Wycliffism

Wycliffism cannot be understood without Wyclif, but it cannot be reduced to him either. A brief reminder; the detail belongs to the article John Wycliffe^[4].

An Oxford doctor in the service of the Crown

Born in Yorkshire around 1328, educated at Oxford (Merton, Balliol, Queen's), doctor of theology in 1372, rector of Lutterworth from 1374, Wyclif first placed his learning at the service of the Crown: in 1374 he sat on the Bruges embassy that negotiated with the papal envoys over English provisions and tributes to Avignon^[5]. A realist philosopher, holding that universals truly exist as ideas in God, he drew from this a theory of dominium: all power and all property are held legitimately only in a state of grace, and a sinful clergy must be stripped of its temporal goods by the secular arm^[6].

This theory, set out in De civili dominio (1376), made him the man of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and the enemy of the English episcopate: as early as 1377, Pope Gregory XI had eighteen to nineteen of his propositions censured in five bulls dated 22 May^[7]. Summoned to St Paul's in London in February 1377 and then to Lambeth in 1378, Wyclif was each time saved by royal protection, the second time through the intervention of Princess Joan of Kent, mother of the young Richard II^[8].

The eucharistic turning point (1380-1381)

Until then, Wyclif had attacked the wealth and power of the clergy, ground on which many orthodox Catholics followed him. Around 1380 he crossed a line no Catholic could cross with him: he denied transubstantiation, as defined by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). According to his so-called theory of remanence, bread remains true bread after consecration while being sacramentally the body of Christ, so Christ is not present in it in his own substance^[9]. A council of Oxford doctors condemned this teaching as early as 1381; the ecclesiastical council of Blackfriars, in May 1382, remembered in history as the "Earthquake Council" after a tremor shook London during the debates, condemned twenty-four Wycliffite propositions, ten of them as heretical^[10].

Wyclif then withdrew to Lutterworth, where he wrote tirelessly (Trialogus, English sermons) until his death on 31 December 1384 from the effects of a stroke that had left him paralysed^[11]. He died without ever being solemnly condemned as a heretic: it is that posthumous judgment, and the struggle against his disciples, that properly make up Wycliffism.

Wycliffism is not a rumour: it is a library. The Lollards hawked precise manuscripts about, and it is this circulation of writings that allowed the heresy to outlive its founder by fifty years^[12].

The master's Latin treatises

The learned framework is Latin: De civili dominio (1376) for stripping the clergy, De ecclesia for the Church of the predestined, De veritate sacrae scripturae (1378) for the sovereign authority of Scripture, De eucharistia and then the Trialogus (1382-1383), a dialogue between Truth, Falsehood and Wisdom, as the final sum of his theology^[13]. These treatises, edited in the nineteenth century by the Wyclif Society, are the very texts on which the censors of Constance would work: the 45 articles of 1415 are drawn from them proposition by proposition^[14].

"Holy Scripture is the law of Christ, and every Christian is bound to believe it explicitly." — John Wyclif, De veritate sacrae scripturae, 1378, ch. 1 (Ignispedia translation)^[15]

The English sermons and the Bible in the vernacular

Alongside the Latin of the schools, Wyclif produced in his last years a voluminous corpus in Middle English: some three hundred sermons intended for itinerant preachers, and the decisive impulse behind a complete translation of the Bible from the Vulgate, the collective enterprise of his close associates and then of John Purvey, completed after his death^[16]. The Wycliffite originality is not translation itself: the Waldensians of Lyon had the Gospel read in Provençal as early as the twelfth century. It lies in making uncontrolled vernacular reading the norm of faith against the Magisterium: each reader, text in hand, becomes judge of the Church^[17].

The Wycliffite propositions form a system, not a collection of quips. Five theses carry the whole, and each would be struck down at Constance^[18].

Dominium founded on grace

The mother political thesis: no one legitimately holds authority or goods while in a state of mortal sin, since all human dominium derives from divine dominium and subsists only in grace^[19]. The practical corollary: the king can and must confiscate the goods of an unworthy clergy, and the people may refuse tithes to bad priests. Under the guise of reform, the entire Christian social order becomes conditional: since no one knows with certainty who is in grace, no property and no jurisdiction is ever secure^[20].

The invisible Church of the predestined alone

The true Church, for Wyclif, is not the visible body governed by the pope and the bishops: it is the congregatio praedestinatorum, the assembly of the predestined alone, known to God only^[21]. Hence "the pope is not the immediate and closest vicar of Christ" (Papa non est immediatus et proximus vicarius Christi), the 37th proposition of Constance, and a prelate in mortal sin is no longer pope, bishop or priest before God^[22]. The visibility of the Church, its hierarchy, its apostolic continuity: swept away at a stroke by supposed grace.

Scripture alone against Tradition

Wyclif makes the Bible, read without the Magisterium, the sovereign and sufficient judge of all doctrine and all authority: what Scripture does not expressly state, the Church has no right to impose^[23]. Indulgences, religious orders, the veneration of images, prayers for the dead, clerical celibacy: everything not read in the text falls. This is the first articulated medieval formulation of what the Reformation would call, a century and a half later, Scripture alone, with the same presupposition: that the text interprets itself, without the Church that wrote, compiled and transmitted it^[24].

Eucharistic remanence

The theologically decisive point: after consecration, bread remains bread; it is at once true bread and, sacramentally, the body of Christ. Christ is therefore not present in his own substance, as Lateran IV (1215) and then Constance defined^[25]. For contemporaries this was the major scandal: as the Catholic Encyclopedia notes, "this open denial of a doctrine which touched every Christian to the heart" cost Wyclif much of his popularity, well beyond clerical circles^[26].

"This open denial of a doctrine which touched every Christian to the heart, and the reaction that followed the peasants' revolt, cost Wyclif much of his popularity." — Catholic Encyclopedia, "John Wyclif" article (Ignispedia translation)^[27]

The rejection of orders, vows and sacraments received from the unworthy

Monks and mendicant friars are "private sects" contrary to the rule of Christ; auricular confession is useless, contrition sufficing, especially if the confessor is in sin; excommunications fulminated by an unworthy clergy do not bind; tithes and offerings to bad priests are a sin for the giver^[28]. Every believer thus becomes judge of his pastors, and every sacrament depends, in its perceived efficacy, on the moral state of the minister, against the constant doctrine that the unworthy minister validly confers the sacraments, Christ acting through him (ex opere operato)^[29].

Three waves of condemnation: the overall picture

Between the second and third waves lies the whole of militant Wycliffism: the Lollards, their Conclusions, their burnings, and the English Bible that fed them^[30].

With Wyclif dead, his school might have died with him: Oxford purges itself, Courtenay stands watch, and the master named no successor. Instead comes expansion: itinerant preachers carry the doctrine into the counties, knights protect it at court, artisans and women read it in conventicles. The Catholic Encyclopedia sums it up: the best account of Lollardy, at least in its early stages, is found in the twelve "Conclusions" presented to Parliament and posted on the doors of Westminster and St Paul's in 1395^[31].

"The best summary of Lollardy, at least in its early stages, is probably to be found in the twelve 'Conclusions' presented to Parliament and posted on the doors of Westminster Abbey and St Paul's in 1395." — Catholic Encyclopedia, "Lollards" article (Ignispedia translation)^[32]

Where the name comes from: darnel or mumbling?

The very word is an insult whose etymology is debated: either the Latin lolium, the darnel the enemy sows in the householder's field (Mt 13:25), with heretics as weeds to be rooted out, or the Middle Dutch lollen, "to mumble" prayers, a nickname already stuck to the Continent's mendicant Beghards^[33]. Both senses suit their adversaries: a sect that mumbles Scripture in English and must be torn out like darnel. The Wycliffites themselves called each other "true men", "Christians", or "poor priests"^[34]. One confusion to avoid: the Continental Lollards, Rhenish namesakes of the Beghards, have nothing to do with the English Lollards; see the article Beguins and Heterodox Beghards^[35].

The "poor priests": itinerant preaching

As early as 1380-1382, Wyclif sent out, or inspired, preachers with neither parish nor benefice, dressed in long russet gowns, who travelled fairs and markets with the English Bible in hand: Nicholas Hereford, John Aston, Lawrence Bedeman, then a generation of anonymous men^[36]. They preached in English, heard confessions, married and buried outside any parochial framework. Their strength was mobility; their weakness, lack of training: the master's learned doctrine simplified into slogans, "no priest in sin is a priest", "the consecrated host is mere bread", which the bishops had no trouble getting condemned^[37].

From knights at court to town artisans

Lollardy is not a movement of paupers. At the court of Richard II, a handful of Lollard knights, including Sir Lewis Clifford, who would only recant in 1402, protected the preachers, circulated the manuscripts and brought before Parliament, in 1395 and again in 1410, schemes to confiscate ecclesiastical goods: Wycliffite dominium translated into bills^[38]. Below them, the base was artisanal and mercantile: tailors, smiths, masons, small traders of London, Bristol, Leicester and Norwich, literate laypeople able to read the English Bible and discuss it among themselves^[39]. Women held a notable place: they hosted the conventicles, hid the books, and some preached, which the courts noted with particular severity, as at the 1429 Norwich trial of Margery Baxter of Norwich^[40].

Conventicles and "schools": a parallel Church

Pressed by repression after 1401, the Lollards organized themselves into domestic conventicles: some ten believers around a reader commenting on a Gospel booklet, learning the Conclusions by heart, copying out the sermons^[41]. Historians speak of "Lollard schools": not buildings, but networks of clandestine reading in which an artisan knew long passages of the English New Testament by heart^[42]. It is this invisible domestic Church, elusive because it had no clergy, no premises and no registers, that survived the burnings and that the investigators of Henry V and then Henry VI hunted village by village^[43].

In January 1395, taking advantage of a Parliament assembled at Westminster, the Lollards placarded on the doors of the abbey and of St Paul's Cathedral a manifesto in English: the Twelve Conclusions, addressed to Parliament and the king^[44]. The gesture was calculated, posting on the church door as one posts a thesis, and the scandal immense: for the first time, learned heresy spoke the people's tongue, in public, at the heart of power^[45].

"When the Church of England began to dote after temporal possessions [...] the faith of the Church, since that endowment, has declined." — Twelve Conclusions, 1st conclusion (English text, Ignispedia translation)^[46]

Parliament did not follow. Richard II, at first accommodating, let Archbishop Courtenay have the text condemned, and eighteen Lollard propositions were censured at London in 1396^[47]. But the manifesto had done its work: all England now knew what the sect professed, and the Crown knew it must choose its side^[48].

With the accession of Henry IV (1399) and of Archbishop Thomas Arundel (1396), tolerance ended: heresy became a crime of state, and England acquired the first systematic repressive arsenal in its history^[49].

De heretico comburendo (1401): heresy becomes a capital crime

In the Parliament of 1401, at the clergy's request, Henry IV promulgated the statute De heretico comburendo: the obstinate heretic, delivered by the bishop to the secular arm, would be publicly burned^[50]. The first to pay the price was the priest William Sawtrey, condemned by the Convocation of Canterbury: he went to the stake at St Paul's in London in March 1401, barely days after the statute was voted^[51]. Others followed, among them the tailor John Badby of Evesham, burned in 1410 for denying the Real Presence despite the exhortations of the Prince of Wales himself, the future Henry V, who attended the execution^[52].

Arundel's Constitutions (1407-1409): locking down Oxford and the language

Arundel then struck at the intellectual root: his Provincial Constitutions, settled at Oxford in 1407 and published in 1409, forbade translating Scripture into English without episcopal authorization, preaching outside one's parish without licence, and publicly disputing condemned articles^[53]. Oxford, the seat of infection, was placed under tutelage: visitations, oaths, prior censorship of books. It was the first modern apparatus for controlling print before printing, applied to manuscripts^[54].

Oldcastle: when heresy takes up arms (1413-1417)

The leader of Lollardy under Henry V was a great lord: Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham by marriage, a veteran of the Welsh wars and a friend of the king^[55]. His Lollardy had been notorious for years, but his rank protected him, until 1413: arrested, tried and condemned as a heretic, he escaped from the Tower and organized, on the night of 9-10 January 1414, an armed gathering at Fickett's Field near London. Henry V, forewarned, scattered the conspirators in person^[56]. Oldcastle fled to Wales, was retaken in 1417, then hanged and burned at St Giles in London in December 1417^[57]. In that same year 1414, Parliament voted the Suppression of Heresy Act: justices of the peace and royal officers must henceforth hunt heresy ex officio, and lords who shelter heretics face confiscation^[58].

Effective repression, and its limits

The repression achieved its political aim: after 1417 there was no more Lollard party, no more public preaching, no more bills in Parliament^[59]. But it never managed to root out the conventicles: the Norwich trials (1428-1431, including the burning of William White in September 1428), the abjurations gathered under Henry VI and the investigations down to the 1480s-1510s show embers glowing under the ash, embers on which the first preachers of the English Reformation would blow a century later^[60]. On the Catholic reading of these severities, neither angelic nor black-legend, see the articles Answering the Objection from the Inquisition and Heretics and the Black Legend of the Inquisition.

The most enduring weapon of Wycliffism is neither a sermon nor a manifesto: it is a book. The English "Wyclif" Bible, the first complete translation into Middle English from the Vulgate, is the collective work launched at his prompting: a New Testament of rugged literalness attributed to Wyclif himself and his close associates (c. 1380), an Old Testament pushed by Nicholas Hereford to the middle of Baruch (3:20) before the Blackfriars condemnation (1382) forced him to flee to Rome, then an idiomatic and fluent revision of the whole attributed to John Purvey and completed around 1388, after the master's death^[61].

Some 250 manuscripts survive, complete or partial, an immense figure for a forbidden work, making it one of the manuscript best-sellers of the English Middle Ages^[62]. Their use was clandestine: read aloud in conventicles, lent from village to village, hidden in the false bottoms of chests, they often bear their readers' marks, marginal notes, underlined passages, reading calendars^[63]. Owning an English Bible became, after 1409, evidence of heresy in itself: several of those condemned at Norwich and Coventry paid for it with their freedom or their lives^[64].

"John Purvey drank deeply of his teaching, he who dwelt under Wyclif's roof." — Henry Knighton, Chronicon, late fourteenth century, on the translator (Ignispedia translation)^[65]

The detailed history of the translation, the two versions, Hereford and Purvey, the 1850 Forshall-Madden edition, belongs to the article John Wycliffe; here the point lies elsewhere: never before the Lollards had a heresy placed in every hand, in everyone's tongue, the very text from which it drew its authority against the Church^[66].

Wycliffism might have died out as a failed insurrection. It was reborn at Prague, through a marriage, some manuscripts and a copyist of genius^[67].

The Anne of Bohemia bridge

In 1382, Richard II married Anne of Bohemia, sister of the future Emperor Sigismund: between the two courts there grew up a coming and going of students, chaplains and books^[68]. Around 1401-1402, the Prague master Jerome of Prague brought back from his stay at Oxford copies of Wyclif's treatises, Trialogus, De ecclesia, De veritate, which set the university of Prague ablaze^[69]. As early as 1403, forty-five propositions drawn from Wyclif were officially proscribed there: a sign that the danger was already judged serious, even before Jan Hus appeared on the public stage^[70].

Hus, copyist and heir

Jan Hus (c. 1370 – 1415), rector of the university of Prague and preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel, translated the Trialogus into Czech, copied out several treatises in his own hand and took up the Wycliffite ecclesiology, the Church of the predestined and the unworthy prelate fallen from office, adding his own vehemence against indulgences and simony^[71]. The Wycliffite affair became the Hussite affair: condemned at Rome as early as 1413, Hus was summoned to Constance, where on 6 July 1415 he joined the English master in condemnation, nine weeks apart^[72]. The full story belongs to the articles Hussitism and Jan Hus: it is not retold here, except to fix the filiation, without Wyclif no Hus, without Hus no Hussite wars^[73].

The Council of Constance, whose general history is told in the dedicated article, dealt with the Wycliffite dossier from its 8th session, 4 May 1415: after examining the seized treatises, it anathematized 45 articles drawn from Wyclif's work, since reproduced in Denzinger under numbers 1151 to 1195^[74]. The decree also struck the heresiarch's memory and ordered the exhumation of his remains, a sentence Bishop Richard Fleming of Lincoln would have carried out in 1428: the bones, burned at Lutterworth, were thrown into the Swift, a tributary of the Avon^[75].

Eight families of errors, among the 45 articles, say the essence of the system:

"The holy council declares, defines and decrees that [Wyclif] was a notorious heretic [...] and anathematizes his memory, ordering that his body and bones, if they can be discerned from the bodies of the faithful, be exhumed and cast far from ecclesiastical burial." — Council of Constance, 8th session, 4 May 1415, decree against Wyclif (Ignispedia translation)^[76]

A share of truth to be acknowledged

Wycliffism was born of a real scandal: the Avignon Church and the Great Schism (1378-1417) too often displayed worldly, pluralist, simoniac prelates, and saints, a Catherine of Siena, denounced this with as much vehemence as Wyclif, without breaking away^[77]. The hunger for Scripture, the thirst for preaching in an understood tongue, the refusal of pomp: all this is evangelical in principle. The Church acknowledged as much in deeds: the duly approved vernacular Bible existed before as after (and exists today in every language), and the Council of Trent as well as Vatican II would recall the obligation to feed the people with Scripture^[78].

Why condemnation was unavoidable

But from partial truth Wyclif made a false system. Three ruptures render it incompatible with the Catholic faith: breaking the visible succession by reducing the Church to the invisible predestined contradicts Christ's promise to be with his Church "always, to the end of the age" (Mt 28:20) and the command to "listen" to it (Lk 10:16)^[79]; denying the substantial presence in the sacrament of unity contradicts the most explicit word, "my flesh is true food" (Jn 6:55), and ten centuries of adoration^[80]; making all authority conditional on the supposed grace of its holder delivers Church and city to each person's private judgment, that is, to spiritual anarchy, the old Donatist error already settled by St Augustine in the fourth century^[81].

What Catholics retain, with charity

No Christian rejoices at any burning: each Sawtrey, each Badby, each Oldcastle is a soul the Church would have wished to bring back, and the slowness, harshness and political calculations mixed into the repression belong to the dossier too, though legitimate coercion, when heresy threatened the peace of the realm, must not be judged through today's spectacles^[82]. Above all the lesson remains: a reform that begins by cutting away, altar, pope, confessional, cloister, ends by impoverishing those it claimed to enrich. The Lollard conventicles, Bible in hand but with neither altar nor priest, are the demonstration across a century of history: one can keep the Book while losing the Church, but one does not keep the sense of the Book for long without the Church that gave it^[83].

"If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." — 1 Jn 1:8: against the claim, common to radical Wycliffites and the Spirituals of the day, of a state of perfection that would free one from obedience and the means of grace^[84].

• The founder's life and work: John Wycliffe (c. 1328-1384) — dominium, Trialogus, English Bible, death at Lutterworth
• The Bohemian heir: Jan Hus — the Trialogus in Czech, Bethlehem, Constance; and the movement: Hussitism
• The judging council: see the article on the Council of Constance — the end of the Schism, Hus, the 45 articles
• The poor cousins of Lyon and their Gospel in Provencal: The Waldensians (1170-1532) — Waldo, evangelical poverty and the break
• The dualists of the Midi: Catharism — perfects, consolamentum, Catholic refutation
• The holy war of 1209-1229: The Albigensians — Beziers, Muret, Toulouse and the Treaty of Meaux-Paris
• The Balkan roots: Bogomilism (10th-15th century) — the priest Bogomil and the road to the West
• The Armenian ancestors: Paulicianism — Constantine of Mananalis, Sergius, Tephrike
• The Franciscan Spirituals and absolute poverty: The Fraticelli — Olivi, the burnings of the Midi
• The doctrine of impeccability: The Heresy of the Free Spirit — the freed soul, its theses, its condemnation
• Understanding the repression: Answering the Objection from the Inquisition and Heretics and the Black Legend of the Inquisition
• A century later, the same questions: Martin Luther — Scripture alone, the 1517 break