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 terrible, but what about their bite? Had they, people wondered, any teeth left to bite with?

At the end of Edward III’s reign the great English scholar, John Wyclif, began to ask questions about all these things, and to argue that the favourite doctrines of the Roman Church were all comparatively new, that they were not part of Christ's teaching, and could not be found in the Bible at all. He published an English translation of the Bible; hitherto men had only a Latin version of it, and the Church did not encourage laymen to read it. He also founded an order of ‘poor priests’, who were to go about preaching simple Christianity.

The English bishops were absolutely terrified; and the monks, abbots and friars more terrified still. These had long known what greedy eyes laymen cast on their vast wealth. Wyclif, said the great churchmen, was a ‘heretic’, and ought to be burned alive (he died in his bed all safe in 1384). In the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V the clergy persuaded Parliament to make laws saying that heretics should be burned alive, and many of Wyclifs followers, during the next hundred and twenty years, were actually so burned. The Church nicknamed them ‘Lollards ’, or babblers.

The ‘State’, as represented by the King and Parliament, somewhat unwillingly supported the churchmen in this matter; yet on the whole the State considered that these Lollards were raising dreadful questions, and it would be better to crush them and not allow them the safety-valve of talking. The Church sat on the safety-valve as long as it could; but the steam of free thought was bubbling underneath, and, once it had gathered head enough, would blow those that sat on the