John Wyclif and the English Government

Abstract

As this study will attempt to alter a traditional view concerning John Wyclif, no better introduction suggests itself than Professor Knowles' statement: Probably no character in English history has suffered such distortion at the hands of friend and foe as has that of John Wyclif.' Wyclif must assume responsibility for some of this distortion. Not only is he at times obscure in his writing, even inconsistent,2 but the observation which a recent scholar made of Thucydides that everyone who worked intimately with his style seemed to emerge from the conflict in a state of vindictive gloom3 might as readily be applied to Wyclif. The principal reason, of course, why Wyclif and his views have so frequently been misrepresented is that he attacked doctrines which some scholars have held sacred and which others have abhorred. Much of this misrepresentation is now happily passing, not so much because more recent scholars have less personal concern about the justice of Wyclif's cause, but because they have learned to delve into the sources in a spirit of greater detachment, bent only on presenting as facts or probabilities that which the evidence reveals. Modern scholarship is ready to credit Wyclif with having laid down the broad lines of attack which future generations did little more than develop,4 although the actual link between his ideas and the events of the sixteenth century was a tenuous one. Thanks to a Reformation he did little or nothing to inspire and in effect everything possible to delay, he has been hailed for centuries as its Morning Star . . . .I Present opinion also inclines to the view that Wyclif never considered himself anything but an orthodox Catholic; that he never repudiated the papacy;6 that he was guilty of negligence in the care of the souls committed to his charge in two of his benefices;7 and that what saved him from the hands of the ecclesiastical authorities was not an aroused England but the strange friendship of John of Gaunt. (England never really became aroused over Wyclif before reading what sectarian writers like John Foxe had to say about him two hundred years after his death.8) Scholars are also in general agreement that the Peasant Revolt deprived him of any encouragement the aristocracy and London