Reformatio regni: Wyclif and Hus as leaders of religious protest movements

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In May 1382 William Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury since the murder of his predecessor Sudbury during the Peasants’ Revolt the previous year, declared it to be a matter of frequent complaint and common report that evil persons were going about his province preaching without authority, and spreading doctrines which threatened to destroy not only ecclesiastical authority but civil government as well. They were the adherents, he was informed, of a certain teacher of novelties at Oxford, named John Wyclif, whose sect broadcast the seeds of pestiferous error so widely in the pastures of Canterbury that only the most savage hoeing would root them out. The chroniclers hastened to confirm this account. According to their accounts, by 1382 Wyclif had been able, through his writings and the preaching of his followers, to seduce the laity, including great lords and members of the nobility, over a great part of the realm. Even members of the clergy and scholars were not free from infection. Thus Knighton commented that – at least in the area around Leicester – every other person one met was a Lollard. Thirty years later it is the same story in Bohemia. As the carthusian prior Stephen of Dolany complained, despite the condemnation of Wyclif’s teachings at the university of Prague in 1403, the Wycliffites swarmed everywhere: ‘in the state apartments of princes, in the schools of the students, in the lonely chambers of the monks, and even in the cells of the Carthusians’.