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 path, and these earliest English protestants formed a sort of society, of which Bilney became one of the leaders. Barnes and Lambert ascribed their conversion to his influence. Matthew Parker, who, in 1521, had come up from Norwich to Corpus College, soon acquired an enthusiastic affection for one who was perhaps his fellow-townsman. In 1524 Hugh Latimer, then as ardent a conservative as he afterwards became a strenuous reformer, read for his B.D. thesis a violent philippic against Melanchthon. Bilney, who nad perhaps studied Lutheran books in secret, and who had been present at the recital of the dissertation, visited Latimer the next day, and reasoned with him with such convincing subtlety that Latimer ended by completely accepting his position. From that day began a lifelong friendship between Bilney and Latimer. Henceforth they were constantly in each other's society, and in their daily walks on 'Heretic's Hill,' as the people called their favourite place of exercise, Bilney quite won over his new friend. 'By his confession,' said Latimer, 'I learned more than in twenty years before.' Their position had this in common, that with a burning zeal for righteousness and spiritual religion their unspeculative intellects were never seriously troubled with mere doctrinal and theological difficulties. To the last Bilney remained orthodox, after mediaeval standards on the power of the pope, the sacrifice of the mass, the doctrine of transubstantiation and the powers of the church. Foxe is quite pitiful on his blindness and grossness on these points. Bilney remained where Luther started, and died too early to be influenced, like Latimer, by external changes of a later date.

The little band of Cambridge reformers were zealous in preaching and in works of charity, however opposed they were to the formal 'good works' of the schoolmen. Bilney and Latimer constantly visited together the foul lazar-house and equally foul prison of Cambridge. On one occasion they discovered a woman in gaol who had been unjustly sentenced to death for child-murder, and Latimer's influence with the king procured her pardon. This must have been at the very end of Bilney's career.

Though a zealous opponent of the ceremonial fastings of the church, Bilney set in his own life a rare example of abstinence and self-denial. He allowed himself little sleep. He generally contented himself with one meal a day, and distributed the rest of his commons to the prisoners and the poor. 'He could abide,' says Foxe, 'neither singing nor swearing.' The 'dainty singing' of the greater churches was to him mere 'mocking against God;' and whenever Thirlby, the future bishop, who had rooms beneath him, played upon his recorder, Bilney 'would resort straight to his prayer.' Latimer is always enthusiastic upon the simplicity, the unworldliness, and the transparent honesty of 'little Bilney,' as he affectionately calls him. He was 'meek and charitable, a simple good soul not fit for this world.'

In the propagation of his teaching, Bilney gave his small and spare frame no rest. Cambridge and London were not enough for him. The election of Stephen Gardiner to the mastership of Trinity Hall in 1525 may have made his college a less pleasant place of abode to him. On 23 July 1526 he obtained from Bishop West a license to preach throughout the whole diocese of Ely (Cole MS. as above, xxvi. 116). He also preached frequently in Norfolk and Suffolk, but his admission into so many churches almost proves that his general teaching seemed orthodox in character. But his denunciations of saint and relic worship, and of pilgrimages to Walsingham and Canterbury, his rejection of the mediation of saints, and of many other cherished portions of the popular religion, drew the attention of Wolsey to his case, who, as legate a latere then exercised a jurisdiction that transcended both the diocesan and metropolitical authorities. Wolsey had been and accused of remissness in dealing with heresy. He began to take a severer line. About 1526 he seems to have had Bilney before him and to have dismissed him on taking an oath that he did not hold, and would not disseminate, the doctrines of Luther (, iv. 622). But next year (1527) Bilney, in conjunction with his Cambridge friend Arthur, fell into more serious trouble. About Whitsuntide he preached a series of sermons in and near London. At St. Magnus's, near London Bridge, he exclaimed 'Pray you only to God, and to noo saynts, rehersing the Litany, and when he came to Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis, he said Stay there.' He also said that 'Christen men ought to worship God only and not Saynts.' At Willesden, in Midalesex, he taught the same doctrines in the same Whitsun week, and declared that but for the idolatry of the Christians the Jews would long ago have been converted to the christian faith. At Newington, in Surrey, which was also in the diocese of London, he again denounced prayer to saints. A sermon at Christ Church, Ipswich, on 28 May, and a disputation in that town with Friar Brasiard against image worship, together with a previous 'most ghostly sermon' on 7 March, had excited general suspicion. Tunstal, who had obtained evidence of his Ipswich proceedings