Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/118

 Hipswell—there is evidence as to a group of houses close to the manor house where the Wycliffes lived, and nearer to it than the village of Wycliffe was. Nothing is more likely than that there should have been a little thorp and a chapel near the gates of the manor house other than the village and the church of Wycliffe. We know, in fact, that there was a Thorp as early as the thirteenth century which formed part of the Wycliffe estate; and if there was no chapel at that early date one would almost certainly have been built in the sixteenth century. The family remained staunchly Romanist to the last, and intermarried with Rokebys, Coniers, Constables, and Tunstalls, though on the ground of their religion they could no longer present to the living of Wycliffe. A private chapel of some kind would be a necessity for them as soon as the Reformation had made headway, and this may well have been the chapel in which Penitent Johnson was married towards the close of the seventeenth century.

It is but a melancholy picture which is presented to us of these Richmondshire Wycliffes, poor in purse, proscribed in religion, proud of heart, gradually fading away amongst the more substantial Northern Catholics, sternly repudiating the one strong member of their race who ranks with the great Worthies of England, and owing much of their later misfortune to the obstinacy with which they cherished the discarded faith. The last of the Wycliffes was a poor gardener, who dined every Sunday at Thorpe Hall, as the guest of Sir Marmaduke Tunstall, on the strength of his reputed descent,