Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/344

 No name was too bad for them in the mouths of regulars and seculars alike, especially after the Revolt. So long as the bishops and monks had no charge to bring against them except one of unsound doctrine, the men of that comparatively liberal age paid little attention to the ecclesiastical censure; but so soon as suspicion and prejudice attached to them in connection with the outbreak of the peasants, the Archbishop was able to deal them some shrewd and effective blows. Nevertheless we shall see that the later English Lollards—that is, Wyclif's Poor Priests and their converts—were stronger than their persecutors, more enduring than the Wycliffite school at Oxford, and sufficiently pertinacious to bridge the darkness of the fifteenth century with an unbroken line of light.

We have been at such pains to establish the connection between the early Reformation and the Peasants' Revolt that we may have lost sight for a moment of the main and prevailing causes of this half-abortive revolution. But if anyone could be found in those days capable of maintaining that Wyclif and his disciples were primarily responsible for the Revolt, it would be enough to ask in reply what would have been likely, and indeed certain, to happen at the close of the fourteenth century even if the last of the Schoolmen, the first of the English Reformers, had never written, preached, or lived. Assuredly we might account for and justify the rising—as every historian worthy of attention has held it to have been justified—without bringing Wyclif into the reckoning at all. Let us consider for a brief space what were the principal