John Wycliffe: England's First Reformer and the Break with Papal Authority

Why England Took Up Reform First

The morals of the clergy were most likely a secondary cause of the English demand for reform. Higher clergy were generally peaceable about celibacy, although a bishop named Burnell was said to have five sons, and he was probably an entirely exceptional case. Wycliffe, Langland, Gower, and Chaucer all agree that monks and friars liked good food and loose women. Yet the anger of the British is unlikely to have come from such lapses, from nuns who came to services with a dog on a leash and a pet bird on the hand, or from monks who competed with each other in chanting. In the last case, English humor invented a helper for the devil whose job was to collect the syllables dropped by the chanters in this sacred contest of word-mangling, and for each slip he assigned a year of hell to the guilty.

The Wealth of the English Church

What stung the purse of the common people and the government was the growing and migrating wealth of the English Church. In some cases the clergy paid a tenth of their income to the state, yet they firmly believed that they could not be taxed without the consent of their own church councils. Bishops and great abbots sat in the House of Lords, and they also met directly or by proxy in councils under the archbishop of Canterbury or York to decide all matters of religion and the clergy. The king usually chose his senior officials from the clergy, the most literate class in society.

A lawsuit by ordinary people against the clergy over church property could be heard in royal courts.
Clerical criminals, however, could be judged only in church courts.
In many towns the Church rented out its land and claimed the right to judge its tenants even for minor offences.

All this stirred resentment, but the strongest cause of anger was the flood of English church wealth flowing in the fourteenth century to the popes at Avignon, in France. It was estimated that the money of English subjects that reached the papal treasury exceeded the revenue of the English king and government themselves.

Laws Against Papal Claims

A party opposed to the clergy formed at court, and laws were passed that placed most of the state's costs on church property.

In 1333 Edward III refused to pay the tribute that King John had promised the popes.
In 1351 the Statute of Provisors ended papal control over appointments to, and revenues of, English church offices.
The first Praemunire law of 1353 declared rebellious those English who took to foreign courts, meaning the papal court, matters that the king regarded as belonging to his own courts.
In 1376 the Commons formally claimed that the pope's tax collectors were sending huge sums to the pope and that unknown French cardinals were amassing great fortunes from English cardinal posts.

The leader of the anti-clerical party at court was John of Gaunt, and his protection of John Wycliffe is the reason this great reformer was not killed and died a natural death.

The Life and Work of Wycliffe

John Wycliffe, the first English reformer, was born around 1320 at Hipswell, near the village of Wycliffe in north Yorkshire. He studied at Oxford and became a professor of theology there. Around 1360 he served for a year as master of Balliol College. Later he was ordained, and the popes gave him parish posts that carried duties and income, while he continued to teach at the university.

A Prolific Writer

His output was astonishing. He wrote many treatises in the scholastic manner on metaphysics, theology, and logic, two books of polemics, four books of sermons, and short, fluent essays on various subjects, among them his well-known On Civil Dominion. Most of his works were written in an awkward and obscure Latin that troubled no one except grammarians. Within this clumsy surface, however, lay ideas so fiery that they separated England from the Roman Catholic Church 155 years before Henry VIII, set Bohemia ablaze with civil war, and delivered almost all of the reforming ideas of Jan Hus and Martin Luther to the world before they did.

Wycliffe's Theology

Predestination and Grace

Following Augustine, whose logic and eloquence he accepted, Wycliffe built his belief on predestination, which still acts like a magnet at the center of Protestant theology. In his view God grants grace to whomever He wills, and the happiness or misery of each person has been fixed from eternity. Good works are not the cause of salvation but a sign that their doer is among the favored servants of God. We act according to the fate that divine providence has set for us, or, reversing a saying of Heraclitus, our destiny is our character. Only Adam and Eve had free will, and by disobedience they lost it for themselves and their descendants.

Direct Obedience to God and the Priesthood of All

God is the sovereign ruler of the world and all of us owe Him obedience. Our allegiance to Him is direct and immediate, like an Englishman's oath of loyalty to his king. It is unlike feudal France, where a man swore loyalty to his lord, who swore it to a great lord, and so on to the king. The bond between Creator and creature is therefore direct and needs no mediator, so the claim of the Church and its priests to be the necessary link between God and the people is rejected. Accordingly all Christians are priests, and there is no need to appoint a separate person called a priest.

Property, Sin, and Church Wealth

God owns the whole earth and heaven and everything in them, and a human being can hold anything only as an obedient subject. A sinner loses the right to own, because sin is rebellion against the Lord, and rightful ownership requires innocence. Scripture shows that Christ wanted the apostles, their successors, and their ranked deputies to own no property. A church or priest who possesses wealth has therefore disobeyed Christ and is sinful, and as a result the rites such a person performs lack validity.

Theoretical Communism and Its Limits

As if he did not think these claims very severe, Wycliffe drew from his theology a theoretical communism and anarchism. Anyone who is innocent and approved by God shares with God the ownership of all the world's goods, so the righteous hold everything in common. Private property and civil government, as some scholastics taught, are the result of Adam's sin and of the sinfulness of human nature. In a society ruled by virtue there would be neither individual property nor church and state laws invented by the human mind.

Wycliffe feared that radicals, who were by then thinking of revolution, would read his ideas in a literal sense, so he stated that his communism was only an ideal and spiritual one. Existing powers, as Paul taught, are the gift of God and must be obeyed. Luther repeated exactly the same point about revolution in 1525.

Wycliffe and the Crown

The anti-clerical party at court did not find Wycliffe's communism to its taste, but it found his attacks on the clergy and on church property very useful. When in 1366 Parliament again refused the tribute promised by King John to the pope, Wycliffe was put forward as a "king's clerk" to defend the decision.

In 1374 Edward III gave him the income of the parish of Lutterworth, apparently as a fee.
In July 1376 he was sent to Bruges as a royal representative to negotiate with papal agents over England's continued refusal to pay tribute.
When John of Gaunt decided to carry the government toward seizing part of the Church's lands, he asked Wycliffe to defend his view in a series of lectures in London. Wycliffe accepted in September 1376, and from then on the clergy and their supporters regarded him as Gaunt's tool.

Trial at St. Paul's

Bishop Courtenay of London decided to strike at Gaunt indirectly by prosecuting Wycliffe as a heretic. He summoned him to appear before a council of the senior clergy in St. Paul's Cathedral in February 1377. Wycliffe appeared, but Gaunt came with him, accompanied by a crowd of armed attendants. The soldiers began quarrels with some onlookers, a tumult broke out, and Wycliffe returned to Oxford safe and sound.

Courtenay then drew up a detailed indictment quoting fifty-two passages from Wycliffe's works and sent it to Rome. In May Pope Gregory XI issued a bull declaring eighteen propositions from the works, most from On Civil Dominion, to be heretical. He ordered Archbishop Simon Sudbury and Bishop Courtenay to find out whether Wycliffe still held these views, and if so to arrest him, put him in chains, and await further orders.

Parliament's Question and Wycliffe's Answer

By this time Wycliffe was protected not only by John of Gaunt and Lord Percy of Northumberland, but also by public opinion. In the Parliament of October, anti-clerical feeling was intense. The idea of stripping the Church of its property appealed to some members, who calculated that with the wealth held by bishops, abbots, and high clergy the king could pay for fifteen earls, 1,500 knights, and 6,200 squires and still keep 20,000 pounds a year for himself. France was preparing to invade, the English treasury was almost empty, and it seemed foolish to let papal agents collect the wealth of the English church and send it to a French pope and to a college of cardinals whose majority was French.

The king's advisers asked Wycliffe to consider this question: may the kingdom of England lawfully, when the need to repel foreign attack is certain, prevent the country's wealth from being sent abroad, even if the pope rebukes it or demands the money in the name of obedience? Wycliffe answered in a treatise and in doing so called for the English church to separate from the court of Rome. He wrote that the pope could ask for the wealth of the English churches only as alms. Since charity must begin at home, sending the kingdom's gifts abroad while it was itself in need was not charity but folly. In answer to the part of the question about the English church being part of the universal Catholic church and so bound to obey it, he recommended the spiritual independence of the English church. By his reading of Scripture, England should be one holy body, with the clergy, lords, and commons as its members. These words, which later became the voice of Henry VIII, were so bold that the king's advisers ordered Wycliffe to say no more about it.

Oxford and Lambeth

The next session of Parliament was postponed to 28 November. The bishops, who had resolved to see Wycliffe dead, published the papal bulls of condemnation on 18 December and asked the chancellor of Oxford University to carry out the pope's order for his arrest. At that time the university was at the height of its intellectual independence. In 1322 it had obtained the right to remove an unfit chancellor without consulting his official superior, the bishop of Lincoln, and in 1367 it had cut itself loose from episcopal supervision.

Half the university rose in support of Wycliffe, at least on the ground that he had the right to express his views freely. The chancellor refused to obey the bishops, declared that no churchman had the right to command the university in matters of doctrine, and at the same time advised Wycliffe to keep silent for a while. But what reformer can bite his tongue and sit quietly in a corner?

The Hearing at Lambeth

In March 1378 Wycliffe appeared before a council of bishops at Lambeth and defended his views. Just as his defense was about to be heard, a letter from the mother of King Richard II reached the archbishop asking him not to pronounce a final condemnation. During the hearing a crowd forced its way in from the street and shouted that the English people would not accept an Inquisition in their country. Under pressure from the government and the people, the bishops postponed their judgment, and Wycliffe went home unharmed and in fact victorious.

Pope Gregory XI died on 27 March. A few months later the papal schism broke out and weakened the Church's power and prestige. Wycliffe renewed his attack and wrote many tracts and essays, most of them in English, which widened the range of his heresies and rebellions.

Wycliffe's Attack on the Clergy

We are given a picture of Wycliffe in these years as a man hardened by argument and made stricter in religious and moral matters by age. He was not a man of ideas set apart but a fighter and creator, and he may have pushed his logic to the point of ruthlessness. His talent for satire and invective was now completely unbridled. He denounced friars who taught poverty to the people but hoarded wealth themselves. Many monasteries, he said, were dens of thieves, nests of snakes, and homes of devils and demons.

Indulgences, Purgatory, and Clerical Vice

He fought the notion that the merit of the saints' good works could be applied to save the souls of sinners in purgatory, and he said that Christ and the apostles taught nothing of the kind. In his words, priests deceive the people with pardons and false forgiveness and rob them of their money, and those who buy indulgences at high prices from these liars are fools. If the pope had the power to rescue sinners' souls from purgatory, why did he not do so all at once, out of charity and faith? With growing heat he claimed that many priests seduced women, girls, widows, and nuns in various ways, and he demanded that crimes of the clergy be punished in secular courts.

He heaped abuse on curates who flattered the rich and despised the poor. They readily forgave the sins of the wealthy, but excommunicated poor people who could not satisfy their greed or pay their tithes. They went hunting, kept hawks, gambled, and deceived the people with tales of false miracles. He accused English priests of stealing the living of the poor while not opposing oppression, and said they valued money above the blood of Christ. They prayed only for show, demanded fees for religious services, lived in pleasure and luxury, and rode fat horses with silver and gold harness. He called them thieves, cunning foxes, hypocritical wolves, gluttons, and lustful apes. Here the heat and sting of Wycliffe's language was sharper even than Luther's.

Simony, Rival Popes, and the Pope as Antichrist

Wycliffe wrote that the buying and selling of church offices was widespread in every part of the Church. In his view the practice of the Roman court did England the most harm, because it was found everywhere under the most sacred colors and emptied the land of wealth and people. The shameful rivalry of the popes during the schism, their excommunications of one another, and their unashamed struggle for power should wake the people up and lead them to follow the popes only to the extent that they follow the teaching of Christ.

A pope or priest, in the spiritual realm, was a ruler or even a king. Christ had nowhere to lay his head, yet people said that this pope owned more than half the empire. Christ was humble, but the pope sits on a throne and makes rulers kiss his feet. Wycliffe may have meant, with cunning, that the pope was the Antichrist whose coming is foretold in the first epistle of John and the beast of the Book of Revelation, who announces the return of Christ.

Wycliffe's Program of Reform

For Wycliffe the solution was for the Church to give up all worldly power and possessions. Christ and his disciples had lived in poverty, so the priests should follow them. Friars and monks should abandon wealth and a comfortable, luxurious life and return to the strict rules of their orders. Priests should accept gladly the loss of lordship over the material world, be content with food and clothing, and live only on alms freely given to them.

If the clergy refused to return to evangelical poverty, it was the duty of the state to step in and seize their property.
Rulers and kings should work to reform priests and force them to accept the poverty Christ commanded.
They should not fear the pope's excommunication, since no one's curse, apart from God's, is effective.
Kings answer only to God, from whom their power comes.
Rather than accepting the view of Gregory VII and Boniface VIII that secular governments were subordinate to the Church, the state should regard itself as supreme in worldly matters and supervise all church property.
Priests should be appointed by the king himself.

Confession, the Eucharist, and the Sacraments

The priest's power lies in his right to perform religious rites, and on this point Wycliffe stated views that would later be heard from Luther and Calvin. He did not consider private confession necessary and supported the open confession approved by the early Christians. Private confession to a priest, he said, is not necessary and is a recent invention of Satan, since neither Christ nor his disciples did such a thing. Such confession makes a person the bought slave of the priests and is sometimes abused for economic and political ends, and a monk or nun might sin together through this secret hearing and forgiveness.

An ordinary good person could grant forgiveness to a sinner better than a base and deceitful priest could, but in truth only God forgives sins. In general we should doubt the validity of a religious act performed by a sinful or apostate priest. No priest, good or bad, can transform the bread and wine of the eucharist into the body and blood of Christ. To Wycliffe nothing was uglier than the claim of some priests he knew that they could perform this divine miracle.

Against Transubstantiation

Like Luther, Wycliffe denied transubstantiation, but he did not deny the real presence of Christ in the rite. Christ was present in a mysterious way, which neither Wycliffe nor Luther tried to explain, spiritually, truly, and effectively, alongside bread and wine that, contrary to Church teaching, were not destroyed.

Wycliffe did not regard these ideas as heretical, but his view of the presence of Christ's body and blood in the bread and wine horrified many of his supporters. John of Gaunt hurried to Oxford to ask his friend to say no more about the eucharist in 1381. Wycliffe refused and confirmed and stressed his views in a confession in May 1381.

The Great Revolt and Its Consequences

A month later the fire of social revolution flared up in England and terrified all property owners, driving them to condemn and recant any beliefs and principles that threatened the property of society or individuals, whether clerical or secular. Wycliffe thus lost most of his supporters in the government. The murder of Archbishop Sudbury by the rebels raised his most determined enemy, Courtenay, to the see of Canterbury. Courtenay felt that if he let Wycliffe's views on the eucharist spread, not only would the reputation of the clergy be lost but the foundations of the Church's moral authority would be shaken.

The Blackfriars Council and Expulsion

In May 1382 Courtenay invited all the clergy to meet at the Black Friars' monastery in London and form a council. He had the council reject twenty-four propositions drawn from Wycliffe's writings and declare them proof of unbelief. He also sent the chancellor of Oxford an order that the author of those propositions be barred from teaching and lecturing until he proved his orthodoxy. King Richard II ordered the chancellor to expel Wycliffe and all his followers, which should be seen as the king's reaction to the revolt that had nearly cost him his crown. Wycliffe, still apparently protected by John of Gaunt, went to his post at Lutterworth.

Distancing Himself from the Rebels

The praise of John Ball, one of the main leaders of the revolt, frightened Wycliffe so much that he published several essays and tracts separating himself from the rebels. He denied holding any socialist ideas and asked his followers to obey their rulers in this world patiently, in hope of reward in the next. Even so, he went on writing anti-church tracts.

The Lollards and the English Bible

Wycliffe formed a band of "poor preaching priests" to spread his reforming teaching among the people. Some of these Lollards were people with incomplete education, and others were teachers from Oxford. They all wore black woolen robes and, like the poor early Christians, walked barefoot, and they had the zeal of people who had rediscovered Christ. Their slogan was nearly the same as the Protestants'. They stressed the infallibility and certainty of the teachings of Scripture over the misleading and false traditions of church teaching, and they proposed preaching and teaching in the native language in place of performing mysterious rites in a foreign one. For these unofficial priests and their literate listeners Wycliffe delivered about three hundred sermons in rough but passionate English and wrote many religious tracts.

Translating the Bible

Since he greatly wished the people to return to Christianity as the New Testament describes it, Wycliffe decided to translate the Bible, the only true authority and guide to religious truth, with a group of his associates. Until then, in 1381, only scattered parts of the Bible had been translated into English. Educated people knew a French translation, and an Anglo-Saxon one from the time of King Alfred survived, but it was unintelligible in Wycliffe's England.

The Church had seen that some heretics, such as the Waldensians, made heavy use of the Bible to promote their beliefs. It therefore forbade people from reading translations not judged authentic and correct by the Church, and in this way reduced the confusion over doctrine that arbitrary translations by sects and personal interpretations of the text would cause. Wycliffe was firmly convinced that the Bible should be in the hands of every English speaker who could read. He apparently translated the New Testament himself and left the Old Testament to Nicholas Hereford and John Purvey. The complete translation was finished about ten years after his death. It was made from Jerome's Latin version, not from the Hebrew text of the Old Testament or the Greek text of the New. Its style did not show the grandeur of English prose, but in the history of England it was a vital event.

Death and Legacy

In 1384 Pope Urban VI summoned Wycliffe to Rome, but the order of death was stronger than the pope's. On 28 December 1384 the ailing reformer was struck by paralysis during Mass and died three days later. He was buried at Lutterworth. By a decree of the Council of Constance on 4 May 1415, however, his bones were dug up and thrown into a stream that ran nearby. His writings were hunted everywhere and destroyed wherever found.

What Wycliffe Anticipated

Every prominent element of the Reformation was present in Wycliffe's teaching:

A revolt against the worldliness of the clergy and a demand for a stricter moral order.
A turn from the Church to the Bible, from Aquinas to Augustine, from free will to predestination, and from salvation by good works to divine providence and grace.
Opposition to the sale of indulgences, to private confession, and to transubstantiation.
The removal of priests from their position as mediators between God and people.
A protest against the transfer of national wealth to Rome.
A call to the state to disobey the papal system.
An attack on the clergy's ownership of worldly property, which paved the way for Henry VIII.

If the Great Revolt had not led the government to withdraw its support from Wycliffe, the Reformation would probably have taken root in England at that time, a hundred and thirty years before it began in Germany.