Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/277

 were collated for Mr. Arnold's edition. They are dated (by internal evidence rather than by continuous description from their origin onwards) as belonging to the later years of the fourteenth century, and various periods of the fifteenth. The same description applies to the sixteen or more manuscripts from which the tracts and miscellaneous works are taken—manuscripts preserved in the Bodleian and other university libraries, and in the Harleian and Cottonian collections at the British Museum. The difficulties of deducing positive belief from the evidence afforded by these manuscripts are various. Experts in palaeography can go a long way towards fixing the date of any particular manuscript, so as to make us fairly confident that we know the time of its production within a few decades. But even when we are assured that such and such a volume of manuscript was the work of a copyist who lived about the close of the fourteenth century, we may not have made any great advance towards a definite conclusion. The volume itself, and the separate tracts of which it is composed, may be without title or preface, and without collateral evidence of any sort; and there are certainly cases where collections of distinct works were attributed to Wyclif in the fifteenth century though it is manifest on closer inquiry that more authors than one were responsible for them. It is conceivable that either the copyist or the collector may have too lightly brought together the writings of different people; and in this way Wyclif has received credit or discredit for many a production of his contemporaries or immediate successors.