Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/433

 Twelve years later, Pope Martin found that the decree of the Council had not been obeyed in England. He wrote an urgent letter on the subject to Richard Flemmyng, Bishop of Lincoln, whom we have encountered already as one of the younger disciples of Wyclif, and who in 1407 was still something of a Wycliffite, though he presently began to receive preferment. Flemmyng, in his old age, was full of zeal for orthodoxy, and brought himself to the point of desecrating his old master's grave and burning his bones.

Orthodoxy would willingly have stamped out everything that Wyclif wrote, with a great deal more into the bargain. Even Caxton, seventy or eighty years after the date of Arundel's Synod at Oxford, never ventured to touch a Wyclif manuscript. Indeed there are comparatively few religious works amongst the fourscore printed books attributed to him and his personal assistants. A Latin psalter appears to be the only complete book of the text of Scripture which found its way into print in the fifteenth century, though there are books of devotion, collections of papal indulgences, and a few orthodox sermons, which bear witness to the fact that the ignoring of Wyclif was not due to any secular exclusiveness amongst the early printers.

The effort to suppress the writings of Wyclif was not confined to England. Two years after the adoption of Arundel's constitutions the Pope appointed a Conference of learned men from the universities of Bonn, Paris, and Oxford to discuss the expediency of burning those heretical writings. Fortunately the hint from Rome was not taken; and it