History of England 1-6

Burning or not, there did emerge a broad Lollard movement that espoused Wycliffe’s arguments as well as adding some of its own. The sacraments were dead signs. There was no purgatory, other than life on this earth, so Masses for the dead have no value. Bread could not be made holier by being muttered over by priests. Confession could only be effective if the priest was full of grace, but no such priest has ever been found. Prayers cannot help the dead any more than a man’s breath can cause a great ship to sail. Pilgrimages served no heavenly or earthly purpose. What is a bishop without wealth? Episcopus Nullatensis: Bishop of Nowhere. St Thomas of Canterbury had already been consigned to hell for endowing the church with material possessions. The pope is an old whore, sitting on many waters, with a cup of poison in his hands. Greater benefit could be derived from a cask of ale than from the four Evangelists. More eccentric propositions were sometimes entertained. One Lollard, William of Wakeham, believed that the land was above the sky.

The Lollards seem to have flourished in the towns, and along the trading routes between towns. It was the faith of the merchant and the artisan rather than the farmer or the agricultural worker. It was strong, therefore, in London and Bristol, Coventry and Leicester. We are talking of hundreds, rather than thousands, of adherents. Yet it was persistent, and provoked royal vengeance in a later reign.

William Smith of Leicester was a ‘deformed’ man who became one of the new sectarians and set up a school in the chapel of St John the Baptist next to the leper-house in Leicester. He gave up the eating of flesh or fish; he avoided wine and beer; he walked about barefoot. He also taught himself to read and to write. One evening he and some of his disciples, sitting in a local inn close to the chapel, grew hungry. They had a supply of vegetables, taken from the fields, but they had no fuel with which to cook them. Then William Smith remembered a wooden image of St Katherine that lay in a corner of the chapel. ‘Look, my friends,’ he said, ‘God has provided us fuel; this image will be holy fuel. By hatchet and fire she will suffer a new martyrdom and perhaps, by cruel pains, arrive some time in the kingdom of heaven.’ He took up the hatchet. ‘Let us see if she be a true saint,’ he added, ‘for, if so, she will bleed; if not she will be good for fire to cook with.’ This reflects the true spirit of Lollardism, rejecting the images of saints as nothing but senseless idols. The incident was inconceivably shocking to the ordinary people, however, and Smith’s words were reported to the authorities of the town. He was ordered to walk, barefoot and bare-headed, in a procession from the church of St Mary’s in Leicester; he was to hold an image of St Katherine in his right hand, and kneel at the beginning, middle and end of the procession. The ceremony was to be repeated during the Saturday market of the town.

Yet not all of the new faith were poor or disadvantaged. Sir Laurence of St Martin, Justice of the Peace, sheriff and MP for Wiltshire, attended Easter Mass in the spring of 1381 and received communion; he did not swallow the host, however, but spat it into his hand. He took it home and divided it into three parts; he ate the first part with some oysters, the second part with onions, and swallowed the remaining piece with his wine. His sin was observed and denounced. He was ordered to do public penance on every Friday for the rest of his life; he was to kneel before a stone cross that was carved with the images of his sin. He was also dismissed as sheriff. There had of course always been a strain of unbelief and as early as 1200 the prior of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, suggested that ‘there are many people who do not believe that God exists, nor do they believe that a human soul lives on after the death of the body. They consider that the universe has always been as it is now, and is ruled by chance rather than by providence.’

Others did not travel so far in heresy. Certain knights and grandees favoured only elements of the new teaching. Some of them attended the preachings of the Lollards, armed with sword and buckler to protect the preacher from the insults of bystanders. These men were not necessarily heretics in any real sense; they were more interested in Wycliffe’s attack upon the clergy and the general wealth of the Church. Some were genuinely devout, however, and took part in that broad movement of lay piety known as devotio moderna which emphasized the inner life of the spirit and the individual’s humble love of God.