1415
When I began
my novel "The Persian Fire", in the early years of this century, my original
aim was to create a literary structure through which I could explore mediaeval
Christianity and try - worthy goal, unattainable objective - to understand the
inside of the mind of a Christian of that epoch. I had no idea where to start,
but my home at that time was in a Somerset village that had been forced to move
downhill when the Black Death led to all its homes being disinfested by fire,
and that was interesting too, and so I started there. Living just fifteen miles
from Glastonbury in one direction, and Wells in another, gave me one of
England's greatest abbeys, and one of its most important Bishoprics, and so I was
set.
John
Wycliffe, or Wyclif, or Wycliff, or even Wickliffe, was probably twenty-five years old (his birthdate is unknown but reckoned to be somewhere around 1324, and not 1338 as on the plaque at the foot of the page) when the Black Death reached Hipswell in Yorkshire, or Ipreswell
by the pronunciation of the time, which was a suburb of Wycliffe-on-Tees, from which his family had taken its name. Roughly two-thirds of Wycliffe was wiped
out by the plague, including that percentage of his own family, and if he
survived himself it was only because he had gone away to study in Oxford three
years earlier, and somehow Oxford wasn't affected quite so badly.
Oxford meant
Balliol College, founded purely as a Hall of Residence by the Member of Parliament for Wycliffe John de Balliol, around 1263, and done so primarily to enable his protegé Fra Roger Bacon to study at Moise's Hall, the principal of the three Jewish yeshivot that had made Oxenford one of the world centres of Jewish intellectual life. Our Wycliffe arrived after the Jews had been expelled from Britain and their yeshivot turned into a Christian university. He started out as a devotee of William of Ockham, but became so much of a
universalist it would be easier to make a list of those subjects that he didn't
study, and the thinkers by whom he wasn't influenced, than those that he did
and was. Of the subjects: the natural sciences, mathematics, theology,
ecclesiastical law, common law including both the Roman and the English, and philosophy,
which is another way of saying "absolutely everything". But his fame rests with
his lifelong effort to publish a complete edition of the Bible in English, and
the very personal position that he took in respect of Christian faith, derived
from those intense and intensive studies, spread all over England by his own
devotees, the itinerant preachers known as the Lollards. My Fra Angelus would
have loved him, but sadly my Fra Angelus was two decades older, and did not
survive the Black Death.
Wycliffe
started at Balliol as a mere scholar, achieved both baccalaureate and
masterhood in record time, and was appointed to the headship of the College,
probably in 1359, but it may have been 1360. The following year he was given
the parish of Fylingham in Lincolnshire by the College, and in 1365 he was made
Head of Canterbury Hall, a position he lost again just one year later, when
Archbishop Islip, who had appointed him, died, and Simon Langham, who succeeded
him, decided that a monk like himself and not a worldly scholar should have
charge of training priests - probably he had heard a sermon from one of the
Lollards, and couldn’t make it coincide with dogma. Wycliffe appealed to the
Pope in Rome;
the Pope took Langham's side.
And so began
the years of controversy, or possibly contraversy - the first means scandal,
the second an intellectual decision to swim against the tide: both apply in
John Wycliffe's case.
Somewhere between
1366 and 1372 he was awarded his Doctorate in Theology, which gave him the
right to deliver lectures at the university, as well as sermons in his parish.
From these would come his Summa Theologiae - the title owes its origins to
Tomas Aquinas, who was the principal inspiration of my own Fra Angelus. In
1368 he gave up his living at Fylingham and took over the rectory of
Ludgershall in Buckinghamshire, not far from Oxford, which enabled him to
retain his connection with the university. Six years later, in 1374, he
received the crown living of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, which he retained
until his death.
Wycliffe's
precise birthdate is unknown, and his deathdate was December 31st,
so I need to explain why I have placed this essay on this date, May 4th.
The major work of his life, on which he spent time every day from his teen
years onwards, was the translation of the Bible into English - and his personal
encouragement of others who were carrying out parts of the task on his behalf.
From reading it, and studying it so closely, it became obvious to him that the
entire structure of the Papal Empire was built upon superstition, and worse,
that it actually contradicted Holy Scripture. The Bible, not the Pope, must
needs be the determiner of Christian lives, and if any creature in the universe
was truthfully infallibile, it most certainly was not this or any other human
Pope. Oh dear! How dangerous!
It could have been worse though. Wycliffe translated from the Latin Vulgate edition of Saint Jerome, rather than going back, as Fra Roger Bacon had advocated, to the Hebrew and Aramaic sources, the Jewish original; and he must surely have known, or at least suspected, as Bacon did, that the Vulgate was replete with errors and mistranslations. Bacon had spent his time at Moise's Hall creating a Lexicon of Hebrew and Aramaic Grammar, insisting that Christians must know the languages of Christ, in order to understand Christ fully; the Franciscans locked him up for the last fifteen years of his life when they discovered what he had done, precisely because of the Wycliffian implications. Wycliffe was surely aware of that, but carried on regardless.
Went even further, indeed. Because it wasn't
only the Pope who had it all wrong. The hierarchies of the Ecclesiasticus at
every level were out of step with Biblical instruction. Long before Erasmus and
Sir Thomas More, long before Luther or Calvin or Zwingli, the call for a
complete and total reformation. Oh dear, oh dear! How very dangerous!
But no one
was ready, yet, to call him dangerous, let alone to challenge him. His
reputation as a man of genius still carried him into favour - he was even
chosen as a representative at the peace congress in Bruges in 1374, his job to
deal with negotiations between the papal and the English clergy over minor but
annoying disagreements on banal matters. If he was considered dangerous, he
would not have been chosen, even for so marginal a role as this.
Mind you,
the subject matter that started all the controversy was pretty marginal as
well, the sort of intellectual debate that students at Oxford are much
encouraged to engage in, one to propose, one to second, two others to oppose, at
the Union. Informally, back then. A monk named John Owtred was the principal
opponent. Owtred put the case that it was a sin even to suggest that the
temporal authorities should ever have the right to deprive a priest, even an
unrighteous one, of his temporalities - complete separation of church and
state, as we would call it today. Wycliffe disagreed. Wycliffe in his turn
argued that it was a sin to incite the Pope to excommunicate those laymen who
had deprived the clergy of their temporalities - complete separation of state
and church; which sounds like the same thing, just stated differently, but
these are highly intellectual scholars disputing highly esoteric points, and it
wasn't just language-games: it really matters what form of dance the angels are
engaged in on the pin-head, and whether they are wearing ballet shoes and tutus,
and how wide are their wings.
The trouble
was, these abstruse esoterica were also fundamental to what was going on in
Parliament, which was fighting its own battles with the Curia, and how useful
to have some important Oxford don say something that could be interpreted as
being, maybe not exactly, but if you phrased it carefully, a point for your
side, or better still a point against the other side. It was probably Wycliffe
and Owtred's theology professor, William Wynham, a Benedictine from St. Albans (the Benedictine was the
strictest, the most papally supportive, of all the monastic rules at that time,
so instinctively anti-Wycliffe) who made their seminar debates a matter of
public interest. And Wycliffe had nothing but praise for the outcome of the
debates of the "Good Parliament" of 1376–77, which introduced a bill
whose 140 headings could have done more damage to the Church than Henry VIII
ever even considered. Wycliffe's headings, in truth; I shall come back to that.
Once his
ideas had been made public, there was no longer any point keeping them to private
debates and sermons; the tracts that make up the Summa Theologiae were
begun when he returned from Bruges, and publication never ceased until his
death. The first ostensibly dealt with the Ten Commandments, but in expressing
his conviction that government ultimately rested with God, with the Bible
serving as the equivalent of its Constitution, his rejection of temporal rule by
the clergy was implicit.
The second took
this even further, and right from its title: "De civili dominio". Good
government in the secular realm requires the renunciation of temporal dominion
by the Church - and what was in the Bill proposed by the "Good Parliament" certainly looks like it came directly from this source. What Luther would decry
later, Wycliffe was already decrying now - "the Avignon system" as it was
called, because the Pope was still in exile there: a hierarchy of commissions
and exactions and nepotistic temporalities; the squandering of charities by
unfit priests; fake relics; the sale of Indulgences: the same complaints lodged by Samuel against
the sons of Eli, and by Nehemiah against the Kohanim of Jerusalem. Regulation
of the church by the state was essential. Confiscation of misused church
property - why does the Church need wealth anyway? Everything that Henry VIII
would do later on, and still more. The church restricted to its spiritual realm,
and ordinanced to ensure that it role-modeled the ethics and teachings of the
Bible - the whole Bible, the Mosaic as well as the Jesuitic. Wycliffe delivered
all 18 of the theses that would be published in "De Civili" to his students at
Oxford in 1376. Not all of them - William Wadeford among them - supported him.
But rather more importantly John of Ghent, the second son of King Edward III,
did. John brought Wycliffe to London to preach, and his own supporters to hear
him. For a while he was the talk of the town.
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| The St Paul's Cathedral "trial", 1377 |
Good talk
and bad talk, inevitably. The bad talk could be heard anywhere that was likely
to be negatively affected if the Wycliffe proposals, the provisional Acts of
the "Good Parliament", became law: abbeys, convents, priories, monasteries, church
offices overall. Wycliffe was summoned before William Courtenay, Bishop of
London, on February 19th 1377, but with John of Gaunt (as
Shakespeare mis-pronounced his name) on one side of him, and Henry Percy, the 1st Earl of Northumberland, on the other, plus four mendicant friars to validate
his theological credentials, Courtenay spent more time arguing with the
protectors than with Wycliffe, and frankly Ghent was the one with the power to
turn these theories into practice - Edward died that June, leaving the
10-year-old Richard II on the throne, and Ghent, effectively though also
somewhat ineffectively, as the unofficial Prince Regent.
It was Ghent
rather more than Professor Wynham who turned scholarly idealisms into political
controversies, though Wynham was certainly the leader of the clerics who now
took on Wycliffe, accusing him not only of the minor sins of scandal and pride,
but also the inflammable crimes of blasphemy and heresy. The threat to secularise
all English church property had of necessity to be resisted, let alone the battle
for power between church and state.¹
But I have
skipped a significant additional piece of this puzzle. In January 1377, just
when Courtenay was summoning Wycliffe to London, Pope Gregory XI left Avignon for
Rome, his authority in everywhere but England theoretically re-established. On
May 22nd he sent copies of his Bull against Wycliffe to the Archbishop
of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, King Edward III, Adam Houghton - the
just-appointed Chancellor of England - and to the University of Oxford. The 18
theses were listed, denounced as erroneous, and declared "dangerous to Church
and State". If this had been Galileo, they would have shown him the instruments
of torture. If this had been Giordano Bruno, they would have taken him directly
to the bonfire. But by the time the emissary reached England, Edward was dead
and Ghent was holding all the strings, including the string that would have
opened any of those five copies to the attention of the public. He kept them
knotted for as long as he could - which was only until December. In the
meanwhile the "Good Parliament" went into session in October, and the war with the
Curia was declared.
Wycliffe was
given the opportunity to present his theses before Parliament, after which he
published them, and his defence of them, in a tract. In March 1378, when
Parliament had been prorogued, he was summoned to the Bishop's Palace at
Lambeth to defend himself - a meeting, rather like the one with Courtenay,
disrupted by the mob outside. King Richard's mother, Joan of Kent, joined Ghent
in supporting Wycliffe, and the bishops retreated, on the condition that
Wycliffe would speak no more in public on the controversy. Back in Oxford, where
the Vice-Chancellor had his copy of the Bull, Wycliffe was confined in Black
Hall, until the latter's supporters threatened violence if he wasn't released.
But if you
can't speak in public, you can still write and publish. So, in "De
incarcerandis fedelibus", he insisted - along with thirty-two other
conclusions, that it should be a right for the excommunicated to make appeal
against that excommunication to the king - presumably he was anticipating this
outcome for himself, and wanted to get his appeal in before the event. And he
did so, very deliberately, in both English and Latin, making again and again a
case that ordinary people, even the vast majority who were illiterate (it could
be read to them, could it not?), could understand: that the source of all
religious authority is the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New, because
it is the Book of God. The head of the world is God, and kings are his
appointed surrogates on Earth; the head of the Church is Christ, and there is
no role for any Pope or Bishop other than in the interpretation of God and
Christ to men, and the leadership of matters spiritual. No politics. No
war-making. No wealth. No power beyond the soul. Oh very, very, very dangerous.
And then
Pope Gregory died, in 1378, and just as there had been two Popes for the past
seventy years, so now there were two candidates, a Pope and an anti-Pope so to
say, and both sent their representatives around the Christian world, vying for
support. Wycliffe was not opposed to Popes as such, only to bad Popes, despots,
empire-builders, money-spinners, and he was convinced that Bartolomeo Prignan,
the man who wanted to style himself Urban VI, was the sort of Pope to make
manifest his theories. He even made a speech in front of the ambassadors, in
Parliament, advocating for the right of asylum in Westminster Abbey - something
that he himself was soon going to need. Urban won the Vatican that same year,
but proved a bitter disappointment to Wycliffe, who withdrew from almost all
ecclesiastical politics as a consequence, focusing now on his translation of
the Bible, and the final volume of his Summa, the wonderfully titled "De
simonia, de apostasia, de blasphemia". Simony is religious bribery and
corruption; the other two words don't need me to translate them.
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| sending out the Lollards |
But I said "almost all", and I meant "almost all". In the closing chapter of "De civili
dominio", Wycliffe launched an attack on the monastic orders, including those
like the mendicants who had supported him, and who his theories theoretically
supported. But "the case of the orders which hold property is that of them
all". Not simply dangerous but, on this occasion, surely rather foolish.
Yet this was
the battle that he most wanted to fight, and he makes the case again and again,
in the "Trialogus", the "Dialogus", the "Opus evangelicum", in
several sermons, in many of what were later published as his "Polemical
Writings". The Church has no need for these sects. The concept of the Nazir
in the Bible does not infer monastic orders; so they and their possessions
should be abolished. Monks should not be recipients of alms either, but should
take up real jobs, like their fellow parishioners. And the people were inspired
by it - historians need to ask the still-unasked question: how significant was
Wycliffe to the mood behind the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and could it have
happened without him? The sad part of the answer is that, after the failure of
that revolt, the monastic lands that had been "liberated" became the
possessions of the king and his nobles, who simply took more power unto
themselves, and set back the progress of Parliament in so doing.
Wycliffe’s
doctrine of "The Lord's Supper" was formulated between May and November 1381, exactly
the same months as the Peasants' Revolt. In twelve short sentences he tore
apart the claims of the Catholic Church in respect of Transubstantiation - the
rather silly idea that the Eucharistic bread and wine transform themselves into
Christ's blood and body when you consume them - and demonstrated how the Mass
had become the principal tool by which the Church used mystery and superstition
to exert power over the uneducated. The chancellor of the University of Oxford
responded by declaring it heretical. Wycliffe appealed against this verdict to
the King, not to the Pope or to the ecclesiastical authorities of the land, and
published another work on the subject, again in English, intended for the
common people. Who he then alienated by expressing "disapproval" of the revolt
- perhaps because he was being publicly blamed for it, and already had the
heresy battle to fight without needing that one as well. But John of Ghent was
blamed, and rightly so, and John of Ghent was Wycliffe's principal defender.
When the
Revolt ended, and with Ghent now a political has-been, Courtenay, who had been
elevated to the Archbishopric of Canterbury in the meanwhile, summoned an
ecclesiastical assembly. Though Wycliffe wasn't personally named, the 24
propositions that were discussed were all his; ten of them were declared
heretical, fourteen erroneous, and expression of such views was formally
prohibited, even in a sermon or an academic seminar. But such a prohibition
required an Act of Parliament, and the Commons rejected the bill. The king
issued a decree permitting the arrest of those in error, and the entire city of
Oxford was placed under a ban, with Wycliffe's supporters summoned one by one
to recant.
On November
18th 1382, Wycliffe was himself summoned before a synod at Oxford.
Having suffered a stroke during the summer of that year, he was already a half-broken
man, and perhaps this led to sympathy among the synod members - or maybe they
were aware of the support he had at court as well as Parliament and didn't want
to risk their own careers. Excommunication was an option, but it was not
carried out. Nor was he deprived of his living.
Wycliffe
went home to Lutterworth, unrepentant, undaunted by the stroke, or by the
enemies he had gleaned. He published another tract against the monasteries, and
one against the Pope as well, declaring that he was not a "true"
Pope, that he "had become involved in mischievous conflicts", by which he meant
the "crusade" currently being fought in Flanders. He published the "Trialogus",
and was working on the "Opus evangelicum", when he suffered a second
stroke, on Holy Innocents' Day by all ironies, December 28th 1384.
He died three days later.
And so,
finally, to the date at the top of this page, but it needed the journey of the full
tale to arrive there. May 4th 1415, fully thirty years after his
death, and with the followers of Jan Huss preaching Wycliffian ideas all over
Europe, preparing the ground for the Protestant revolution soon to come. The
Council of Constance, the body that would end the western schism by naming one
and only one "true" Pope, took a moment aside from its broader deliberations on
this day, to declare John Wycliffe "a stiff-necked heretic", and to place him
under the ban of the Church - excommunication of his books, since clearly he
wasn't going to be speaking again in person. Those books were ordered to be
burned, and his remains exhumed for the same purpose - though it would take
twelve years before that new Pope, Martin V, insisted on it. Wycliffe's ashes
were thrown into the river Swift, which is the river that flows through
Lutterworth. As to the books, many people had hidden their copies in the
intervening years, many more had made samizdat copies of them. Many were found,
and burned, but Wycliffe's words survived.
A "complete" Wycliffe Bible can be found by clicking here or here.
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| The burning of the corpse, 1415 |
¹ * For a detailed explanation of the Church's position on this, Dostoievski will give his Grand Inquisitor the opportunity to express it in full, in a chapter of his novel “The Brothers Karamazov”. Click here to read it.
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