Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/344

Rh 324 ENGLAND [HISTORY. inent. The Go 3d of Edward III. The parliament of 1376, which lived Parlia- j n meil s memories by the name of the Good Parliament, had the full support of the prince of Wales. It was able to overthrow the king s ministers, to remove his favourite Alice Ferrers from court, and to encumber him with a council. A crowd of petitions of various kinds were presented, some of them insisting on freedom of elec tion. The houses separated ; the prince died; all the acts of the parliament were set at nought; most of them were re versed by a packed parliament the next year. Yet even this packed parliament established some wholesome doctrines, and amongst others enacted that no statute should be made at the petition of the clergy without the consent of the Commons. The same alternation of reforming and re actionary parliaments is found under Richard II. There is no surer witness to the importance of any assembly or other institution than the fact that the ruling powers find it convenient to corrupt or pervert it. John Wick- liffe. Founda tion of colleges. Resist ance to the popes. When we turn to the religious, the social, and the literary aspect of this period, we may be amazed at the way in which the three are all intertwined together, and in which they all gather round a single man. We cannot write the history of the fourteenth century in any of these aspects, we cannot write the history of the fifteenth as affected by causes which had their beginning in the fourteenth, with out bringing in the name of John Wickliffe. As a man who was employed in important negotiations with foreign powers, he has earned his place in any minute record even of the outward political history of his time. But it is in these other three branches that lie stands out as the fore most figure of his time. But, while he is prominent in all three alike, it is his religious position which is primary. His influence on our social and literary history is secondary, and acts wholly through his religious position. Wickliffe, a renowned schoolman and doctor of Oxford, a well beneficed secular priest, and not unknown in the political world, made himself the centre and the mouth-piece of the great need of his time. The fourteenth century saw the beginning of a cry for a religious reformation in a wider sense than a mere reform of the abuses of the moment. Reforms of that kind have been demanded, promised, and indeed partly attempted, in almost every age. The day of the monks was past when the day of the friars be gan; and now the day of the friars was past also. They too had fallen from their first love, and the abuses of the mendicant orders formed one of the chief subjects of decla mation for the reformers of the time. The bounty of founders now took another form. The foundation of colleges in the universities went on briskly all through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Schools and hospitals, chantries and colleges of priests attached to parish churches, were largely founded ; but the foundation of monasteries was now rare. The great foundations of William of Wykeham at Winchester and Oxford, followed by those of Henry VI. at Eton and Cambridge, form an aera in the history of education in England. It is singular that this new class of foundations was largely helped by an act of legislation which might well pass for spoliation of the Church. The fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth was a busy time of legislation on ecclesiastical matters. The political strife with the Roman see went on in full vigour, with all the more vigour because the Roman see had in some sort ceased to be a Roman see. In the fourteenth century the popes were no longer the common fathers of Christendom, ruling from the centre of Christendom. They had forsaken Rome for Avignon, a city close to the French border, and where they were the tools of the king of the neighbouring ralm. The popes of Rome had been oppressors and spoilers of England ; the popes of Avignon were her political enemies, the allies of her rivals in Britain and on the continent. When, later in the century, Rome and Avignon became the seats of rival popes, England was naturally found on the side of the pope of Rome, France and Scotland on the side of the pope of Avignon. But, whether at Rome or at Avignon, the foreign ecclesiastical power had to be kept in check. A series of statutes designed to check papal encroachments marks the reign of Edward III., and still more conspicuously marks the reign of Richard II. The statute of provisors checked the interference of the popes with the disposal of English benefices. The statute of prcemunire denounced the heaviest penalties against the unauthorized introduction of papal bulls into the kingdom. Legislation of this kind was indeed only repressing innovations ; it was bringing the law back to what it had been in the days of King Eadward and King William. Under the house of Lancaster, the spirit of opposition to the papal claims grew fainter, at all events on the part of the kings. In the appointment of bishoprics especially, pope and king found it easy to play into one another s hands, at the expense of the ecclesiastical electors. Meanwhile, from the reign of Edward III. onwards, opposition to the aggressions of the head of the Church abroad grew into a dangerous hankering after the possessions of the Church at home. In the later days of Edward a strong party of the baronage, headed by John of Gaunt, were zealous for ecclesiastical reform, in the sense of confiscation of ecclesiastical property and of the exclusion of churchmen from political office. In the reign of Henry IV. a scheme was proposed in the Commons for the general confiscation of ecclesiastical revenues. This storm was turned aside, but the hand of disendowment fell heavily in the next reign on one class of ecclesiastical foundations, though, as it txirned out. greatly to the profit of another class. The new colleges and other foundations were largely endowed out of the revenues of the alien priories. These were monasteries in England which were dependent on greater monasteries in Normandy or elsewhere beyond the sea. During the w T ars with France these alien houses were looked on as outposts of the enemy, and in the reign of Henry V, they were finally suppressed. By far the greater part of their revenues went to the educational and secular foundations which were growing up at Oxford, Cambridge, and elsewhere. A king and a primate, both of them of a piety unusual in that age, Henry V. and Archbishop Chicheley, were the chief actors in this aliena tion of ecclesiastical revenues by the secular power. But changes of this kind were not religious reformation ; they were hardly ecclesiastical reform. It is plain that the corruptions of the Church were growing ; everything shows the prevalence of a hard, secular, grasping spirit in ecclesiastical relations. The primates of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are, if we except the momentary primacy of Thomas Bradwardine, an inferior race to those of the thirteenth. Men cried, as they had ever cried, for the reform of practical evils, and they now began to go much further. They began to attack the whole ecclesiastical system, and even the received doctrines of the Church. It was held that heresy was a crime at common law ; but, as a matter of fact, religious dissent of any kind was rarely heard of in England from the earliest times till the fourteenth century. The most remarkable case in earlier times was in the reign of Henry II., when a company of foreigners, belonging to some of the sects of Southern Europe, succeeded in making a single English proselyte. But the teaching of Wickliffe in the fourteenth century was the beginning of the religious changes of the sixteenth century. Wickliffe, the founder of a sect which suffered much persecution, can hardly be said to have been chu pro; Sup sioi: alie pric nin, rcli Tea of I iff.