Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/52

 national character of the English Church, the attitude of the monks and friars towards those whom they denounced as innovators, and the phases of life and thought in the university of Oxford, where Wyclif for the most part lived, and to which he was always devotedly attached.

After the breaking up of the vast empire of Charles the Great, the continent of Europe had come to be parcelled out into a large number of kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and republics, few of them possessing any exceptional importance, whilst the majority were quite insignificant. The most powerful overlordships, apart from that of the popes, were the Holy Roman Empire—extending from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and dividing the kingdom of Hungary and the Polish dukedoms from western Europe—the Byzantine Empire, the kingdom of France, and the States of the Spanish and Italian peninsulas. Over each and all of these, the popes had claimed not merely a spiritual but a political supremacy.

From the middle of the thirteenth to the close of the fourteenth century—to speak without absolute precision—the great central empire of Europe was gradually shrinking down to proportions roughly corresponding to those of Germany and Austria (proper) at the present moment. On the west and south-west this shrinkage was especially noteworthy. Burgundy had enlarged her borders; Switzerland had already adopted the federal republicanism which she has maintained ever since; the Low Countries, Savoy, and most of northern Italy, had