The Church Regains Strength
In 1407 Archbishop Arundel again placed canon law above all secular law and declared that denying or doubting the pope's decrees was unpardonable heresy deserving condemnation.
Relieved of Wycliffe's attacks, the Church recovered strength in the fifteenth century, and growing wealth flowed into its coffers. Paying priests to perform prayers or build chantries became a new and common form of charity. Those whose sun was setting paid the Church to build a chapel in their names and to help their souls reach heaven with prayers and masses.
In the House of Lords, against 20 bishops and 26 abbots there were only 47 lay lords, so the Church held the majority of seats in that house. To redress this imbalance, Henry VII and then Henry VIII insisted that kings had the right to choose any qualified churchman they wished as bishop or abbot. By putting clerical appointments in the king's hands, this paved the way for Henry VIII's claim to supremacy over the Church of England.
The Lollards Spread
Meanwhile Wycliffe's poor preachers spread his anticlerical ideas everywhere. In 1382 a chronicler monk reported with exaggerated alarm that "they multiply like plants in the flowering season and cover the whole country. Of every two people you meet on the road, one is a follower of Wycliffe." Factory workers, especially the weavers of Norfolk, were sympathetic listeners.
In 1395 the Lollards felt strong enough to present Parliament with a bold statement of their principles. In it they opposed:
- priestly celibacy;
- transubstantiation;
- the worship of images;
- pilgrimages;
- prayers and masses for the dead;
- the wealth of the Church;
- the employment of clergy and church officials in government offices;
- the necessity of confession to a priest;
- rites for exorcising or binding demons and spirits;
- the worship of the Church's saints.
In another declaration they urged that everyone should read the Bible regularly and follow its contents, which stand above the Church's commands. They rejected war. They favored laws limiting personal expenditure and obliging people to eat plain food and wear plain clothing. They disliked and avoided oaths, and when necessary they affirmed with phrases such as "I am sure" or "this is the truth." Puritan ideas and attitudes were gradually taking shape in Britain.
A few Wycliffite preachers mixed socialist ideas with religious beliefs, but most refrained from attacking private property and sought the support of knights and the middle class, as well as peasants and the proletariat.
The Law for Burning Heretics
Even so, the upper classes did not forget the humiliation with which they had survived the social revolution of 1381, and in them the Church saw a new readiness to defend itself as a stabilizing force in society. Richard II threatened the Lollard members of Parliament by arrests and forced them into silence. In 1397 the English bishops petitioned the king to punish stubborn heretics "like other Christian countries." Richard did not go that far with them.
In 1401, however, Henry IV and his Parliament issued the famous statute De haeretico comburendo, "on the burning of heretics." Under it, persons whom a church court declared incorrigible heretics were burned, and all heretical books destroyed. That same year a Lollard priest, William Sawtrey, was burned. Others were arrested, and when they recanted they were treated leniently.
In 1406 the Prince of Wales presented a petition to Henry IV saying that Lollard propaganda and attacks on monastic property threatened to bring down the structure of society. The king ordered prosecution and punishment pursued more severely, but the bishops' preoccupation with the problems of the papal schism distracted them for a time. In 1410 the Church condemned a Lollard tailor, John Badby, to death and burned him in the marketplace. Before the wood was lit, Prince Hal asked Badby to renounce his beliefs and promised him money and his life. Badby refused and climbed the pile toward death.
Sir John Oldcastle
Prince Hal became king as Henry V in 1413 and pursued the policy of arresting heretics with vigor. One of his personal friends was Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, whom some readers of Shakespeare have later identified with Falstaff. Oldcastle had rendered notable service to England on the battlefield, but in his sphere of influence, Herefordshire and Kent, he protected the Lollards and looked on their activities with tolerance.
The bishops summoned him three times, and three times he refused to appear. At last he bowed to the king's order and in 1413 stood before the bishops in the trial hall of St. Paul's, where Wycliffe had been tried thirty-six years before. Oldcastle affirmed that he was a devout Christian but did not deny the Lollard views on confession and the Eucharist. The court declared him a heretic, imprisoned him in the Tower of London, and gave him forty days to retract. Instead of repenting, he escaped from the Tower.
On hearing the news, the Lollards around London rose in revolt and tried to seize the king (1414). Their attempt failed, and some of the leaders were captured and hanged. Oldcastle was a fugitive for three years in the hills of Herefordshire and Wales. At last he was captured, and since government and Church both wanted satisfaction from him, they hanged him first as a traitor and then burned him as a heretic (1417).
A Moderate Persecution
Compared with other punishments and persecutions, the treatment of the Lollards was almost moderate. Between 1400 and 1485 only eleven people were condemned for heresy. We know of several Lollard groups that survived until 1521. Lollards were still active in 1518, until Thomas Man, who claimed to have converted seven hundred people to his faith, was burned that year. In 1521 six more Lollards were burned.
When Henry VIII announced England's separation from the Church of Rome, the people accepted the change quietly. The Lollards could claim that they had to a large extent paved the way.
Bishop Pecock and the Appeal to Reason
In 1450 Reginald Pecock, Bishop of Chichester, published a book which, in the fanciful manner of the time, he titled The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy. It was explicitly a refutation of Lollard beliefs and took for granted the existence of a strong anticlerical movement among the people. Its aim was to show that these ideas should be countered not by imprisonment and burning, but by rational argument and refutation.
This zealous bishop talked so much of reason and argument that he fell in love with reason himself and found himself in danger of heresy. He saw that he was refuting, by rational argument, some of the Lollards' beliefs and arguments drawn from Scripture. In a work called The Book of Faith, he plainly places reason above Scripture and regards it as the standard and touchstone of truth, a stage Europe reached only two hundred years later.
Finally, Pecock adds in his rebuttal that Church authorities are not always trustworthy, that Aristotle is not an unquestionable authority, that the apostles did not write the "Apostles' Creed," and that the "Donation of Constantine" was a forgery.
The English bishops put the proud Pecock on trial (1457) and left him a choice between two things: burning or retracting his words. Pecock, who disliked burning, read a public recantation. He was deprived of his bishopric and spent the rest of his life, alone and isolated, at Thorney Abbey (1460).