Lollards

English followers of John Wyclif. The Oxford reformer inspired a force of disciples who traveled up and down the land denouncing wrongdoing in church and state. Those who had enough to eat and dressed in fine raiment, and who wagged their heads at poverty-stricken preachers preaching to poverty-stricken peasants, called them Lollards, a term meaning "babblers." The Lollards were not wholly religious reformers. The rising under Wat the Tyler in 1381 reveals social conditions which made the doctrines of the Lollards popular.

In its widest sense, Lollardy was a democratic protest of the downtrodden poor against the oppressive rich, both in church and in state. Preachers like John Ball and other "babbling preachers" spread the gospel of discontent. The miserable peasants who had but emerged from villeinage were not alone in deeming that affairs were awry. Oxford University and many nobles, some it must be owned for political purposes, aided the "poor priests" who went about preaching to the crowds. Not a few noblemen had Lollard chaplains. The ferment of social betterment spread so rapidly during the ten years following Wyclif's death that one of the bitterest adherents of the old order declared that every second man in England was a Lollard.

Piers Plowman's Creed was written about this time. It draws a "portrait of the fat friar with his double chin shaking about, as big as a goose's egg, and the ploughman with his hood full of holes, his mittens made of patches, and his poor wife going barefoot on the ice so that her blood followed." The strife between the adherents of the red rose and the white rose favored the spread of Lollardism. In 1399 Henry IV, the Lancastrian, secured the throne. The Lollards claimed that he was aided by the Church as the reward of an agreement to put down Lollardy. Whatever the fact may be, it is certain that Henry and the Archbishop of Canterbury, in pursuance of an act for the burning of heretics, united the forces of church and state to purge the land of a troublesome political and religious heresy. Oxford was regulated. Preachers were banished, imprisoned, and burned. Sir John Oldcastle and his chaplain were burned at the stake. Wyclif's Bible and heretical pamphlets were hunted down. Lollards no longer preached by the wayside, but held forth in secret "in peasants' huts, in sawpits, and in field ditches." A prominent feature of these meetings was readings from hidden copies of Wyclif's Bible.

Though Lollardism persisted under cover until merged in the English Reformation, it was so far suppressed that all prospect of a Lollard sect was averted. Much has been written on the effect of Lollard writings on England and the relation of the English Lollards to the followers of John Huss in Bohemia.

The preachers were picturesque figures in long russet dress down to the heels, who, staff in hand, preached in the mother tongue to the people in churches and graveyards, in squares, streets, and houses, in gardens and pleasure grounds, and then talked privately with those who had been impressed. The Lollard literature was very widely circulated,--books by Wickliffe and Hereford and tracts and broadsides,--in spite of many edicts proscribing it. In 1395 the Lollards grew so strong that they petitioned parliament through Sir Thomas Latimer and Sir R. Stury to reform the church on Lollardist methods. It is said that the Lollard Conclusions printed by Canon Shirley contain the substance of this petition. If so, parliament was told that temporal possessions ruin the church and drive out the Christian graces of faith, hope, and charity; that the priesthood of the church in communion with Rome was not the priesthood Christ gave to his apostles; that the monk's vow of celibacy had for its consequence unnatural lust, and should not be imposed; that transubstantiation was a feigned miracle, and led people to idolatry; that prayers made over wine, bread, water, oil, salt, wax, incense, altars of stone, church walls, vestments, mitres, crosses, staves, were magical and should not be allowed; that kings should possess the jus episcopale, and bring good government into the church; that no special prayers should be made for the dead; that auricular confession made to the clergy, and declared to be necessary for salvation, was the root of clerical arrogance and the cause of indulgences and other abuses in pardoning sin; that all wars were against the principles of the New Testament, and were but murdering and plundering the poor to win glory for kings; that the vows of chastity laid upon nuns led to child murder; that many of the trades practised in the commonwealth, such as those of goldsmiths and armorers, were unnecessary and led to luxury and waste. These Conclusions really contain the sum of Wickliffite teaching; and, if we add that the principal duty of priests is to preach, and that the worship of images and going on pilgrimages are sinful, they include almost all the heresies charged in the indictments against individual Lollards down to the middle of the 15th century. The king, who had hitherto seemed anxious to repress the action of the clergy against the Lollards, spoke strongly against the petition and its promoters, and Lollardy never again had the power in England which it wielded up to this year.-Britannica.

All the religious and social discontent of the times floated instinctively to this new centre; the socialist dreams of the peasantry, the new and keener spirit of personal morality, the hatred of the friars, the jealousy of the great lords towards the prelacy, the fanaticism of the reforming zealot, were blended together in a common hostility to the Church and a common resolve to substitute personal religion for its dogmatic and ecclesiastical system. But it was this want of organization, this looseness and fluidity of the new movement, that made it penetrate through every class of society. Women as well as men became the preachers of the new sect. Lollardry had its own schools, its own books; its pamphlets were passed everywhere from hand to hand; scurrilous ballads which revived the old attacks of "Golias" in the Angevin times upon the wealth and luxury of the clergy were sung at every corner. Nobles, like the Earl of Salisbury, and at a later time Sir John Oldcastle, placed themselves openly at the head of the cause and threw open their gates as a refuge for its missionaries. London in its hatred of the clergy became fiercely Lollard, and defended a Lollard preacher who had ventured to advocate the new doctrines from the pulpit of St. Paul's.-J. R. Green.