Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/323

 to give his astute foes the opportunity of proclaiming that he had retracted his mature and deliberate opinions. It is possible enough that he may have written such a paper in order to hand it in at the beginning of Berton's inquiry in 1381, or of one of the inquiries held by Courtenay in the following year, as an abstract or text for elucidation. In that case it is easy to understand how the document might come to be called, as it is by Knyghton, a "refugium mortis."

That Wyclif, however, was not merely the obstinate old man who clings to his opinions with senile perversity, and because he has lost the spirit of conciliation, is proved by an admission which he makes in the Trialogus, written after his withdrawal to Lutterworth. "I have undertaken," he says, without indicating when or to whom the promise was made—it may have been either to John of Gaunt or to Courtenay—"not to use out of the schools the term 'substance of material bread and wine.'" It must have cost him dear to make even this conditional promise, which of course is a very different thing from a retractation.