Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/324



CHAPTER XIV.

WYCLIF'S POOR PRIESTS.

HOUGH much that is interesting and comparatively new remains to be said about the Peasants' Revolt in the fourteenth century, we have no more to do with it in the present volume than may be necessary to show how much or how little John Wyclif contributed to bring it about, and in what manner it affected his own life and the development of his ideas. In this sense it is at least as important as any other chapter of events in the history of the early reformation; for there can be no doubt that the panic produced amongst the governing classes by the uprising of the serfs was for the religious reformers a final check to the hope of speedy victory. 258