Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/137

 than Fillingham, and to move from one to the other involved a loss of income.

Why, it may be asked, should Wyclif, who had elected and prepared himself for the life of a secular clergyman, twice decline to undertake the charge of a parish so near to his own birthplace, if it was not actually his birthplace, and which must have been in some respects attractive to him? A simple answer suggests itself. Wyclif was by this time, if not a Southerner in sympathies, at least bound up with the life and interests of Oxford, and bent on pursuing his ambitions by cultivating his friends in the political world. To go to Wycliffe-on-Tees as its rector, to devote his life and his means to rebuilding and decorating the old church, and to spend his days with the rough and not very intellectual men of the Yorkshire borders, must have appeared to him in the light of a banishment, not to say a deliberate desertion of the path of duty which had opened up to him elsewhere. He wanted to live in the South, within easy reach of Oxford and London; and so bent was he on being close to his work that, as he had preferred a Lincolnshire living to a residence in one of the most beautiful of north-country dales, he subsequently removed to a poorer parish because it lay between his beloved university and the capital. There was another reason why he would not be keen to present himself to Wycliffe-on-Tees. The thing would smack to his sensitive mind of an abuse which he particularly hated, and against which he had already publicly declared. Appropriation to individuals of the trust-funds of the Church, in any