Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/131

 with remarkable precision to Wyclif himself, who took Grosteste as a model for imitation.

There was another man who undoubtedly had a strong and a personal influence on the character of Wyclif, one of the latest and broadest of the Schoolmen, Archbishop Fitzralph of Armagh, who was much at Oxford up to the year 1547. During the last ten years of his life (1350-60), Fitzralph threw himself into the controversy on evangelical poverty, carried to Avignon the grievances of the secular clergy against the mendicant friars, and wrote (amongst other works) a book on The Poverty of Our Saviour—in which, however, he dwelt but lightly on the contrast between the life of Christ and that of his latter-day disciples, which had been so deeply resented from the Italian Fraticelli. Some of the latter had contended that Jesus himself begged for his living, which the Irish prelate strongly denied, and which Wyclif even denounced as blasphemous. Fitzralph was on excellent terms with Popes Clement and Innocent; but the friars had made their position too strong to be seriously affected, even by the great "Armachanus," or by the "Doctor Evangelicus" (as Wyclif came to be called), who took up the case against them from the relaxing fingers of his friend and counsellor.

It was in the very year of Fitzralph's death that we find Wyclif, now about forty years old, engaged at Oxford in the earliest stage of an acute struggle between the authorities and the friars,which endured for something like six years. The friars wanted to have the privilege of proceeding to the degree of Doctor in