Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/119

 It would be impossible to speak with confidence as to the origin of this family of Wycliffes. There is nothing to show whether they were Norman or English. The local surname would be natural enough in either case, and it is no more difficult to conceive a man of English origin bearing a Norman patronymic than it is to think of Anglo-Normans in the eighth or tenth generation who had lost their Norman characteristics and their Norman speech.

Wycliffe means "the water cliff." It is not the same name as that derived from "the white cliff," although the latter name also came to be written Wycliffe. The point is significant. There is a white cliff near Hipswell, and a hamlet called Whitcliff, which has been suggested as the place from which the Reformer took his name. But it is worthy of note that although we find more than twenty variations in the spelling of this name, it was never (so far as I am aware) spelt with a t, though John Wycliffe of Mayfield is occasionally called Whitcliffe.

As for the baptismal name of John, it was already more employed than any other; it was even in higher favour in the fourteenth century than it is in the nineteenth. If we can point to only two French kings and one English king of that name, there had been twenty-two Pope Johns when Wyclif was born. There is scarcely a list of proper names in the century wherein the Johns do not show a remarkable