John Wycliffe
John Wycliffe died in his church at Lutterworth, but the men who hated him would not let his body rest. In 1428, more than forty years after his death, his corpse, or perhaps a neighbour's, was dug out of consecrated ground. On the orders of the bishop, the remains were burned and the ashes thrown into the River Swift, which flows through the town. This was the verdict on a man who had been a theology professor at the University of Oxford, a Catholic priest, and a philosopher whom contemporaries called second to none. How did a scholastic philosopher born in a Yorkshire village come to be condemned as a heretic? Why did kings and dukes protect him while bishops summoned him to answer for his ideas? And how did a thinker who has been called the morning star of the English Reformation reach so far that his writings stirred a reformer in distant Bohemia?
Hipswell, near Richmond in the North Riding of Yorkshire, was the village where Wycliffe was born, though even his date of birth is disputed. He was conventionally assigned the year 1324, but Hudson and Kenny note only that records suggest the mid-1320s, while Conti places it after 1331. He received his early education close to home before making his way to Oxford, where he is known to have been around 1345. Thomas Bradwardine, Archbishop of Canterbury, shaped the young scholar through his book On the Cause of God Against the Pelagians, a bold recovery of the Pauline-Augustinian doctrine of grace. The Black Death, which reached England in the summer of 1348, marked him just as deeply. According to Robert Vaughn, the plague gave Wycliffe very gloomy views about the condition and prospects of the human race. He became a priest in September 1351, and would have been at Oxford during the St Scholastica Day riot, in which sixty-three students and a number of townspeople were killed.
In 1356, Wycliffe completed his bachelor of arts degree at Merton College as a junior fellow, and that same year produced a small treatise, The Last Age of the Church. The plague had subsided seven years earlier, yet it convinced him that the close of the 14th century would mark the end of the world. Where other writers saw God's judgement on sinful people, Wycliffe saw an indictment of an unworthy clergy, whose high mortality had been filled by replacements he considered uneducated or disreputable. By 1361 he was Master of Balliol College, and the college presented him to the parish of Fillingham in Lincolnshire, which he visited rarely. He gave up the headship of Balliol but continued to live at Oxford, said to have had rooms in the buildings of The Queen's College. In 1365, Simon Islip, Archbishop of Canterbury, placed him at the head of Canterbury Hall, where twelve young men were preparing for the priesthood. When Islip died in 1366, his successor Simon Langham, a man of monastic training, turned the leadership over to a monk. Wycliffe's appeal to Rome was refused in 1371. The incident was typical of the rivalry between monks or friars and secular clergy at Oxford. He took his bachelor's degree in theology in 1369 and his doctorate in 1372, and in 1374 received the crown living of St Mary's Church, Lutterworth in Leicestershire, which he held until his death.
De civili dominio, On Civil Dominion, drew its arguments from the works of Richard FitzRalph and called for the royal divestment of all church property. Wycliffe argued that the Church had fallen into sin, that it ought to give up all its property, and that the clergy must live in poverty. His broader theory of dominion held that the church was not allowed to own property or have ecclesiastic courts, and that men in mortal sin were not entitled to exercise authority in church or state, nor to own property. Dominium, he taught, is always conferred by God. Injuries inflicted by a king on someone personally should be borne submissively, but injuries by a king against God should be patiently resisted even to death. Gravely sinful kings and popes forfeited their divine right to obedience. The tendency of high offices of state to be held by clerics was resented by powerful nobles such as John of Gaunt, the third son of King Edward III, whose power was challenged by the wealth of the clergy. Gaunt also believed church wealth could fund the government's military needs. Wycliffe's connection with the Duke may have begun as early as 1371, or through a 1374 mission at Bruges, negotiating with Gregory XI's papal envoys on disputed points between king and pope. Versions of his dominion teaching were later taken up by Lollards and Hussites.
In 1377, Pope Gregory XI censured 19 articles of De civili dominio in Wycliffe's first official condemnation. Wycliffe was summoned before William Courtenay, Bishop of London, to a convocation at St Paul's Cathedral on the 19th of February 1377. Gaunt, the Earl Marshal Henry Percy, and a number of armed supporters accompanied him. A hostile crowd gathered, and at the entrance an angry exchange broke out between the Bishop of London and John of Gaunt over whether Wycliffe could sit. Gaunt declared he would humble the pride of the English clergy, hinting at the intent to secularise the Church's possessions. The assembly broke up, and anti-Gaunt riots followed in London the next day. On the 22nd of May 1377, Gregory XI sent five copies of a bull against Wycliffe, dispatching them to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, King Edward III, the Chancellor, and the university, enclosing 18 theses denounced as erroneous. Edward III died on the 21st of June 1377, and the bull did not reach England before December. In March 1378, Wycliffe was summoned to Lambeth Palace, but Sir Lewis Clifford, in the name of the queen mother Joan of Kent, forbade the bishops to proceed to a definite sentence. They satisfied themselves with forbidding him to speak further. In 1382, Courtenay, now Archbishop of Canterbury, called an assembly at London. During the consultations on the 21st of May an earthquake occurred. The participants were terrified, but Courtenay declared the earthquake a favourable sign meaning the purification of the earth from erroneous doctrine, and the result of this Earthquake Synod was assured.
From 1380 onwards, Wycliffe devoted himself to writings rejecting transubstantiation, and strongly criticised the friars who supported it. In the summer of 1381 he formulated his doctrine of the Lord's Supper in twelve short sentences and made it a duty to advocate it everywhere. As long as he limited his attacks to abuses and the wealth of the Church, he could rely on part of the clergy and aristocracy. Once he dismissed the traditional doctrine of transubstantiation, this view cost him the support of John of Gaunt and many others. He believed the communion bread was very God in form of bread, not merely symbolic, yet he rejected transubstantiation in favour of consubstantiation. In his words, the bread while becoming by virtue of Christ's words the body of Christ does not cease to be bread; when it has become sacramentally the body of Christ, it remains bread substantially. His preaching also expressed a strong belief in predestination that let him declare an invisible church of the elect, made up of those predestined to be saved, rather than the visible Catholic Church. To Wycliffe, the Church was the totality of those predestined to blessedness, and outside that one universal Church there was no salvation. He accepted the existence of purgatory but not the usefulness of intercession for those saved within it, and he rejected the selling of indulgences.
Itinerant preachers, called poor priests or poor preachers, were appointed by Wycliffe to carry his teaching throughout the realm, and most were laymen. A contemporary record claims sympathetic local knights would force people to hear the preaching, sometimes acting as armed guards in the parish church to prevent disputation. These preachers attacked not only the wealth of the monasteries but the secular properties of the nobility. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was sparked in part by this preaching. Although Wycliffe disapproved of the revolt, some of his disciples justified the killing of Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury. The bull of Gregory XI fixed upon his followers the name of Lollards, intended as an opprobrious epithet, but it became to them a name of honour. They preached God's law, without which no one could be justified. Wycliffe aimed to do away with the existing hierarchy and replace it with poor priests who lived in poverty, were bound by no vows, and had received no formal consecration. His Latin writings greatly influenced the Czech reformer Jan Hus, whose own De Ecclesia summarised Wycliffe's work of the same name, with additional material from Wycliffe's De potentate papae. Some Bohemian followers even took a piece of his tomb to Prague, where it was worshipped as a relic.
Holy Innocents' Day, the 28th of December 1384, found Wycliffe saying Mass in the parish church when he suffered a stroke, and he died a few days later. He had been summoned to Rome in 1383 but, after an earlier debilitating stroke, was excused from travel; he was neither excommunicated then nor deprived of his living. From Lutterworth he had sent out tracts against the monks and Pope Urban VI, who had not turned out to be the reforming pope Wycliffe hoped for. His last work, the Opus evangelicum, whose final part he named Of Antichrist, remained uncompleted. The reprisals came after his death. The anti-Lollard statute of 1401, De heretico comburendo, classed heresy as a form of sedition or treason and ordered Lollard books burnt; a person who refused to abjure could be burnt. The Constitutions of Oxford of 1408 named John Wycliffe as a Lollard and his writings as heretical, and decreed that new translations of Scripture into English be first authorised by a bishop. The Council of Constance declared Wycliffe a heretic on the 4th of May 1415 and ordered his works burned and his remains removed from consecrated ground, an order confirmed by Pope Martin V and carried out in 1428. In the centre of Lutterworth, a Grade II-listed memorial obelisk to Wycliffe was erected in June 1897, near where the Wycliffe Memorial Methodist Church was later built.
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Common questions
Who was John Wycliffe?
John Wycliffe (c. 1328 to the 31st of December 1384) was an English scholastic philosopher, Christian reformer, Catholic priest, and a theology professor at the University of Oxford. He became an influential dissident within the Catholic priesthood during the 14th century and is often considered an important predecessor to Protestantism.
Why was John Wycliffe declared a heretic?
The Council of Constance declared John Wycliffe a heretic on the 4th of May 1415 and banned his writings. His rejection of transubstantiation, his attacks on the papacy and monasticism, and his theory that sinful clergy forfeited authority and property put him in conflict with the Church.
What was John Wycliffe's theory of dominion?
John Wycliffe's theory of dominion held that the church was not allowed to own property or have ecclesiastic courts, and that men in mortal sin were not entitled to exercise authority in church or state, nor to own property. He set out the political form of this argument in De civili dominio, which called for the royal divestment of all church property.
Did John Wycliffe translate the Bible into English?
John Wycliffe is traditionally credited with a translation of the Vulgate into Middle English, now known as Wycliffe's Bible, completed before 1384 with later versions by his assistant John Purvey in 1388 and 1395. More recent scholarship has minimised his actual involvement for lack of direct contemporary evidence, and it is not possible to define exactly his part, if any, in the translations.
Who were the Lollards connected to John Wycliffe?
The Lollards were followers of John Wycliffe, derogatorily named by their orthodox contemporaries in the 15th and 16th centuries. They adopted beliefs attributed to Wycliffe such as predestination and iconoclasm, with some questioning transubstantiation, monasticism, requiem masses, and the role of the Papacy.
What happened to John Wycliffe's body after his death?
The Council of Constance ordered John Wycliffe's remains removed from consecrated church ground, an order confirmed by Pope Martin V and carried out in 1428. His corpse, or a neighbour's, was exhumed, the remains were burned, and the ashes were drowned in the River Swift, which flows through Lutterworth.
How did John Wycliffe influence Jan Hus?
John Wycliffe's writings in Latin greatly influenced the philosophy and teaching of the Czech reformer Jan Hus (c. 1369 to 1415). Hus' De Ecclesia summarised Wycliffe's work of the same name, with additional material drawn from Wycliffe's De potentate papae.
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