Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/152

 to refuse tribute to the Roman Pontiff, to try ecclesiastics in its own courts, and to take away, for fit and proper cause, the possessions of ecclesiastics.

"My Doctor," says Wyclif,—"my Doctor with his brethren demands, with a certain excess of vehement insistence, with effervescence and swelling of the spirit, that I should reply to him categorically in the terms of his argument, and more particularly as regards the case which he makes for the Pope against the authority of the King. Every lordship, says he, given under a condition, exists only so long as that condition has not been destroyed. Now the Pope gave the realm of England to our King on condition that England would pay seven hundred marks each year [and Ireland three hundred]. But this condition has been abolished by lapse of time and circumstances: wherefore the King of England has lost the true lordship of England."

It is curious, Wyclif goes on to say, that the case should be put to me in this pointed way; and my friends tell me that it has been done for three reasons—first, that, as soon as I have answered, I may be denounced to the Roman Curia, censured, and deprived of my position; secondly, that the favour of Rome may be secured for himself and his friends; thirdly, that secular lordships may be heaped upon the abbeys, by the extension of the papal authority in England, without the wholesome restraint of brotherly expostulation. "But I, as a humble and obedient son of the Roman Church, protest that I do not mean to make any contention which would so much as sound like an insult, or