Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/255

 held, sank during these generations so deeply into the popular mind that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries found all England saturated with biblical knowledge. It is marvellous that such widespread results should have left behind them so little visible testimony of the process by which they were brought about.

But indeed the very silence of history as to the personality of Wyclif's Poor Priests, and as to the details of their appointment and mission, is eloquent of the simplicity, the enthusiasm, the single-minded devotion with which they set about their work. Knowledge of and reverence for Holy Writ, an unbleached sheepskin, a broad hat, and a pair of sandals made up their moral and material equipment. Some of them were certainly university men, whilst some had graduated by the side of the master whom they revered, in no other learning than that of "the sacred page." It may be that the more scholarly amongst them carried copies of the Bible, or of the Gospels.only, made industriously by their own hands, at Oxford, at London, or at Lutterworth. In the same way they may have taken with them a few of Wyclif's sermons, or notes from the sermons which they had heard him preach. But the humblest of them all, it is very easy to believe, had nothing more than a well-furnished memory, together with a tested power to move the hearts of their fellow-men.

Naturally the first translations made by Wyclif from the Latin Bible were taken in hand some time before the Poor Priests went forth on their mission. It is impossible to fix a date for the beginning of the