Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/286

 without all mercy tormented on gibbets to death, what slaughter of men, what battles were fought between the two Popes, whereof five thousand on the one side were slaine."

Whilst the whole Church was scandalised by these disorders, Wyclif was living a comparatively quiet life at Oxford and Lutterworth, and devoting himself to congenial but arduous labours. So far as can be accurately ascertained, he produced a large majority of his works, and nearly all his English works, in the last six years of his life. It was indeed the four years from 1378 to 1382 which in all probability saw the publication of the English Bible, the sermons, one or two of the more interesting Latin works, and a series of English tracts, in which he maintained his unorthodox opinions with greater vigour than ever; and it was now for the first time that he began to express doubts of the accepted theory of transubstantiation. This particular error, more grievous to the orthodox people of his day than any other which is attributed to him, was not one of the conclusions enumerated in the papal bulls, as it certainly would have been if he had given his enemies the slightest pretext for laying it to his charge. But in 1382 it was placed, in the front of his fresh condemnation by Courtenay, and he had probably given utterance to it several years before that—certainly, as we shall see, in 1381.

It was one of the regular diversions of the orthodox in those days, and indeed for two or three generations afterwards, to count up the heresies of John Wyclif; and, as Thomas Fuller drily says, they were