Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/205



CHAPTER IX.

PERSECUTION.

ROM Courtenay, it is evident, Wyclif would have little to expect save a stern and uncompromising opposition. The young aristocrat from the West of England, ever conscious of the royal blood in his veins, the haughty prelate whose proud bearing and intellectual vigour overawed bishops old enough to be his father, found little in common with the simple gentleman's son from the North. Courtenay has been described as a patriotic and anti-papal Englishman, and so no doubt in a sense he was. But his qualified hostility to the papal assumptions is not to be compared with the vehement antagonism of Wyclif in his later years. Courtenay, as we have seen, was ready enough to accept the mandate of Rome 157