Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/339

 touched by the fire of their master's zeal in his rural home at Lutterworth. Their plain speech and lack of refinements would be amongst their most hopeful qualifications for the task entrusted to them. They went forth to speak and associate with their kind, clad in a distinctive robe of undressed wool, brown and rough as the russet apples in their homely garden plots, relying for food and shelter on the good-will of their hearers, forbidden to thrive by their calling like the mendicants of an Order that was no longer poor, and rich only in their knowledge of the word of God, or haply in the possession of a roll of Scripture in their mother-tongue, and a few of their master's sermons.

The monks and friars and secular clergymen who came at times to listen to these uncouth wayfarers, and to deride their appearance and their ignorance before the simple folk whom they had gathered together, applied to them a term of contempt which had long been in use on the continent for religious fanatics of the humbler sort. The English "loller" of Langland's day was, indeed, a mere loafer and idler, not necessarily religious, or a babbler of any kind. Thus, in the Vision of Piers Plowman—

"Lollard" and "loller" in fact, did not mean quite the same thing, though the words descended from