Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/120

 predominance. In Courtenay's Synod of 1382, for instance, seventy-three theologians and lawyers took part, and twenty-six of them were named John. Again, out of the twelve doctors assembled at Oxford by William Berton, who agreed in his condemnation of Wyclif's opinions in 1381, no fewer than nine were Johns. One of the writers of the Chronicon Angliæ, probably himself a John, referring in a certain passage to Wyclif, says quaintly: "This fellow was called John but he did not deserve to be. For he had cast away the grace which God gave him, turning from the truth which is in God, and giving himself up to fables."

If we are tempted to look with some doubt on the Hipswell conjecture, and to nurse the idea that John Wyclif was born in the home of the Wycliffes, we shall gain additional support for the general belief of the past five centuries that the father of the English Reformation was a scion of one of the most devout Catholic families of the North, the head of which was lord of the manor of Wycliffe-on-Tees. Let us see what contemporary records have to tell us about the Plantagenet Wycliffes.

The genealogy preserved by the Wycliffe family, which will be found recorded in Whitaker's Richmondshire, includes three generations admitted to be insufficiently proved. They are given in the