Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/315

 enemies, and by a Chancellor who had plainly gone beyond the sentiment of the University. He did not affect to treat the decision as impersonal, and therefore one that might be safely ignored. He took it home to himself, and went to the length of addressing a direct appeal to the Crown.

It was the natural and proper appeal under the circumstances. Berton had conducted the inquiry and pronounced his decision as Chancellor, and in the exercise of his authority on a question of university teaching and discipline. His judgment, indeed, was scarcely equitable, and at any rate it strangely jumbled together the academic and the ecclesiastical functions. Berton, like Wyclif, was a secular priest and a regent of divinity, but in both respects the Reformer was senior to the other by several years. The talk of excommunication, however, was only a threat; the effectiveness of the judgment was in its prohibition of certain teaching; and it was against this prohibition that Wyclif rightly appealed from the Chancellor to the Crown. He was, in fact, simply acting in conformity with the royal decree of 1366, and with the consistent claim of the University to be independent in its own sphere of bishops as well as of popes.

At any rate the appeal reached the King's Council; and it is stated by one authority that John of Gaunt himself brought the answer down to Oxford. What was the answer? Was Wyclif still so far potent with the Court as to obtain a technical victory over Berton and the twelve doctors? That would make it easier to understand the temporary removal or withdrawal