Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/163

 bird took back his own feather by force; and so they escaped the danger, whilst the owl was more wretchedly callow than before. So,' said he, 'if war breaks out against us, we ought to take the temporalities from the possessionem, as being the common property of the realm, and prudently to defend our country with what is our own wealth, though in a measure superfluous.'"

But if the clergy had to listen occasionally to pungent apologues of this kind, they managed to return rubber for rubber. With part of the spoils of the Church a great fleet was fitted out and placed under the command of the Earl of Pembroke. "Plenty of money" was sent with it, to engage an army of mercenaries in Poitou; but the Spaniards fell upon this expedition off Rochelle, and annihilated it. Evidently, said the clergy, there was a curse on the plundered money; and when the King with four of his sons attempted to take out another fleet, to restore their broken fortunes, and could not get a favourable wind until it was too late, the superstitious friends of the Church agreed that "God was on the side of the French."

The fact is that the country entered on a series of disasters at the moment when Wyclif and his friends must have been nursing their highest hopes. The illness of the Prince of Wales had forced him to return to England after the cruel massacre at Limoges. The tide of war was already turning, and under the Duke of Lancaster the English arms suffered various humiliating defeats. Portsmouth had been burned by the French in 1369, and three years