Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/395

 that they teach truly the nature of the sacrament, and of all the Orders of Friars, under penalty of losing their privileges, that they do the same. For I am sure of the third part of the clergy, who maintain these positions here defined, that they will defend them at the cost of their lives."

If this confident reassertion and retort was in reality uttered by Wyclif in person before Courtenay, Wykeham, Gilbert, and the rest, we can easily imagine how it would trouble them, and perhaps exasperate them. Whether he did or did not see the bishops at this time depends very much upon the date of his first stroke of paralysis. One account, which comes to us at second or third hand, and which shall be quoted by and by, says that he had a minor stroke about two years before the major stroke which carried him off at the end of 1384. By the minor stroke it seems that he was partly disabled, and it may well be that movement was difficult for him in the year of the Synod, and that, in point of fact, those who wanted to see him had to come to the side of his couch or his study chair. Already in 1379, as we have seen, he had been seriously ill, and is described as calling on his attendants to raise him up in bed, and put him face forward before the aggressive friars. But then, at all events, he seems to have recovered both in body and in mental vigour. For the last two years of his life he was manifestly disabled; but this is precisely the period during which his active mind and hand were most productive. At any rate the period following his great conversion or perversion on the subject of the