Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/343

 to the opinion of discreet men. Thirdly, let them be given to the duties which befit the priesthood, for want of habitude as well as indolence unfits men for this work; and it is not every occupation, as the keeping of a booth, or hunting, or devotion to games or to chess, which is becoming to a priest, but studious acquaintance with God's law, plain preaching of the word of God, and devout prayerfulness." Especially they should be good preachers, for in this way Christ conquered his kingdom; "but let him who does not preach publicly exhort in private. . . . And if anyone is specially skilled in training priests on this model, he has a power which comes of God, and possesses merit through grace when he accomplishes such a work."

However obnoxious the Poor Priests, and the independent Lollards, of whom John Ball was a type, may have been to the secular and religious clergy, they were far from being universally unpopular amongst the higher classes. Walsingham says, and there is no reason to doubt him, that "lords and the highest men in the land, as well as many of the people, supported them in their preaching, and favoured those who taught erroneous conclusions—and very naturally, since they assigned such great authority to laymen, even the authority to deprive ecclesiastics and religious corporations of their temporalities."

Courtenay refers to them in a letter to the Carmelite friar Peter Stokys of Oxford, in 1382, as "wolves in sheep's clothing," sons of perdition, preaching their false conclusions under a cloak of great sanctity.