Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/107

 have been derived from Ockham; and, so far as religious and merely anti-papal views are concerned, this may well have been the case.

The evolution of these ideas in the age of the Schoolmen, where evolution can be recognised before the time of Marsiglio, was a gradual and tardy process, limited for the most part the antagonism between Rome and the secular governments, or exhibiting little more than a variety of paraphrases from Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas. Pierre Dubois and John of Paris had begun to emphasise the distinctions between the authority of the Church and that of the State. This was before the time of the Emperor Ludwig; and it was Ludwig's vigorous conflict with Rome, during the "Babylonian Captivity" at Avignon, which set the seal of actuality on what had hitherto been a somewhat abstract disquisition. Several of the earlier Schoolmen had provided arguments against the encroachments of the Papacy; it was for Marsiglio and Ockham to erect an independent system without exclusive reference to the papal claims.

Lupoid von Bebenburg, who wrote the first theoretical work on German jurisprudence, went a step further. Having formulated the rights of the Emperor, he maintains that even the homage and submissions of emperors to popes cannot wholly commit the subordinate princes and the people. As a tributary prince is permitted, when his overlord chooses to submit himself to another overlord, to refuse the new vassalage for his own part, so, if a vassal of a church-vassal declines to become a