Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/194

 that would mean in our own days, and it would seem that Islip's poor priests were not even passing rich on forty pounds a year.

It is a question how far these humble missioners put into Wyclif's head the idea of his russet priests. At any rate it was in the same field that he was subsequently moved to labour.

Islip gave many signs of his ability as an administrator; and the manner in which he dealt with the Flagellants is worth mentioning on this ground alone. For a time these curious products of physical suffering and spiritual elation convulsed the minds of many devoted men, in England as well as on the continent. The history of these fanatics is very much the same as that of irregular religious demonstrations in all ages. There were the same ecstasies, the same ability to endure pain, the same conviction that endurance would be accounted to them for righteousness, the same aggressive bearing, which excited indignation and persecution. Persecution, too, had its usual effect in fostering what it tried to exterminate. Only phlegmatic England, of all the western nations of Europe, escaped lightly from this epidemic of purely human origin. It was condemned in a bull from the Pope, who called on the different monarchs to take measures for its repression. To this message Edward paid no attention, and the Archbishop as little as possible. So far as England was concerned, the Flagellants may be said to have been tolerated out of existence.

Some of the last acts of Islip's life—the foundation of Canterbury Hall at Oxford, the exclusion of