Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/41

Rh of Fasciculi Zizaniorum Magistri Johannis Wyclif cum Tritico—"Bundles of Tares . . . together with Wheat." Would it were possible to suppose that Netter, who was confessor to the grandson of John of Gaunt, Wyclif's patron and protector for something like fifteen years, had preserved these materials for the purpose of justifying rather than gibbeting the last of the English Schoolmen! Such, at all events, has been their effect in the long run. Bishop Bale of Ossory, who followed Netter after an interval of a century, possessed and made great use of his manuscript, which he did much to elucidate; and many others in more recent times have found it exceedingly serviceable for Wyclif's defence. Amongst these was Foxe, a friend of Bale, who probably owed to the latter nearly all his materials for the account of Wyclif in the Acts and Monuments. Throughout the later reformation period, and in the seventeenth century, the story of Wyclif must have been familiar in England through the works of Foxe, James, Thomas Fuller, and others; but hardly any of these writers knew more than they had been told by Netter, Bale, and the English chroniclers.

A great debt is due from the present generation to the Rev. John Lewis, who, in 1720, published at Oxford his History of the Life and Sufferings of John Wickliffe, and collected as many facts and documents as were at that time within his reach. That he should now and then have jumped a little too confidently to his conclusions, and made use of one or two works which had not been sufficiently authenticated, is by no means a matter of surprise.