Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/241

 increasingly violent treatises or pamphlets against the abuses of the church, especially against the papacy and the regulars.

It is alleged that Wycliffe in person had to appear before the bishops assembled at Oxford in November 1382, and that he there recanted, but the statement rests entirely upon the authority of Knighton (Chronicon, ii. 160), who represents the assembly as an adjourned session of the ‘earthquake council,’ assuming that the later sittings of that assembly, in which so many Oxford doctors figured, must have been held in the university itself. Moreover the English document which Knighton gives as a recantation emphatically reasserts the opinions that Wycliffe had always entertained, and Knighton's whole treatment of Wycliffe's life is confused and unchronological. It is improbable that Wycliffe appeared before such an assembly, and certain that he did not retract his opinions. The archbishop's registrar, who duly chronicles the recantation of Repington and Aston (, iii. 172), would not have failed to place on record so welcome an event.

For the last time the crusade which Urban VI had proclaimed against his rival of Avignon brought Wycliffe back into his old field of political pamphleteering (1382). Here indeed was an exhibition on a more than ordinary scale of every abuse which Wycliffe had denounced. A pretended pastor of one half of Christendom was encouraging by the most extravagant indulgences the murder and plunder of his rival's adherents in Flanders, which was invaded by an army of ruffians recruited by preaching friars, financed by church collections, and led in person by the fiery prelate Henry Despencer [q. v.], bishop of Norwich, who had already used his formidable mace in putting down with more than the ruthlessness of any secular lord the rebellion of the peasants in Norfolk. Wycliffe's letter to Urban VI is sometimes said to have procured him the honour of a citation to Rome in 1384, which he was prevented by illness from obeying. But the fact of the citation rests entirely upon the authority of a letter of Wycliffe's apologising for non-obedience to it (Fasc. Ziz. p. 341), and the document, the real occasion of which must remain uncertain, scarcely reads (as Lechler points out) like a real letter actually sent to Rome, though the fact of the citation is accepted by Dr. Poole (Wycliffe and Movements for Reform, p. 111). A mere rumour that he was to be cited might well have moved the reformer to some such unfinished sketch of a reply, or it may have referred to the citation to Rome enjoined by one of the bulls of 1377.

It is to the parliament of November 1382—the parliament which cancelled the pretended statute against heresy—that Wycliffe is supposed to have addressed an ‘English petition’ to the following effect: (1) That regulars might be free to leave their orders; (2) that those men who unreasonably and wrongfully have damned the king and his council (for taking away the goods of ecclesiastics) may be amended of so great error; (3) that tithes and other ecclesiastical dues be withheld when not used for their proper purpose; (4) that the true doctrine of the eucharist may be taught (the document, which contains an elaborate statement of reasons, is printed in Arnold's ‘Select English Works of Wycliffe,’ iii. 508). A decidedly different version of the propositions addressed by Wycliffe to parliament is given by Walsingham (ii. 51). It invites parliament to withhold obedience to prelates, except in so far as such obedience promotes obedience to Christ; not to send money to the Roman court, not to allow absentees to enjoy benefices in England, not to oppress the people with tallages till the property of the clergy is used up, and to confiscate the goods of delinquent clergy; but contains no allusion to the eucharist.

Wycliffe had already, in 1382 or 1383, experienced a paralytic stroke. On 28 Dec. 1384 (see Bishop Buckingham of Lincoln's Reg. Memorabilia, f. 7, ap., p. 44, and the testimony of Gascoigne's manuscript deposition, ap. , p. 336; not, as the monk of St. Albans for polemical purposes represents, on the feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury, 29 Dec., Chron. Angl. p. 362) it was repeated while he was hearing mass in his own church; he never spoke again, and died three days later (31 Dec.) He was buried at Lutterworth, where his body remained till 1428, when it was disinterred, burnt, and thrown into the adjoining river Swift, in accordance with the orders of the council of Constance, by his former disciple Richard Fleming [q. v.], now bishop of Lincoln.

The repose enjoyed by Wycliffe's remains at Lutterworth from his death till 14 May 1415 is symbolical of the subsequent history of Wycliffism or Lollardism (the name is probably derived either from ‘loller,’ an idle fellow, or from the verb ‘lull,’ to sing or mutter psalms). The movement was no doubt thrown back by the repression which immediately preceded and followed his death, especially by the measures taken to collect and destroy his writings in Oxford (, Concilia, iii. f. 160). It is to this reaction against Wycliffism that the Oxford