Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/235

 the people, he now ‘gathered around him many disciples in his pravity, living together in Oxford [probably leading a common life in some academic hall], clad in long russet gowns of one pattern, going on foot, ventilating his errors among the people and publicly preaching them in sermons’ (Chron. Angl. p. 395; cf., Chron. ii. 184–185, where the gowns are described as being of undyed wool). By these men the new doctrines which Wycliffe was developing in the Oxford schools and embodying in his elaborate scholastic works were diffused among rich and poor throughout the land. Although these ‘poor priests’ are not to be thought of as ignorant evangelists (they were most of them university men, who had listened to Wycliffe's lectures), many of them no doubt exaggerated his antagonism to the existing church order, and preached the new tenets in a cruder and coarser form than was given to them by the master himself; and among the laity who had imbibed his teaching occasional acts of fanaticism occurred which tended still further to excite alarm and hostility among the bishops and the mass of the clergy. Wycliffe had taught that tithes might be withheld from bad priests by legal authority or by the combined action of the whole parish (Select English Works, iii. 176, 177); his disciple, William Swinderby, went about urging individuals to refuse such dues on their own responsibility to an immoral curate (Chron. Angl. p. 340), while a little later a knight near Salisbury took home the consecrated wafer and consumed it at an ordinary meal (ib. p. 282).

Whether or not Wycliffe actually began the work of translation at this period of his life, his whole teaching put the Bible in quite a different position from that which was assigned to it by common mediæval tradition. All his works exalt the authority of the Bible, whether as compared with that of later fathers and doctors, or as compared with that of the contemporary prelacy and priesthood, and he insists much on the necessity of its being accessible to all Christians. Wycliffe had begun the great protestant appeal to Scripture against the abuses of the mediæval church. The demand for a closer acquaintance with its text on the part of the laity was the natural sequel.

Parts of the Bible had already been done into Anglo-Saxon and into English, especially the great treasure-house of mediæval devotion, the Psalms; and the whole Bible had been translated into the court French dialect, which had now ceased to be the living language of the highest classes. Wycliffe and his associates for the first time conceived and executed the great task of translating the whole Bible into the vulgar tongue. Wycliffe himself translated the Gospels, and probably the whole New Testament. His disciple, Nicholas Hereford [see, fl. 1390], began on the Old Testament, which he completed to Baruch iii. 20. The rest of the Apocrypha (except 4 Esdras) was completed by another, possibly, as some have thought, by Wycliffe himself. Afterwards the whole was revised by John Purvey [q. v.], his friend and parochial chaplain, or, as we should say, his ‘curate’ at Lutterworth. The work was completed by about 1388, certainly before 1400. It is this edition which is for the most part exhibited in most of the 170 extant manuscripts of Wycliffe's Bible, nearly all of which were produced between 1400 and 1450. Both translations were of course made from the Vulgate. Their connection with Wycliffe, at least as the moving spirit if not as the actual author of the earlier version, rests on the testimony of Huss (who declares that the English commonly ascribed the translation of the whole Bible to him, Opp. 1558, vol. i. p. cviii b), of Knighton (Chron. ii. 152), and of Archbishop Arundel (, Concilia, iii. 350; see also preface to Forshall and Madden's magnificent edition, London, 1850, p. vi n.) The doubts of Dom Gasquet (Dublin Review, July 1894) are quite gratuitous, and are satisfactorily disposed of by Mr. F. D. Matthew (Engl. Hist. Rev. 1895, x. 91 sq.). As to the date at which the translation was executed, we can only say that the silence of Wycliffe's accusers in 1371, and even in 1381, makes it improbable that any part had begun to be widely diffused before the latter date.

The year 1381 constitutes the second great crisis in the life of Wycliffe. In that year occurred the great and mysterious rising of the peasants in Essex, Kent, Suffolk, and elsewhere, and the murder of Archbishop Sudbury. The way for this movement was in places apparently prepared by vague socialistic or communistic teaching more or less akin to Wycliffe's tenets about lordship and grace. By the monk of St. Albans (p. 321) John Ball is described as a teacher of Wycliffe's ‘perverse dogmas,’ and Walden (Fasc. Ziz. p. 273) declares that the same leader after condemnation professed that for two years he had been a disciple of Wycliffe. On the other hand the former authority also mentions that he had preached his revolutionary creed ‘for twenty years and more’ (Chron. Angl. p. 320), which shows that the first impulse at all events cannot have come