed possessions by the clergy, the various ranks of the hierarchy, the framing of ecclesiastical laws and ordinances by papal and episcopal authority, the institution of religious orders, the costliness of ecclesiastical decorations, the ceremonies of the mass and the sacraments, the taking of oaths and the maintaining that war and capital punishment are lawful. When these points are compared with the Lollard Conclusions of 1395, it is plain that Lollardy had not greatly altered its opinions after fifty-five years of persecution. All the articles of Pecock’s list, save that on capital punishment, are to be found in the Conclusions; and, although many writers have held that Wycliffe’s own views differed greatly from what have been called the “exaggerations of the later and more violent Lollards,” all these views may be traced to Wycliffe himself. Pecock’s idea was that all the statements which he was prepared to impugn came from three false opinions or “trowings,” viz. that no governance or ordinance is to be esteemed a law of God which is not founded on Scripture, that every humble-minded Christian man or woman is able without “fail and defaut” to find out the true sense of Scripture, and that having done so he ought to listen to no arguments to the contrary; he elsewhere adds a fourth (i. 102), that if a man be not only meek but also keep God’s law he shall have a true understanding of Scripture, even though “no man ellis teche him saue God.” These statements, especially the last, show us the connexion between the Lollards and those mystics of the 14th century, such as Tauler and Ruysbroeck, who accepted the teachings of Nicholas of Basel, and formed themselves into the association of the Friends of God.
The persecutions were continued down to the reign of Henry VIII., and when the writings of Luther began to appear in England the clergy were not so much afraid of Lutheranism as of the increased life they gave to men who for generations had been reading Wycliffe’s Wickette. “It is,” wrote Bishop Tunstall to Erasmus in 1523, “no question of pernicious novelty, it is only that new arms are being added to the great band of Wycliffite heretics.” Lollardy, which continued down to the Reformation, did much to shape the movement in England. The subordination of clerical to laic jurisdiction, the reduction in ecclesiastical possessions, the insisting on a translation of the Bible which could be read by the “common” man were all inheritances bequeathed by the Lollards.
Literature.—Fasciculi Zizaniorum Magistri Johannis Wyclif cum Tritico, edited for the Rolls Series by W. W. Shirley (London, 1858); the Chronicon Angliae, auctore monacho quodam Sancti Albani, ed. by Sir E. Maunde Thompson (London, 1874); Historia Anglicana of Thomas Walsingham, ed. by H. T. Riley, vol. iii. (London. 1869); Chronicon of Henry Knighton, ed. by J. R. Lumby (London, 1895); R. L. Poole, Wycliffe and Movements for Reform (London, 1889); R. Pecock, Repressor of overmuch Blaming of the Clergy (2 vols., London, 1860); F. D. Matthew, The English Works of John Wyclif (Early English Text Society, London, 1880); T. Wright, Political Poems and Songs (2 vols., London, 1859); G. V. Lechler, Johann von Wiclif, ii. (1873); J. Loserth, Hus und Wycliffe (Prague, 1884, English translation by J. Evans, London, 1884); D. Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, iii. (London, 1773); E. Powell and G. M. Trevelyan, The Peasants’ Rising and the Lollards, a Collection of Unpublished Documents (London, 1899); G. M. Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe (London, 1898, 3rd ed., 1904); the publications of the Wiclif Society; H. S. Cronin, “The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards,” in the English Historical Review (April 1907, pp. 292 ff.); and J. Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation in England (1908).
(T. M. L.)
LOLLIUS, MARCUS, Roman general, the first governor of Galatia (25 B.C.), consul in 21. In 16, when governor of Gaul, he was defeated by the Sigambri (Sygambri), Usipetes and Tencteri, German tribes who had crossed the Rhine. This defeat is coupled by Tacitus with the disaster of Varus, but it was disgraceful rather than dangerous. Lollius was subsequently (2 B.C.) attached in the capacity of tutor and adviser to Gaius Caesar (Augustus’s grandson) on his mission to the East. He was accused of extortion and treachery to the state, and denounced by Gaius to the emperor. To avoid punishment he is said to have taken poison. According to Velleïus Paterculus and Pliny, he was a hypocrite and cared for nothing but amassing wealth. It was formerly thought that this was the Lollius whom Horace described as a model of integrity and superior to avarice in Od. iv. 9, but it seems hardly likely that this Ode, as well as the two Lollian epistles of Horace (i. 2 and 18), was addressed to him. All three must have been addressed to the same individual, a young man, probably the son of this Lollius.