John Wyclif 640

Today is the 640th anniversary of the death at lotto off in Leicestershire of the rector, John Wyclif - also, of course, spelt as Wycliffe. 

Wyclif had been rector for the previous decade since 1374, but only resident since 1382, and probably reluctantly, for all his inveigling against negligent clergy, He apparently suffered a stroke during Mass in the church on December 28th and died hree days later. He was buried in the church with a memorial, of which fragments were taken in later years by Bohemian admirers back to central Europe. In 1428, by order of the Council of Constance, confirmed by Pope Martin V, and at the order of the diocesan Bishop Richard Fleming of Lincoln, Wyclif’s bones were dug up, burned and the ashes thrown into the local river Swift. Later romantically minded admirers have seen this as spreading his influence worldwide.

To many he came to be seen, and still is, as the “Morning Star of the Reformation”, founder of the Lollard movement and enthusiastic translator of the Bible into English. That is very much the interpretation offered by H.B. Workman in his two volume early twentieth century biography of Wyclif

Twenty or so years later the immensely influential Oxford Historia and reinterpretor of late Medieval English politics K.B. Macfarlane wrote a short but significant life of Wyclif. Unlike Workman Macfarlane was not a religious man and for him Wyclif was a disappointed careerist with high blood pressure. Forced out of Oxford because of his highly controversial views, and after failing to secure a fixed place there and dependent on various small benefices for his income he became ever more critical of the established Church and succumbed to a stroke.

Such were the two prevailing views of Wyclif when I was an undergraduate.

Since then studies on all aspects of Wyclif, his immediate circle, their influence, the development of Lollard ideas and Lollard ( if it existed,that is, as a coherent movement )the impact of his ideas on Jan Hus in Bohemia and on, or arguably not on, the English reformation, and its enduring legacy. As has been pointed out long ago he anticipated almost the whole range of reformist ideas, but not in a systematic way, being in that respect more like Luther than Calvin and his followers.

The result has been much excellent scholarship, much light has been shed and some heat generated. The result is we think we know something or indeed more about Wyclif, but it seems to me that often the more we know, or think we know, the more perplexing he is. That extends to his - putative - followers, and the place of all of them in Ricardian and fifteenth century England.

Just a brief glance at the Wikipedia account of Wyclif indicates something of this. It can be seen at John Wycliffe

It begins with the old emphasis on him as the proto-English protestant but what have been I suspect later revisions indicate how far and wide scholarship has gone in recent decades. There are no easy answers with the life and thought of Wyclif. 

Ten years ago I posted about the anniversary of his death in John Wyclif

In it I recommended the ODNB life by Anne Hudson and Anthony Kenny. That remains a major introduction, as does Kenny’s ‘Past Mastets’ OUP account.  G.R. Evans’ biography is readable and brings late fourteenth century Oxford to life.

Kenny compared Wyclif to Wesley and Newman as three Oxford men with the same Christian name, exiled from Oxford but ever nostalgic for it. For all their immense differences he makes a useful, memorable comparison. All three risked sanctions from essentially the same academic code of regulation and conduct in the age before Victorian reform got to work on the University. I would add that all three wrote vast amounts, and trawling through it all takes time and skill.

Today he might well be a television don, a pundit on everything, or one exiled to the internet for being too politically or ecclesially incorrect.

There is an illustrated account of the church at Lutterworth at Lutterworth Church St Mary Leicestershire | Leicestershire & Rutland Church Journal

I wrote about following Wyclif’s footsteps in modern Oxford in 2014 in Walking round Wyclif's Oxford

John Wyclif

Today is the 630th anniversary of the death of the English heresiarch John Wyclif at Lutterworth in Leicestershire. He had been living in the parish in his last years, effectively exiled from Oxford on account of the increasing hostility of the authorities in the Church and realm to his increasingly radical ideas. He suffered a stroke whist attending or assisting at the Mass in his church at Lutterworth on December 28th. He was buried in the church and had a tombstone - fragments of it were taken as relics by two Bohemian students in the years that followed.

John Wyclif

Image:herodote.net

Lutterworth Church.

East view of the church where John Wyclif was rector from 1374 until his death in 1384.
The church formerly had a spire

Image: leicestershirevillages.com

Following the formal condemnation of his teachings as heretical by the Council of Constance in 1415 the Council orderd that his remains be exhumed and burned. At the tim eteh Bishop of Lincoln, in which diocese the parish lay, was Philip Repingdon, once a fervent admirer of Wyclif at the beginning of the 1380s, but who renounced his Wycliffite ideas in the summer of 1382.

 

The exhumation and burning of Wyclif's bones in 1428

From the 1563 edition of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments 1563

Image:en.academic.ru

It was under his successor, Richard Fleming, that the remains of the founder of English dissent were exhumed and burned, the ashes being poured into the River Swift. Sympathisers ahve seen this as symbolic of the transmission of his ideas world wide.

One does not have to agree with Wyclif to recognise that in his own time, in the century and a half down to the reformation and then, held up as its great precursor, during the English Reformation, he was and is a figure of importance and with a legacy.

 

Gunning for Wyclif

A series of posts on the Medieval Religion discussion group on Thursday caught my attention as a historian interested in the career of John Wyclif [Wycliffe] - my Bishop Fleming was responsible for having his remains exhumed and burned in 1428 - and of his followers, the Lollards.

The posts are, I think, self-explanatory:

Al Magery wrote to the list as follows:

"Is there extra salvation value in studying medieval theologians? In the shooting today in the library at Florida State University, in which three were wounded, USA Today reports:

Student Jason Derfuss said he was leaving the library when the shooter opened fire very near him. Derfuss posted on Facebook pictures of a bullet and a book, Great Medieval Thinkers: John Wyclif, the bulllet had torn through. Derfuss says in his post he was near the gunman when the shooting started but never felt the shot and only discovered the damage three hours later."He was about 5 feet from me, but he hit my books," Derfuss said. See http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/20/fsu-guman/19310741/

Author of that book is Stephen Edmund Lahey, who teaches philosophy at Lemoyne College."

At this point the Clever Boy would add the comment that it all seems so unlike, so very unlike, our own dear Bodleian here in Oxford.

Jim Bugslag responded:

"Tunics which had lain for a novena on the reliquary of the Virgin's Tunic at Chartres Cathedral used to be considered able to miraculously fend off bullets and other weapons. And I recall some stories of the First World War in which soldiers were saved from bullets or shrapnel by the Bible they were carrying on their person. Wycliffe seems an unlikely inheritor of that miraculous tradition. I'm not sure he'd approve!"

Jaye Procure commented:

"That's certainly not the usual means of hitting the books."

Andrew Larsen summed it all up:

"The question is, is this John Wycliffe's first miracle or Stephen Lahey's?"

Of course there must remain the possibility that the gunman was a sharpshooter who targeted the book. One of Archbishop Arundel's lieutenants who is still out there seeking to eradicate Lollardy...?

Walking round Wyclif's Oxford

This morning I gave a guided tour to some visitors on the Oxford of Wyclif and of the Reformers.

The Oxford DNB has an excellent and extensive biography of John Wyclif by Anne Hudson and Antony Kenny, which must be the best short account available, and one that combines scholarship of a high degree with lucidity and balance. It can be accessed here.

We began in the High Street with St Mary's Church. The thirteenth century tower and early fourteenth century spire are one of the relatively few surviving buildings from Wyclif's time. Along with the adjacent Old Convocation House of 1320, from which the University governed itself, they are buildings Wyclif would have known throughout his time in Oxford. In his time the church was used for meetings of the Masters of the University and for degree ceremonies; in the mid-sixteenth century it was used for the trials of Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer and for the procedural ceremonies before their executions in Broad Street.

 

The tower and spire of St Mary's Church

Image:gonomad.com 

 

The Old Convocation House 

Image:university-church.ox.ac.uk

Along the High Street to the east is The Queen's College which was a college for 'Northeners', of which Wyclif was of course, one. He lived in the college in the early 1370s and paid  rent for a room there in 1380. This was one of the leading colleges in the University in these years.  The buildings he knew have all been demolished to be replaced by the present fine example of English Baroque. Fortunately we do possess David Loggan's birds-eye view of the college buildings drawn beforehand,and which show some features which Wyclif would have known.

The Queen's College as it appeared in 1675
The High Street is to the left, and the road in front is Queen's Lane

Image:heatons-of-tisbury.co.uk

On the opposite side of Queen's Lane is the medieval church of St Peter in the East. It now serves as the library of the adjacent St Edmund Hall, but the building must be substantially as it was in Wyclif's time.

St Peter in the East

Image:oxfordhistory.org.uk

St Edmund Hall became a notable centre for Wycliffite or Lollard academics in the early fifteenth century. Notable amongst these was Peter Payne, master of the adjacent White Hall before becoming Principal of St Edmund Hall and then fleeing to join the Hussites in Bohemia. His remarkable career can be read in the Oxford DNB life of him here. 

South of the High is Merton. which in the early fourteenth century had been the leading college in the time of the 'Merton calculators'. Wyclif was a Fellow of Merton in 1356, and the chapel he would have worshipped in still survives, with addition of the tower of 1450 and the completion of the transepts. Much of the glazing is glass which would have been there in the 1350s.

Merton College Chapel

Image:thewayofbeauty.org 

Immediately to the south of the chapel is Mob Quad, the oldest quadrangle in either Oxford or Cambridge; there is an account of it here. The entrance and muniment room is referred to in the college accounts for  1288 -91. The north and east ranges date from 1310-20, whilst the south and west sides were built after Wyclif had left the college, but whilst he was still in Oxford, in 1373-8.

 The north and east sides of Mob Quad, with the chapel behind

Image: Wikipedia

To the west, in Oriel Square, is Canterbury Gate of Christ Church. This and the quadrangle it leads to occupy the site of Canterbury College - a college initially founded by Archbishop Islip to accommodate both secular and monastic clergy and of which Wyclif was a member in the later 1360s. This was until he and the other seculars were removed by the Benedictine monk- Arcbishop Langham in 1370; this was seen by K.B. Macfarlane as part of the origin of Wyclif's hostility to the possessioner monastic orders.

The old gate of Canterbury College before it was taken down in 1775, and the new gate of 1778

A print published by Joseph Skelton in 1820

Image:lindisfarneprints.com

Behind the site of Canterbury College is the cathedral. In Wyclif's time this was the church of the Augustinian priory of St Frideswide, housing the shrine of the patroness of both the town and university. Much of the building as it was in the mid- to later fourteenth century survives despite numerous alterations and adaptations of the church to meet different liturgical fashions and requirements.

 

The early thirteenth century tower and spire of St Frideswide's Priory from the south-east

Image:chch.ox.ac.uk

In 1382 the Augustinian Canon Philip Repyngdon, then an enthusiastic supporter of Wyclif's ideas, preached a sermon in the priory churchyard at Corpus Christi, June 5th, endorsing Wyclif's ideas. This site is now probablty represented by the Canons' Garden to the north of the cathedral or may lie under part of Tom Quad.  Summoned before the authorities over a series of sermons and disputation speeches  he formally recanted his errors in St Frideswide's on November 18th that same year. Subsequently Canon Repyngdon returned to his home at Leicester abbey, where he may have previously introduced Wycliffite ideas to the town, but now retuned to orthodox belief, went on to became Abbot, confessor to King Henry IV, and was Bishop of Lincoln from 1405-19, and offered a Cardinal's hat by Pope Gregory XII. The Oxford DNB life of him can be read here.

We then walked up Oriel Street - one which Wyclif must have used to cross the High and into Radcliffe Square. In 1378 he was temporarily under house-arrest on the order of the Chancellor in Black Hall which stood on what is now the Square to the north of St Mary's.

The Osney Schools where he would have attended and given lectures were rebuilt after his time and then demolished to make way for Sir Thomas Bodley's extensions to the Divinity School and Duke Humphrey's Library (1420s-1480s), and their site lies just in front of the Proscholium of the Bodleian, which occupies what had been the continuation of School's Lane.

The Austin Friary, where Wyclif was detained in 1378, stood on the site of Wadham College and the King's Arms - a friend of mine used to describe this as wyclif being arrested in the pub.

Along Broad Street lies Balliol, another 'Northern College',where Wyclif was Master in 1361, and where he may have been before his sojourn at Merton. In recent year the college under the Mastership of Sir Antony Kenny has helped advance Wyclif studies, although today nothing remains of the buildings he would have seen - the oldest parts are early fifteenth century, and most of it a handsome Victorian rebuilding of 1863.

The front of Balliol as rebuilt in 1863

Image:bbc.co.uk 

The executions of 1555 and 1556 took place outside Balliol in what was then the city ditch - Oxford then was still an obviously walled city as it had been in Wyclif's time

Oxford in 1578

The middle part of Ralph Agas' map shows the city more as Wyclif and the Protestant Reformers would have known it. The map has the south at the top.

St Mary's is centre left, Merton top left, Canterbury College was just above Peckwater Inn, the Schools are just to the left of the lower centre, and Balliol at the lower right. The Queen's College is just off the view to the centre left. The city walls, still unencumbered by housing, can be seen towards the bottom of the view. The Northgate, where the Protestant bishops were imprisoned adjoins St Michael's church (lower right handside)

In Wyclif's time New College was just beginning in 1379 (bottom left), and Lincoln (1427) All Soulds (1438) and Brasenose (1509) in the centre had still to be founded.

Image:Wikipedia

All in all, after more than six centuries there are a surprising number of buildings still surviving and in use in Oxford which Wyclif would have known.