Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/430

 University, which had successfully resisted the authority of the Bishops of Lincoln, afterwards contested the claims of the Archbishops of Canterbury to exercise a right of visitation. Arundel, with shrewd judgment and calculation, had turned his attention to Oxford from the beginning of his primacy, probably considering that the best way to deal with a flood is to cut off the springs that feed it. It was ostensibly on the solicitation of a strong party in the faculties of law and divinity that he announced his intention to come down and assert his right in 1397; but he was foiled by the production of a bull from Boniface IX., declaring the University exempt. It is characteristic of that age of lame and ineffectual resolutions, that the popes themselves were found impeding the efforts of their legates to crush out a most formidable heresy—for it is evident that there was an intimate relation between the prosecution of the Oxford Wycliffites and the question of archiepiscopal visitation. Officious appeals on both points reached Arundel simultaneously, and he went so far as to declare, in a letter to the Chancellor, that he had been informed "that almost the whole University was affected by heretical pravity."

The phrase seems to have stuck in the gizzard of the Chancellor and Regents, for we find it again in a letter under the University seal, apparently addressed to the Archbishop some time later. This document bears witness to the manner in which Wyclif's repute was still cherished by the men who personally remembered him. "His conversation from his youth