Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/136

 The next established incidents in his career bring us face to face with certain facts already referred to, which possess considerable importance from several points of view. Not long after he had become Rector of Fillingham, in the course of the year 1363, John de Wycliffe presented William de Wycliffe, a clerical fellow of Balliol, to the rectory of Wycliffe-on-Tees. And on the next voidance of that living, in the year 1369, John de Wycliffe is again recorded as having presented a Balliol man, in the person of Henry Hugate probably a relative of the John Hugate who succeeded Wyclif as Master of the college.

It is a coincidence that he came up to Oxford from Fillingham on each of the two occasions when Wycliffe-on-Tees fell vacant in 1363, when he took rooms at Queen's College, and again in 1368, when his bishop gave him a prolonged leave of absence, in order that he might "devote himself to the study of letters at Oxford." He may or may not have heard in 1368 that the family living was about to be vacated. In any case he would be in Oxford, and in close association with his old friends and "commensales" at Balliol, when the presentation again fell into his hands, and he offered it to Hugate.

It was just at this latter date that Wyclif exchanged his rectory of Fillingham for that of Ludgarshall, or Lutgurshall, in the archdeaconry of Buckingham. If there was any question of private arrangement in all this, and if his presentation of Hugate to Wycliffe-on-Tees facilitated his transference to Ludgarshall, the fact would be entirely and conspicuously to Wyclif's credit, since Ludgarshall was a poorer