The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Lollardy was first inspired by the ideas and ideals of John Wyclif at the end of the fourteenth century,
but the movement was the creation of Wyclif's early disciples as much as of Wyclif himself. Those ideas had been transmuted in the dissemination of them: Wyclif's more subtle teachings upon the
theology of the Eucharist were simplified as they were promulgated beyond the Oxford Schools to
the wider community, and his more philosophical ideas upon predestination and dominion were gradually diluted. Wyclif's argument that no one - priest or layman, king or peasant - whilst in a state
of mortal sin had true dominion over anything, either inanimate object or animate nature, had radical
implications: the clergy, if not in a state of grace, could lawfully be deprived of their endowments.
Wyclif had looked to the Crown and nobility to reform the Church, but the spectacular ambition
and failure of the Lollard armies under Sir John Oldcastle in 1414 had cost them any chance of support from the political orders or of conciliation with Church or Crown. Throughout the fifteenth
century, the 'known men and women' had sustained their faith in secret, guarding their treasured manuscript copies of the Bible in John Purvey's translation and of Wycliffe texts, but they were
leaderless, and without theological guidance to ensure spiritual orthodoxy and regeneration. By the
mid fifteenth century the Church was pleased to believe that the heresy had almost disappeared.
But it had not. There were sufficient signs of Lollardy's revival by the early sixteenth century for
the prelates to begin to hunt for it again, and to find it. They discovered remarkable continuities in
the Lollard communities and their beliefs.
Lollardy was a faith practised in households, not in churches. Lollards believed that theirs was the
true Church, they God's 'children of salvation', and the Catholic Church was the Church of Antichrist,
the Devil's Church. Usually, they conformed superficially within their communities, often attending
their parish churches in order to evade suspicion. Salisbury heretics admitted in 1499 that they
received the holy sacrament, not because of their belief in it, but because of 'dread of the people'
and of the danger if they did not do 'as other Christian people did'. Yet they saw themselves as set
apart from 'other Christians'. Was it true, asked Church officials in 1521, who were in the dark about
this closed world, that Lollards only married other Lollards? Sometimes it was. Bound as well by
ties of kinship and friendship as by their common faith, the Lollards sustained each other, a fraternity
of an heretical kind. Lollard masters took Lollard apprentices and servants; Lollard children were
brought up in the faith; Lollard widows remarried other Lollards. Lollard families protected the
missionaries who travelled between the communities, and sheltered fugitives from the authorities.
Radical sectaries of the later middle ages were usually of artisan status, and so most Lollards were.
In 1523 a disgruntled curate complained, 'These weavers and millers be naughty fellows and heretics
many of you'. Yet not all were artisans, nor were they poor. The discovery of Lollards in higher ranks
of society made the revival of the heresy the more alarming. In 1514 the Bishop of London's summoner claimed that he could take his master to heretics in London who were each worth a
thousand pounds. Fellowship in the faith might transcend the usual barriers between rich and poor.
Robert Benet, an illiterate Lollard water-carrier, found shelter during the battle at Blackheath in
1497 at the house of John Barret, a goldsmith of Cheapside and Merchant of the Staple at Calais,
one of the richest men in the City. In the Lollard enclave in the Childrens 'known men' held respected
positions within their communities. When the bishops began to look for them once more, the Lollards still congregated where they had always been before: in London, Essex, Kent, Coventry, Bristol,
in the Chilterns, and through the Thames Valley from Newbury in Berkshire to Burford in the Cotswolds. Lollards met together in order to read the scriptures. The Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament, in English, were their inspiration and the fount of their faith. It was the Lollard preoccupation with vernacular scripture which had outlawed the English Bible, not only to them,
but to all others, since Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions of 1409. Reading the Bible aloud and evagelizing the Christian message was the purpose of any Lollard assembly, and if some, perhaps most, were illiterate, it hardly mattered, for those who could not read could listen. This was a society
used to committing words to memory. Lollards became deeply versed in the texts. Thirteen-year-old
Elizabeth Blake, the daughter of a Lollard living by St Anthony's school in London, knew by heart
and could recite the Epistles and Gospels. Wyclif's belief in the priesthood of all believers was made
reality as they expounded the Word without priests to enlighten them.
Knowledge of scripture was the rule of faith. Their texts sustained their movement. Robert Benet,
the poor water-carrier, had already been detected for his heresy in 1496, but in 1504 he sold his looms
and shears in order to by a copy of the Four Evangelists. He could not read it, but kept it safe in his
belts, and Thomas Capon, the stationer who sold it to him, taught him its truths. Joan Austy brought
a copy of Wyclif's Wicket with her when she remarried, as a Lollard dowry. Her first husband had
entrusted this treasure to her on his deathbed. The texts were passed around, and read secretly,
by night. Possessing them was dangerous. The disciples of Thomas Denys, a Lollard teacher, were
forced to watch his burning in 1513, and to throw their spiritual heirs, the puritans, to hear the Word
of the God was a kind of sacrament. John Whitehorn, rector of Letcombe Basset, who was burnt at
Abingdon in 1508 for his heretical ministry, taught that 'whosoever receive devoutly God's Word, he
receiveth the very body of Christ'. Asking, did not St John's Gospel begin: 'The word is God, and
God is the Word'? he echoed Wyclif's identification of Christ with scripture. John Pykas, a Colchester
baker, converted by his Lollard mother, avowed in 1527 that 'God is in the Word and the Word is
God'. A theological chasm opened between committed Lollards and their Catholic neighbours.
Lollards thought Catholic devotion was superstition; Catholic veneration, idolatry. What Catholics
held holiest, they denied, even derided. For their views on the Mass, above all, Lollards were persecuted, for here many of them were guilty of the gravest heresy of all: they doubted the miracle
of transubstantiation. Though Wyclif himself had believed in the Real Presence in the Eucharist,
many of his later followers, ignoring or misunderstanding his subleties, rejected the central mystery.
They asked how Christ, one and indivisible, could be at once on earth with mankind and in heaven
with His Father; how Our Lord's body could be made by corrupt priests. They maintained that the
Eucharist was a memorial, commemorative event; that the bread and wine were only figures of
Christ; that priests could not make their Maker.