Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/435

 of the law. It was an age in which many parts of England were involved in almost constant civil war. The Lancastrians and the Church had made common cause, and their enemies combined against them with arms in their hands. In all the revolts that marked the reign of Henry IV., the Lollard's everywhere took an active and a prominent part. The bitter hostility of the clergy towards the men whose very existence was a reproach against them was well illustrated by the conduct of some of the highest authorities of the Church and religious Orders, when they heard that Salisbury had been slain in battle. "His gory head was welcomed into London by a procession of abbots and bishops, who went out singing psalms of thanksgiving to meet it"; and amongst these exulting professors of Christianity there were probably some who had taken part in the barefoot litany of 1382, which celebrated the condemnation of Wyclif.

It was war to the knife between the Lancastrians and the Lollards—so completely had the earlier traditions of the first Duke of Lancaster been abandoned by his family. Parliament was still subject to the violent and rapid fluctuations which we have already observed in the reigns of Edward and Richard. If it was by no means always on the side of the clergy, still it was nearly always prejudiced against the Lollards as a fighting party. The survival of pure Wyclifiism was conspicuous enough in the repeated demands made by the House of Commons for the appropriation of Church property to secular and popular uses. Demands to this effect were made by the Lack-Learning Parliament in 1404, by