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 Paul’s to Westminster, and around the church and the palace. The king, bareheaded, proceeded on foot, holding the sacred relic above his head. The bishop of Norwich preached the sermon on the occasion and, at a later date, Robert Grosseteste preached another, defending the genuineness of the blood by reasoning which displayed great scholastic ingenuity. Matthew Paris, who gives a detailed description of the relic, called it “a holy benefit from heaven.”

Among the cases of bloody hosts was the one reported by Cæsar of Heisterbach two centuries earlier at St. Trond, Belgium. He had seen it himself and spoke of it as a miracle to be recorded for the benefit of the generations that were to come after. The fragments of the cross, which the piety of the Middle Ages revered as genuine, came to be so numerous that Clement V solemnly proclaimed the dogma of the multiplication of the wood of the sacred tree.

The decision issued against the use of Wyclif’s writings by the university of Prague, in 1403, had the result of increasing the curiosity to know what Wyclif’s views were. In fact, clerical and scholarly opinion in Prague was in a fer-