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252 no degree owing to the scandal which Wycliffe's opponents have discovered in his ejection by the archbishop of Canterbury. So far as we can see, there was nothing discreditable to either party in the transaction, and nothing discreditable to the pope who dismissed Wycliffe's appeal, or to the English king who confirmed the papal sentence. It was simply a dispute, one of a kind that constantly arose, between the secular and the regular clergy. At the same time if the reformer be actually the person who was thus deprived we shall no doubt be right in looking upon this event in his personal history as one of the elements which produced his subsequent rancour against the monastic system.

At whatever decision we arrive with respect to this affair, it remains certain that Wycliffe continued active in the Oxford schools ; and this is all that we are here concerned to know, since it was not until many years later that he became conspicuous as a leader of opposition to the established doctrine of the church. Yet even now he had made himself a name outside of Oxford. He was, it seems, a chaplain to the king, and had already entered the lists of controversy as an advocate, though in guarded terms, of the rights of the English nation as against the papal claim to tribute from it. In the tract to which we refer he puts in the mouth of seven lords in council the arguments which might be urged against this claim; and to one of these speakers he gives the announcement of his own special doctrine of dominion. This was in