Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/427

 independent industry, annealed by common interests and resolutions, energetic, honest, and self-respecting. These were the operative forces which in fact produced the people of England as we know them to-day, which worked with silent and subtle machinery amidst the transient din and chaos of the fifteenth century.

We are apt to be misled by such terms as the "Wars of the Roses," the "Lancastrian and Yorkist parties," the "Lollards" described as a mere persecuted sect, and "Jack Cade's rebellion." We have had, perhaps, too much of the mere story of White Rose and Red Rose, and too little of the history which explains who they were that fought, and why they fought, and what depended on the issue of each battle. In this sense, the history of the English people may almost be said to have been begun by Green. Up to his time it had been a sealed book; the seals are broken, but even now the pages are no more than half exposed. Green shows us how, from the Peasants' Revolt, from the persecution of Courtenay and the death of Wyclif, Lollardy was dispersed but not destroyed—how, stricken down and left for dead by the authorities, the spirit of religious independence revived amongst its friends and permeated many classes of the population. "All the religious and social discontent of the time floated instinctively to this new centre; the socialist dreams of the peasantry, the new and keener spirit of personal morality, the hatred of the friars, the jealousy of the great lords towards the prelacy, the fanaticism of the Puritan zealot, were blended together in a