MARVELLOUS FOOLISHNESS
Choosing to be Wrong
TRUE AND FALSE beliefs were matters only the clergy could define: ‘the judging of any question concerning the supposition of heresy appertaineth only to them’. At the height of the Standish controversy, the English bishops formally set this principle down on paper, and swore they would never flinch from investigating and punishing error, ‘though they themselves should suffer persecution or death for the same’.
When it came to investigating heresy, the bishops were not the people most likely to be facing persecution and death. But there is no doubting the seriousness with which heresy was taken in early Tudor England, or the determination of church leaders to see it eradicated. In February 1512, John Colet reminded the Fathers of Convocation that the realm was nowadays ‘grieved of heretics, men mad with marvellous foolishness’. His provocative suggestion that the wicked lifestyle of priests itself represented a kind of heresy was calculated to concentrate minds on the problems facing the Church, and the weight of moral demand on those charged with addressing them.1
Heresy, like beauty, resides in the beholder’s eye. It is possible to regard it as no more than a ‘construct’ – an artificial category created by self-proclaimed policemen, with their own reasons for identifying, or inventing, a convenient criminal enemy.2 It was no accident that the most intense English anti-heresy campaign for a century coincided with parliamentary attempts to restrict benefit of clergy. In England, the people accused of heresy were known by the pejorative nickname of Lollard, a puzzling label which probably originally meant something like mumbler of prayers. Some historians suspect that those to whom the label was applied did not comprise any kind of ‘movement’ or ‘sect’, but were rather a haphazard assortment of the opinionated, the ignorant and the irreverent, misleadingly made to look coherent in their views by the procedures and preoccupations of persecuting authorities.3
But this is to tell only half the story, and to risk drawing attention away from the behaviour and beliefs of those actually accused of being heretics. These people often understood that they were going against accepted opinion; they thought they knew better than their neighbours, their curate, their bishop, even the Pope. The existence of such people is a pointer to the dynamic, and sometimes surprisingly diverse, character of later medieval religion, and to the ability of even humble parishioners to think things out for themselves.
The word heresy derives from the Greek hairesis, meaning choice. Orthodox churchmen were quite right when they defined heretics as people who chose their own opinions above the traditions and teachings of the Church. A heretic, Bishop John Alcock declared, was one that ‘taketh the scripture of God after his will, and not after the sense of the Holy Ghost’.4 It was not so much error in itself, but wilful pertinacity in error that made heresy so terrible. Heretics were undoubtedly worse than pagans or infidels, who never had opportunity to learn and embrace the truth. The heinous nature of the crime was brought home to parishioners through quarterly recitation in all churches of the ‘great sentence’, a declaration of excommunication against anyone guilty of specified offences. High on the list were heretics, who ‘do willingly against the law of holy Church and the faith of Christendom, in word or deed or counsel, or in example’. The ritual pronouncement of their exclusion included the tolling of a death knell, and the extinguishing and casting to the ground of a lighted candle – accompanied by a clerical spit of scornful disdain.5
All the more remarkable, then, that some folk decided to risk these censures – though we should avoid the temptation, sometimes indulged by the Lollards’ modern admirers, of assuming they were exceptional people, thinking thoughts their insentient Catholic neighbours were simply incapable of formulating.
Lollardy was not straightforwardly a ‘cause’ of the Reformation in England, or a sign that society was impatiently ready for it, in the way some Protestant historians used to imagine. Yet neither should we regard the persistent presence of heresy in officially Catholic England as a sideshow or an irrelevance. Looking at late medieval religious culture through the lens of Lollardy and anti-Lollardy repays the effort. It helps us understand how the changes that would divide and transform that culture came from within, as much as from without, and how people at all levels of society might react when those changes finally arrived.
Heresy and Reformation of the Church
Heretics, in the early sixteenth century, were firmly linked to reformation, but not to a Protestant reformation that no one could then see coming. The ‘reformation of the Church’s estate’, to which Colet and others were fervently committed, had heresy high on its agenda for action. By the time of the 1512 Convocation, an episcopal drive to cleanse this stain from the Church was already firmly underway. In the years 1510–14 investigations were undertaken in at least eleven English dioceses. Everyone realized something was afoot. In November 1511 Henry VIII’s Latin secretary, Andrea Ammonio, wrote jokingly to Erasmus – one sophisticated European scholar trapped in rainy England to another – that the price of firewood had gone up yet again, for ‘every day there are a great number of heretics to make bonfires for us’.
Ammonio was exaggerating: across England as a whole, probably fewer than a dozen people were burned at this time. A much greater number ‘abjured’ – that is, they formally confessed and repented of their offence and were assigned penance. A handful of these were burned in the following years for returning to their error; there were no second chances in heresy proceedings. In terms of the population as a whole, the numbers were undoubtedly small: most likely fewer than 300 persons were seriously investigated in the purge of 1510–12, and the numbers were heavily concentrated in the weald of Kent, the Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire, and the urban environments of Coventry and London. Nonetheless, this was the most ambitious set of prosecutions seen in England for many decades, a potent measure of episcopal concern.6
Heresy was virtually as old as Christianity itself, but its concentrated presence in England was a relatively recent phenomenon, traceable to the influence of a single individual, the Oxford theologian John Wyclif (d. 1384). Wyclif was never definitively condemned as a heretic in his lifetime, largely due to the political support of Edward III’s son, John of Gaunt, who was attracted to Wyclif’s views on the respective scope of secular and ecclesiastical power. In a world corrupted by sin, Wyclif argued, ‘dominion’ (i.e. temporal power derived from God) was bound to be imperfect, and churchmen should not become involved with it by maintaining wealth and estates. ‘Disendowment’ of the Church, on the ostensible grounds of recalling it to its true function, was a seductive idea to lay authorities in the fourteenth century, as it was to be in the sixteenth.
The growing radicalism of Wyclif’s ideas alienated supporters, even as they attracted converts. Wyclif was a rigid proponent of ‘realism’ – the metaphysical system that posited the existence of ‘universals’ – underlying realities that accounted for the existence of individual things by pointing to their sharing in a common essence. In contrast, the ‘nominalist’ school dominant in Wyclif’s Oxford denied the existence of universals other than as a system for naming things that were fundamentally unique. Why this abstruse philosophical debate mattered was that it prevented Wyclif from believing the doctrine of transubstantiation. He could not accept that a substance (bread) partaking in a universal essence could ever be completely annihilated, as, according to orthodox theology, happened during the mass. Yet, at the Last Supper, Christ could not have been lying when he told his disciples that ‘this is my body’. Wyclif’s eucharistic theology has been hard even for modern experts to unravel. Whether he believed Christ was really present at the mass ‘virtually’, ‘figuratively’ or ‘sacramentally’, or as a signification of his power and grace, one thing was certain: bread was bread.
Lay devotions in front of the consecrated host were thus superstitious and idolatrous, a critique Wyclif widened to embrace other popular practices – pilgrimage, veneration of the saints, images and prayers for the dead. The true Church was not the motley band of saints and sinners receiving instruction and sacramental grace from the priesthood, but rather an invisible congregation of those predestined to eternal life. True authority could rest only with the genuinely holy, whether ordained or not. An intense anticlericalism and anti-papalism pervaded Wyclif’s writings: claims to jurisdiction and sacramental power made by the vast majority of the clergy were sinfully invalid.
All of this went well beyond a moralistic reformism that was common currency in the late medieval Church. Likewise, Wyclif’s biblicism transcended the devout concern with interpretation of scripture characteristic of the late medieval schools. For Wyclif, the bible was the only source of truth and revelation, and nothing in faith, morals or law could be binding unless scripture expressly authorized it.
Ferocious intellectual and theological debate, conducted in Latin and within the lecture halls of the university world, was nothing new in the later fourteenth century. What transformed Wyclif from a dissenting scholar into an arch-heretic was his failure to respect the rules of the game. Courting the secular powers against the wealth and jurisdiction of the Church was disquieting enough; still more alarming was his willingness to take the key issues to the laity in the vernacular. By the early 1380s, Wyclif’s disciples were preaching his doctrines to lay audiences across midland and southern England, composing tracts in English, and making willing converts. Lollard ‘poor preachers’ were soon equipped with a powerful weapon, a complete translation of the bible into English, produced in two versions before the end of the fourteenth century. Wyclif himself may or may not have played much of a direct role in the production of the ‘Wycliffite Bible’, but he inspired the team of translators. The texts themselves were fairly faithful, occasionally ponderous, translations from the Latin Vulgate. But a General Prologue publicized Wyclif’s teaching on the eucharist.7
Wyclifism was a potent social and political force around the turn of the fifteenth century, attracting the patronage of a clutch of so-called ‘Lollard knights’. The new and insecure Lancastrian dynasty saw, however, opportunities to make capital out of promoting itself as a champion of orthodox faith. An Act of Parliament in 1401 enshrined the death penalty for heresy, and in 1409 Archbishop Thomas Arundel issued a set of constitutions placing restrictions on preaching, and banning translations of the bible that did not have episcopal approval. An ill-fated rebellion against Henry IV in 1414, led by the convicted heretic Sir John Oldcastle, established an association between Lollardy and political sedition, and most of its support from the political elite ebbed away.
Lollardy was driven hard in the first decades of the fifteenth century in the places where it seems to have most firmly established itself: in Bristol, Essex, Kent and along the river valley of the Waveney, bounding Suffolk and Norfolk. But the intensity of Lollard trials slowed after the mid-1430s, and reduced to a trickle in the 1450s. There were likewise comparatively few cases in the following decade, though a significant exception was the clutch of prosecutions pursued by Bishop John Chedworth of Lincoln in 1462–4, and centred on the Buckinghamshire towns of Amersham, Great Marlow, Hughenden and High Wycombe.8 It is unclear when Lollardy first came to the chalk hills of the Chilterns, lying to the north of the middle section of the Thames Valley as it meanders eastwards from Oxfordshire to London. But it was here the heresy put down its deepest roots.
Recorded prosecutions began to rise again towards the end of the fifteenth century. It seems unlikely that this represents a genuine resurgence of Lollardy. The lull in investigations coincided with the political turbulence of the Wars of the Roses, and came to an end with the restoration of relative stability under the Tudors. Henry VII, like Henry IV, was a usurper anxious to show that God approved of his usurpation. And the fact that so many of the new investigations took place in areas where Lollardy was present at the start of the century – Coventry, London, a Berkshire–Buckinghamshire corridor along the Thames, Kent east of the Medway – strongly suggests a continuous existence of heresy, rather than any fortuitous pattern of eradication and ‘reinfestation’.9
Heresy-hunting around the turn of the sixteenth century was nonetheless patchy and sporadic, dependent on the vigilance of individual prelates. Concerned bishops set up commissions to investigate heresy, as James Goldwell, bishop of Norwich, did in 1494. Goldwell was a diplomat active in the service of the Yorkist kings, but after the accession of Henry VII, he withdrew from political and public engagements and concentrated on his diocese. Likewise, one of the first episcopal acts of Richard Mayhew, created bishop of Hereford in October 1504 with a lifetime of royal administrative and diplomatic service behind him, was to establish a commission to suppress heresy in the diocese. Like Fox of Winchester, these bishops may have seen attention to their dioceses as a form of penance for clerical careers overburdened by secular affairs.10 Fox, too, was a diligent watchdog of orthodoxy, and a declared reason for his foundation of Corpus Christi College Oxford was ‘the extermination of heresies and errors and the augmentation of the orthodox faith’. A godfather of humanism and Greek learning in England, the scholar William Grocyn (d. 1519) composed a treatise against Lollard eucharistic error.11 Heresy-hunting was not the preserve of bigots inimical to reform, but a mark of diligent and conscientious churchmen.
This was the context for a co-ordinated campaign beginning in 1510, and linked to the reform agenda brought by Archbishop Warham to the Canterbury Convocation of that year. Warham conducted in parallel during 1511 a visitation of the parishes and religious houses of his diocese, and a drive to eradicate Lollardy, in the course of which fifty-three suspects were brought before him. Similar magna abjurata (great abjurations) were orchestrated in 1511–12 by Bishops Geoffrey Blythe in Coventry and Lichfield, Richard Fitzjames in London and William Smith in Lincoln, while other bishops stepped up their regular policing activity. Revealingly, many of the officials most heavily involved in Warham’s campaign were able young scholars with theological training and humanist sympathies, rather than old-lag canon lawyers: the archbishop’s chancellor, Cuthbert Tunstall, was the backbone of proceedings.12
Henry VIII’s slapping down of the bishops in 1515, the rise of a cardinal-legate with priorities distinct from those of the archbishop, and the fizzling out of the reform euphoria created briefly by the Fifth Lateran Council, all probably contributed to a waning of episcopal enthusiasm for heresy-hunting. An earlier pattern of sporadic investigations re-established itself after 1512, though several bishops remained active and vigilant. In 1513–14 Richard Fox of Winchester brought to trial a clutch of heretics discovered in Kingston-upon-Thames and a group of villages straddling the Hampshire–Surrey border. Edmund Audley of Salisbury initiated two sets of prosecutions in 1514–19, with suspects drawn from the areas around Devizes and Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire. Bishop Blythe and his officials kept a close eye on Coventry, and some half-dozen of those abjuring there in 1511–12 were burned for relapse over the following decade. In London, too, the years following the Hunne case witnessed an ongoing drip of abjurations, and in 1518, two burnings: that of the wandering Lollard teacher, Thomas Man, who abjured in the Chilterns in 1511, and of John Stilman, who had sworn to orthodoxy before Bishop Audley of Salisbury in 1508.13
The authorities were managing to keep a lid on Lollardy, but did not succeed in scouring the pot. The early 1520s heralded the return of magna abjurata. In 1521, John Longland, newly appointed bishop of Lincoln, again turned to the Chilterns. He personally examined some 350 suspects, and around fifty Lollards were made to abjure. Four relapsed heretics were burned, and names unearthed in the investigation were passed to the bishops of Salisbury and Winchester. In 1527–8, Cuthbert Tunstall, now bishop of London, set in motion a major investigation centred on the Essex village of Steeple Bumpstead and the neighbouring town of Colchester.14
By now, the name of Luther was well known to English bishops, and there were additional reasons to be on the lookout for challenges to orthodoxy. But what was found, both here and in the Chilterns, was little different from what had been uncovered in these places decades before. Whatever its other qualities, Lollardy was remarkably tenacious. Its persistence well into the sixteenth century is not so much the portent of a new reformation as evidence for the faltering of an earlier one. Lollardy’s continued existence mocked the clericalist vision of a powerful and purified Church, a channel of God’s grace to obedient laypeople, elevated by example of holy priests.
The Inner Worlds of Lollardy
Lollardy was a proscribed activity to which no one voluntarily admitted. As a result, we catch sight of Lollards only as they are presented through the evidence of trials, their words and actions recorded by heresy commissioners and their scribes. Suspects were questioned on the basis of lists of articles, often in standardized form. If they admitted holding specified errors, or confessed to consorting with heretics or possessing forbidden English books, they could throw themselves on the mercy of the court, and recite an abjuration prepared by the authorities.15
After abjuration, the accused would be absolved, received back into the bosom of the Church, and assigned a penance. Penances varied, but were nearly always performances with pointedly symbolic elements. Commonly, the penitent took part in a public procession, clad in linen shirt, and bearing the faggot (bound bundle of sticks) that was both instrument and emblem of the fate of the unrepentant. Abjured Lollards in Coventry and Kent in 1511–12 were ordered as part of their penance to attend and watch the burning of a relapsed heretic. Earlier Coventry Lollards, accused of disparaging Our Lady of the Tower, were ordered ‘to carry your said faggot to this image and, devoutly making a pilgrimage to it, offer there a candle worth a penny’. Seven Kentish Lollards, abjuring before Warham in May 1511, were ordered to make confession to a priest and receive the eucharist. The performance of devotional acts, even reception of the sacraments of the Church, as a form of disciplinary sanction suggests how permeable the line was between private devotion and public duty in late medieval religion. Submission did not wipe the slate clean. The bishops accepted first-time abjurations, but they were not born yesterday. Penitents were often required to wear in perpetuity, embroidered on their outer clothing, a badge depicting a burning faggot – a warning to others, and a reminder of the consequence of relapse.16
No particular type of person was programmed to become a Lollard. Suggestions that Lollardy was organically attached to the rural cloth industry are too pat.17 Yet religious nonconformity fared best where there was a little affluence, a little leisure time, and a certain degree of distance from the sanctified cycle of the farming year – very few Lollards seem to have come from the numerically predominant agricultural labour force. The Kent heretics rounded up by Warham in 1511–12 were mainly artisans of moderate wealth – cutlers, weavers, tailors, shoemakers, glovers. There was a similar pattern among the Coventry groups investigated by Bishop Blythe: smiths, wire-drawers, coopers and butchers were questioned, alongside workers from the city’s leather and cloth industries.18
Nothing, however, prevented Lollard opinions from seeping up (or down) the social scale. Most London Lollards were artisans, but some were members of the prestigious livery companies who ran the city’s economy. Charles Joseph, the disreputable summoner implicated in the Hunne scandal, was reported to have boasted he could ‘bring my Lord of London to the doors of heretics in London, both of men and women, that be worth a thousand pound’. Lady Jane Young, widow of Sir John Young, sometime Mayor of the City, was the daughter of Joan Boughton, burned for heresy in 1494. According to a city chronicler, she ‘had a great smell of an heretic after the mother’. In Amersham, the fortuitous survival of a 1522 tax assessment to set alongside the record of Longland’s investigations reveals that ten of the town’s twenty richest inhabitants were Lollard suspects. The Coventry Lollards too had links to the city elite: two women abjuring there in 1511, Alice Rowley and Joan Smyth, were married to former lord mayors, and several members of the urban oligarchy were named in the course of the trials.19
The landed gentry had a great deal invested, financially and emotionally, in the structures of orthodox Catholicism. Overwhelmingly, they observed the conventions of traditional religion. Lollardy and gentility were not, however, mutually exclusive. Coventry Lollards in 1511 included the splendidly named Balthasar Shugborough, of the Warwickshire village of Napton, described in his abjuration as generosus, gentleman. The handful of known or suspected ‘gentle’ Lollards includes a number of wives and widows. Perhaps they had more time to think about radical ideas, and less to lose in flirting with them. But the idea that heresy per se was disproportionately attractive to women, providing them with opportunities for leadership and expression stifled by the hierarchical and patriarchal norms of late medieval Catholicism, is a fanciful one. In all of the major sweeps, women were a minority of the suspects apprehended, and in its inner workings Lollardy could be just as patriarchal as the Catholicism against which it set its face. Women, some women, were attracted to Lollardy, not because they were women, but because they found its teachings compelling.20
The same holds true of another unlikely subsection of early Tudor heretics: the clergy. It is often supposed that Lollardy had little traction with priests, who derived their status from the sacramental functions Lollards tended to impugn. But, in fact, a priest or two can be found around the edges, and sometimes close to the centre, of most local networks of heresy. Two Amersham Lollards arrested in the mid-1460s claimed to have been instructed in their heresies by the rector of Chesham Bois. A Berkshire priest, Richard Molver, curate of Newbury in Berkshire, was charged in 1504 with possession of heretical books. Twenty miles to the north, the rector of Lectombe Basset in Berkshire, John Whithorn, was allowed to remain in office upon abjuring heretical articles in 1499. But there was no second chance for him after he was denounced to Bishop Audley in 1508. It emerged he had hidden English books near the high altar of his church, and sheltered two heretics who escaped from the Lollards’ Tower in London. Another Lollard out of London assured Whithorn that if ever he came to the capital, he would find there ‘rich heretics’, with books he would want to read.21
In the trafficking of books between Lollard groups, clergymen, the professional literati of society, were often deeply involved. A book of English gospels, ending up in the hands of the vicar of Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire, was given to a Chilterns Lollard by Thomas Tykill, morrow mass priest of St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, in London. A parishioner there, Joan Baker, confided to another priest, John Cawood of St Margaret’s, Bridge Street, that Lady Young died ‘a martyr before God’.22
Cawood was likely a quiet sympathizer, rather than an activist, as perhaps was James Preston, doctor of theology, and vicar of St Michael’s, Coventry, from the 1480s until his death around 1507. Alice Rowley confessed that Preston borrowed a New Testament from her; she thought he favoured her and her sect. The names of several other priests emerged in the course of the Coventry investigations, and a further batch, half a dozen parish clergy and a couple of regulars, were identified as suspects during Longland’s Chiltern investigations of 1518–21.23 At Steeple Bumpstead in Essex, the Lollard John Tyball managed ‘by disputing and instructing’, and by sharing his collection of vernacular books, to bring the curate, Richard Fox, ‘to his learning and opinions’. He then tried to convert another two local clergyman, feeling that ‘if he might bring a priest once into his learning and heresies, he were sure and strong enough.’24 Tyball was unsuccessful in this second round of persuasions, but the widespread involvement of some clergymen, over decades and in diverse regions, suggests Lollardy offered more to its adherents than unreflective anticlerical protest.
Lollardy had no priesthood of its own, and in so far as there were recognized leaders, they tended to be peripatetic laymen, like John Stilman and Thomas Mann, burnt in London in 1518. Stilman, who regarded John Wyclif as ‘a saint in heaven’, learned his heresy in Hampshire in the last years of the fifteenth century. He abjured in Reading in 1508, but kept silent about his books, which he later took with him to London. He was well known to the Buckinghamshire Lollards of Chesham and Amersham. Man lived and worked in Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk and London, as well as in the Lollard heartlands of the Thames Valley. He did penance before Smith of Lincoln in 1511, but kept subsequently on the move, apparently boasting that ‘he and his wife had turned six or seven hundred people unto those opinions which he was abjured of’. This seems implausible, but Man was without doubt an influential figure, approaching the status of ‘Lollard evangelist’.
Another of the kind was John Hacker, a frequent visitor in the late 1520s to Steeple Bumpstead, where he was known as ‘Old Father Hacker’. A decade and more earlier, Hacker was teaching Lollardy in northern Hampshire, before moving, via Newbury, to Coleman Street in London. From there he ventured frequently to Burford in Oxfordshire, and to the villages of the Chilterns and the north downs of Berkshire. His teaching had a distinctly apocalyptic edge, with talk of a coming battle of priests, and of how, after a period of ascendancy, ‘all the priests should be slain … because they hold against the law of holy church’.25
Heretics like these kept on the move because the authorities were on their tails. Their wanderings confirm the existence of contacts and connections, maintained over decades, between different Lollard groups. But most Lollards were firmly rooted in place, their most meaningful relationships not with a nationwide corresponding club of spiritual idealists, but with people placed in day-to-day networks of family, locality and workshop. In so far as ‘Lollards’ had a name for themselves, they spoke about ‘known men’ – those whose faith was known to God, but whose understanding and discretion could be vouched for and trusted.26
No one was baptized into Lollardy, but parents might initiate their offspring into its mysteries at an early age. John and Agnes Grebill, of Tenterden in Kent, began to teach their sons, Christopher and John, against the sacrament of the altar when they were ‘about a vii years age’. Yet, revealingly, John confessed ‘he never could perceive their teachings nor give any heart thereunto till this year last past’ (1510, when he was twenty), and Christopher had ‘no feeling in that matter of errors till he heard John Ive teach him … which was the space of three years past’.27 Even at the heart of an established Lollard family, some awareness of having arrived at superior knowledge and understanding – an experience of conversion – was critical to the sense of religious belonging.
Lollardy was nourished by the natural bonds and structures of the communities where it established itself. Husbands converted wives, and vice versa. John Gest, a shoemaker from Birmingham, confessed in 1511 that he fell into heresy ‘about eleven years ago, at the promptings of his wife Joan’. Hopeful conversations might be struck up and pursued with friends, neighbours and in-laws.28
Those in a position of social dependence – apprentices and servants, as well as children – were the easiest to draw in, though it is hard to say exactly what they were being drawn into. The modern vocabulary of religious affiliation – church, sect, denomination, cult, conventicle – is not very helpful here. With the exception of the odd code word or catchphrase, Lollardy did not develop rites or ceremonies of its own.29 In the established centres, there were certainly meetings, either of mixed company or – more rarely – of men and women separately. Doctrines were discussed and readings were made from the scriptures or other English texts. But these were not ‘services’; the numbers present were usually small, and they are not easily distinguished from the ordinary social occasions on which neighbours gathered for conversation and conviviality.
Lollardy flowed along the channels of everyday social interaction. Potentially incriminating conversations took place in alehouses and gardens, at fairs, even in churches. John Browne and William Baker of Cranbrook in Kent shared their thoughts about images and pilgrimages as they ‘walked by the way’, from Baker’s house to a local chapel. But most of all, heresy was a domestic pursuit. Browne discussed the eucharist with Thomas and Joan Harwood at their house in Rolvenden, ‘in an evening sitting by the fire in the hall’.30
For such occasions there was no fixed catechism or creed, and no set texts other than the bible itself, nearly always owned and consumed in the form of separate volumes of epistles and gospels. Lollards sometimes drew inspiration from copies of old Wycliffite tracts such as The Lantern of Light (c. 1400), but they did not produce original writings of their own. Only one heretical treatise, the pleasingly alliterative Wyclif’s Wicket, may date from the second half of the fifteenth century.
This is often taken to indicate the fundamentally debased and decaying character of Lollard beliefs. Yet the fact that early Tudor cutlers and shoemakers did not feel inspired to attempt original theological compositions need not mean that their faith lacked vitality or even creativity. There was undoubted variation in the range and emphasis of the doctrines Lollards abjured at their trials. But to dismiss Lollardy as therefore fundamentally ‘incoherent’ is to set an unrealistic standard of doctrinal rectitude. There is evidence to suggest a seam of eccentric (or independent-minded) individuals in late medieval England, who held and expressed sceptical opinions about such basic Christian ideas as the incarnation or the resurrection. They sometimes ended up in the courts, and the authorities might well label such people as ‘Lollards’ (a straight synonym for heretic). Usually, though, they had little or no connection to established dissenting groups. In any case, at heart Lollardy was not so much about what you knew, as simply that you knew.31 Lollards were people who had seen through the official version, and knew it was a snare and a delusion.
Certain themes nonetheless recur. Most common was a pronounced anti-sacramentalism, and an insistence the round white object the priest held above his head during the mass was not what the Church said it was – the true body of Christ. Lollards would occasionally work through the list, denying efficacy to all seven of the Church’s sacraments, but it was the mass to which they most often returned. Also common was a rejection of the sacrament of penance, and the associated discipline of confession to a priest. These were the sacraments most closely tied to clerical authority and status. Virtually all Lollards, even the priests among them, seem inveterately and instinctively anticlerical. Resentment of clerical failings was scarcely uncommon in later medieval England, but Lollards rejected the theological premises on which Catholic priesthood was based. A priest, thought Richard Gilmyn of Coventry, was only a priest while saying mass, and until he returned to the altar ‘he is only a layman and has no power except as a mere layman’. Agnes Grebill of Tenterden conceded that confession could be good and profitable, but only if ‘made to a priest being the follower of Peter and being pure and clean in life’.32
Lollards were equally critical of practices not directly controlled by the clergy, and popular with other laypeople. Along with the eucharist, the heresies most frequently abjured in Lollard trials touched on the related topics of veneration of saints, worship of images, and pilgrimage. This seems a rough yet fair reflection of the priorities of Lollard themselves, rather than a template stamped on them by the authorities. Other areas where bishops had an obvious concern to define and defend orthodoxy – such as the existence of purgatory, or the status of the Pope – do occur in the trial record, though very much less frequently.
Lollardy’s critique of orthodox popular religion was colourful and abrupt. Images of saints were ‘stocks and stones’; the rood with its figure of Christ crucified was ‘block Almighty’; statues of Our Lady were fuel to ‘make a good fire’. John Falkys of Coventry, home to a famous image of the Virgin, swore that ‘her head shall be hoary [i.e. white or grey] before I offer to her. What is it but a block?’ Pilgrimages to holy places, so the Lollards of east Kent told themselves, were unprofitable for men’s souls, and ‘labour and money spent thereabout is but lost and done in vain.’33
An impression of utilitarian, rationalizing disdain for the incarnational and mysterious in religion is particularly marked in Lollard attacks on the sacrament of the altar. ‘The carpenter doth make the house and not the house the carpenter.’ This was a common catchphrase. Lollards liked to impress with the cogency of their sceptical reasoning. Francis Funge of Little Missenden in Buckinghamshire offered his brother a syllogistic argument he learned from Thomas Clerk of Hughenden:
If the sacrament of the altar be very God and man, flesh and blood in form of bread, as priests say that it is, then have we many Gods, and in heaven there is but one God. And if there were a hundred houseled [given communion] in one parish, and as many in another, then there must needs be more than one God.
Clerk himself came across his brother-in-law, a priest, drying out ‘singing bread’ (the unleavened discs used in celebrations of the mass). He could not resist slyly suggesting ‘that if every one of these were a God, then were there many Gods’.34 There is an unattractively negative and destructive cast to such witticisms. Lollards, it seems, were the people who loved to say no.
But in their own minds, the Lollards’ refusal of the norms of communal religion was not a sullen rejectionism, but a positive spiritual critique. Contempt for images and pilgrimages grew from a sense they were socially unjust, diverting resources from the poor who were the true ‘image’ of Christ.35 Trial evidence also suggests that understandings of the eucharist were often more nuanced and sophisticated than a simple denial of transubstantiation. Three Maidstone Lollards, sitting around a kitchen fire in February 1510, ‘communed together against the sacrament of the altar’ and concluded it was bread. But they also decided it was ‘done in a mind to call people together’, a thoughtfully communal reflection on the social functions of eucharistic practice.
‘Memorialist’ understandings of the mass were favoured among the Kentish Lollards. John Bampton of Bearsted knew that what Christ gave to the disciples was not his own body, ‘and so do priests in likewise give bread that cometh from God in remembrance of the bread given by Christ in his Maundy’. Local theologies of the eucharist were similarly shared by clusters of Lollards in Surrey, Essex, Coventry and elsewhere. They often concluded that while the eucharist was ‘not very God’, it was nonetheless a ‘figure’, a ‘sign’, a ‘commemoration of Christ’s passion’. Such interpretations were not directly indebted to Wyclif, who affirmed (however obscurely) some form of real presence; they may reflect the teaching of Wyclif’s Wicket, which circulated widely among sixteenth-century groups. Eucharistic understanding was certainly not crudely unsophisticated among the Essex Lollards who taught each other to speak of the mass as Maozim – an obscure allusion to the strange God, ‘whom his fathers knew not’, mentioned in the Book of Daniel.36
Lollards condemned the mass, and knew the official version was a fraud. But they were virtually never accused of absenting themselves from it on Sunday. Nor did they shirk the obligation to present themselves to a priest for Lenten confession. There is a puzzling disconnect between the radicalism of Lollards’ views and the conventionality of their outward behaviour. Maybe there is no great mystery. Given the consequences of being identified as a heretic, Lollards kept their heads down, and lived double lives of concealment and hypocritical pretence. Perhaps too, as a dissident and even parasitic presence, Lollardy needed the proximity of the corrupt host body to feed its righteous ire. But there is another possibility – that ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’ were not necessarily repelling magnetic fields; that Catholics and Lollards were not people with nothing to say to each other, bereft of meaningful common ground.
How much did the neighbours know? Some Lollards took care to conceal their opinions and activities, admitting they conformed outwardly to avoid detection. Four men and four women from Reading, appearing before Bishop John Blythe of Salisbury in 1499, confessed they received the sacrament ‘not for any devotion or belief that we had therein, but only for dread of the people’. A suspect appearing in 1514 before Blythe’s successor, Edmund Audley, said he ‘would not have come unto the church oft times, but for the rumour of the people’, and in the same year a Hampshire Lollard admitted he abstained from meat on fast days ‘for fear of slander and detection’. John Pykas of Colchester taught secretly against the sacrament of confession, yet ‘hath yearly been confessed and houseled, but for no other cause but that people should not wonder upon him’. Some were not quite cautious enough. John and Cicely Eaton of Speen in Buckinghamshire did attend mass, but during the elevation of the host other parishioners noticed how they would ‘hold down their heads, and would not look upon the sacrament’.37
At Christmas 1510, lively discussion of the eucharist in Edward Walker’s house in Maidstone was cut short by Walker’s wife: ‘Sirs, it is not good that ye talk much here of these matters … beware, for some folks will come hither anon.’ Earlier, a seminar on the sacraments at the home of Robert Harrison in Canterbury ended with ‘the coming into the house of a certain brother of the hospital of St John’, an ecclesiastical institution located inconveniently next door. Participants in illicit discussions insisted on promises of silence and discretion. A tinker from High Wycombe spoke with Thomas Clerk about pardons, pilgrimages and the eucharist (‘a holy thing, but not the body of Christ’). But he begged Clerk not to mention anything to his wife, or to her brother, a priest. Thomas Harwood of Rolvenden in Kent commanded his wife not to disclose his discussions of the eucharist with John Browne ‘upon pain of her life’. Julian Yong of Coventry received books and instruction from Alice Rowley, who ‘bound her under oath not to reveal her counsel and secrets’. The Grebills of Tenterden, parents and sons, made a family promise: ‘none of them should discover nor betray the other of these beliefs in any wise’. Tragically, the compact was broken: both boys gave evidence against their mother, Agnes, who was burnt as a relapsed heretic in May 1511.38
Lollards were careful with their books. At Colnbrook in Buckinghamshire, the parish priest, Robert Freeman, was spotted reading a suspect book: ‘he closed it, and carried it to his chamber.’ Trial depositions mention books being hidden, and suspects admitted to concealing them. Alice Rowley of Coventry was rebuked by Thomas Banbrook for lending a book of gospels to a man they knew little about. Joan Cook, wife of a former mayor, advised Alice to burn her books.39 Christian Clerc, wife of a Coventry hosier, urged her husband to destroy a forbidden book from which she heard him reading. John Langborowe of Kingston in Surrey was given a heretical book by John Jenyn. But when Jenyn was arrested in 1511, Langborowe burned it ‘privily in the night’.
After her husband was arrested in 1514, Anne Wattys of Dogmersfield in Hampshire burned one of his books. But two others – a volume of epistles, gospels and Apocalypse, and another containing paternoster, Ave, Creed and Commandments and a treatise on baptism – she hid in a ditch. Anne’s conscience perhaps rebelled at the idea of setting fire to the Word of God, but not all were so scrupulous. After the episcopal crackdown in Coventry in 1486, the fuller Matthew Markland destroyed all his gospel books. A generation later, when Roger Parker of Hughenden in Buckinghamshire reproached John Phipps for burning books including a gospel, Phipps retorted ‘that he had rather burn his books, than that his books should burn him’.40
Given these habits of concealment, it has proved very difficult to identify individuals as Lollards on the basis of what they wrote in their wills – public documents scrutinized by the church courts.41 In processes preceding the major abjurations, witness testimony was overwhelmingly supplied by associates and fellow suspects, not outsiders to the group. Perhaps orthodox parishioners simply did not know enough about the activities of their heterodox neighbours to incriminate them and facilitate convictions.
Yet it is hard to imagine, particularly in communities with stubbornly rooted Lollard minorities, that more conventional Christians were oblivious to the spiritual oddballs in their midst. At the 1511 episcopal visitation of Kent, the churchwardens of Tenterden reported that ‘there is buried in the churchyard … one Agnes Roche, which was commonly known an heretic’.42 But if she was commonly known to be a heretic, the archbishop’s officers might reasonably have asked, why was she not reported earlier, and who allowed her to be buried in hallowed ground?
Some historians have suggested the existence of a parochial world of pragmatic, even benevolent, toleration of otherness, of neighbours rubbing along together until the heavy hand of external authority intruded.43 Yet there is too much evidence that heresy was actively and widely disliked for this to be fully plausible. Suspicion was not certainty, and initiating a judicial process – requiring effort, expense and danger of retribution – was not something anyone undertook lightly. In places like Tenterden, Amersham or Colchester, where suspected Lollards were persons of wealth and local status, networks of influence worked against denunciation. After Bishop Smith’s descent on Amersham in 1511, Alice, wife of the town’s wealthiest inhabitant, Richard Saunders, proudly boasted that her husband had ‘brought to beggary’ several people who co-operated with episcopal officers. Thomas Houre was dismissed from her husband’s service, and from his position as parish holy water clerk, after he told Alice ‘he would lean to that way no more’. Another waverer, Thomas Rowland, was warned to ‘take example’ by his fate.44
Lollards were not always discreet and circumspect, and even where formal denunciations did not immediately ensue, their presence could cause tension and unease. This was precisely because nowhere did they comprise an insulated or self-contained ‘community’. Lollards rubbed up against orthodox Catholics in countless social contexts, sometimes in the intimate bonds of marriage. William Dorset of King’s Langley in Hertfordshire mocked his wife for preparing to go on pilgrimage to Our Lady of Willesden – ‘Our Lady is in heaven’. John Bayly of Rolvenden in Kent scoffed that priests only wanted to make money from the pilgrimage his wife was planning. William Sweeting, a Lollard activist in Essex and London, managed the considerable feat of converting his monastic employer, the Augustinian prior of St Osyth’s near Colchester. But he had less success with his spouse, who remained frustratingly wedded to lighting candles and going on pilgrimage. John Tyball was similarly able to convert a priest, but not his own wife.
The inwardness of such ‘mixed marriages’ eludes us. It is usually impossible to know if the wives were aware of a partner’s proclivities at the time of courtship, or if conversion took place subsequent to the espousal. Both husbands and wives were occasionally assigned penance for failing to report heretical tendencies in a spouse.45
Other divisions can be found within families. Thanks to some 1521 testimony gathered by Bishop Longland, we can eavesdrop on discussions between two sisters, Elizabeth Copland and Isabel Morwyn of Amersham, beginning as they came from a visit to the bedside of their dying father. ‘All which die,’ pronounced Isabel, ‘pass to hell or heaven.’ ‘Nay,’ retorted Elizabeth, ‘there is between them purgatory.’ The debate resumed when Elizabeth returned from a trip, perhaps to pray for their father’s soul, to a renowned crucifix known as the ‘Rood of Rest’. Isabel chided her for going on pilgrimage, for saints were all in heaven. Why then, demanded Elizabeth, was pilgrimage ordained by doctors and priests? ‘For gain and profit.’ ‘Your curate, I dare say,’ Elizabeth retorted, ‘never taught you so.’ Isabel answered tartly that her curate never knew so much, and offered to say more if her sister would swear to keep counsel and not tell her husband. Elizabeth was in no rush to inform the authorities, but neither would she swear an oath to conceal blatant heresy.46 Here, in an articulate and theologically informed argument between two strong-minded laywomen, we see a face of late medieval religious life usually hidden from us.
These were not the only women to engage in religious dispute. In around 1520, Mistress Alice Cottismore, widow of a Berkshire landowner, exchanged pointed words with her servant, Elizabeth Wighthill, during a visit to the house of Sir William Barentyne. Alice quietly mocked some newly gilded domestic images: ‘Look, here be my Lady Barentyne’s Gods!’ Elizabeth was undaunted in challenging her mistress: ‘They were set for remembrance of good saints.’ There followed a lively exchange on the utility of religious imagery. Alice was sure that ‘if I were in a house, where no images were, I could remember to pray unto Saints as well as if I did see the images’. Elizabeth insisted that ‘images do provoke devotion’. Determined not to let the servant have the last word, Alice paraded her superior knowledge of the scriptures: ‘ye should not worship that thing that hath ears, and cannot hear, and hath eyes and cannot see, and hath mouth, and cannot speak, and hath hands, and cannot feel’ (Psalm 113, Vulgate numbering). On another occasion, Alice told the local rector that when women went to venerate saints, ‘they did it to show their new gay gear’. Images were ‘but carpenters’ chips’ and ‘folks go on pilgrimage more for the green way than for devotion’.47
Another family argument took place at Princes Risborough, where Elizabeth Ryburn was shocked to find her brother John eating butter and eggs on the eve of the Feast of the Assumption. John mockingly told her she was ‘so far in limbo patrum that you can never turn again’, and derided her intention to go on pilgrimage, as well as her accustomed reverence to the elevated host. Another sister, Alice, heard John say the time would come when no elevation should be made. ‘What service,’ Alice wanted to know, ‘shall we then have?’ In the event, John was reported by his own father for saying that ‘at sacring time he kneeled down, but he had no devotion, nor believed in the sacrament’.48
Lollards, then, were sometimes willing to challenge the opinions of neighbours or kinsfolk, either in hope of converting them, or simply to witness to the truth. Some clearly couldn’t help themselves. Thomas Higons of Mitcheldean in Gloucestershire was ‘defamed of heresy’ in 1511 for repeating the old aphorism about the mass, houses and carpenters. He made the remark in a neighbour’s house, ‘unadvised and of my slippery tongue’.49
Others knew exactly what they were doing. Thomas Rave of Great Marlow went unwillingly on pilgrimage to Our Lady of Lincoln, a penance imposed on him by Bishop Smith. Even as he did so, he told pilgrims returning from the shrine of St John Shorne they were ‘fools’. When he came to Lincoln, Rave ‘made water in the Chapel at mass time, excusing afterward that he did it of necessity’. And, performing a further portion of his penance at Wycombe, he showed contempt for the proceedings by theatrically binding ‘with a silken lace’ the faggot he was obliged to carry as a symbol of defeated heresy. In London in 1520, John Southwick picked a quarrel with William Rivelay as the latter came from mass declaring he had just seen his Lord God in form of bread and wine. ‘Nay, William, thou sawest not thy Lord God: thou sawest but bread, wine, and the chalice.’50
In the bustle and relative anonymity of the capital, Lollards had a particular tendency towards bold self-righteousness. Whenever any pauper requested Joan John for alms, ‘in the worship of the Lady of Walsingham’, she would snap back, ‘the Lady of Walsingham help thee!’ But if she did relent and decide to assist them, she would say, ‘Take this in the worship of Our Lady in heaven, and let the other go.’ This was mild stuff compared to the critiques of pilgrimage made by Elizabeth Sampson of Aldermanbury, who called Our Lady of Crome a ‘puppet’ and Our Lady of Willesden ‘a burnt arse elf, and a burnt arse stock’.51 To be ‘burnt’ was to suffer venereal disease; Sampson slandered revered icons in the sexual language reserved for prostitutes.
Discussion and disagreement did not always lead to immediate denunciation. Yet provocations of the sort indulged in by Sampson – who also spat at a woman attending her labour-bed for invoking the Virgin Mary – surely aroused resentment. Catholics made reverence when the consecrated host was carried through the streets to the beds of the sick and the dying, so bystanders were shocked in September 1482 to hear Thomas Wassingborne calling out, ‘where goeth the costermonger?’ In 1511, at Goudhurst in Kent, parishioners were sufficiently irritated by William Owyne’s repeated interruptions of divine service to report him to the episcopal visitors. Owyne, they added, ‘hath certain secret English books with him’.52
Feelings were most painfully inflamed on the rare occasions when Lollard anti-sacramentalism escalated into acts of heretical terrorism. In 1512, an image of St John was shockingly knocked down during mass in the chapel of Lincoln’s Inn. Ten years later, a still greater outrage was committed in the parish of St Mary’s Rickmansworth in south-west Hertfordshire. Persons unknown broke into the church, wrapped flammable cloths around the rood and rood screen, and set fire to all the images, as well as to the blessed sacrament reserved on the high altar. The resulting conflagration devastated the chancel, though an indulgence issued to raise money for rebuilding claimed that ‘the blessed body of Our Lord Jesus Christ in form of bread was found upon the high altar, and nothing perished’. Rickmansworth lay close to the Lollard centres of Amersham and Chesham, and the fire was possibly started in retaliation for two Amersham Lollards burned by Bishop Longland in January 1522.53
Genuinely angry confrontations between heretics and orthodox Catholics were a latent possibility, particularly in places like the Essex village of Steeple Bumpstead, where Lollards were numerous enough to feel entitled and belligerent. Here, in the late 1520s, the curate Richard Fox announced, to a company assembled in the house of John Darkyn, that if he enjoyed such authority as Cardinal Wolsey he would use it to pull down all the images from the church, ‘for I fear me a great many of you sin in idolatry’. One of the guests took serious exception, saying he would ‘bear a faggot to burn him’, and grabbed the priest’s breviary, the book containing stipulated daily prayers. Unfazed, Fox remarked that in that volume was ‘never a word that God ever made’. The heretic priest was asked to leave, and as he did so he asked his host if he thought he did well ‘to go in pilgrimage to Our Lady of Ipswich, Walsingham, or to Canterbury?’54
Catholics and Lollards could, and did, debate furiously – but not because they had nothing in common. Rather, they shared important points of reference, and dwelled within the bounds of the same moral universe. It is not even certain we should talk emphatically about Lollards and Catholics, for Lollards were Catholics, to the extent that they participated in the rituals of the parish and shared its obligations and communal life. It was not always even a matter of doing the minimum they could get away with. There were cases of Lollard churchwardens and guild wardens, such as Henry Phipp of Hughenden, who implausibly allowed himself to be chosen as parish ‘roodman’; that is, the person responsible for maintaining lights burning before the images on the rood loft. Other Lollards carried out the ritual and liturgical functions of parish holy water clerk, like the hapless Thomas Houre of Amersham, or the indefatigable William Sweeting, who held the post successively at Boxted and Colchester in Essex, and at Rotherhithe in Surrey.55 There is no evidence of Lollard sympathizers among the clergy failing to perform their usual pastoral and sacramental functions. Wyclif’s theology posited a ‘true Church’ of those predestined to salvation, but in the here-and-now many Lollards chose to live and work within the system as they found it.
Catholicism in late medieval England was universal but not uniform. Devotional preferences varied, between individuals and between regions (see Chapter 1). Whether this helps explain particular geographies of Lollard persistence, or is itself accounted for by them, is uncertain. An examination of wills in the Kentish town of Tenterden suggests ‘orthodox’ piety in that centre of dissent was becoming noticeably ‘parsimonious’ around the start of the sixteenth century, unenthusiastic about the cult of the saints, veneration of images and intercession for the souls in purgatory. But other places with a conspicuous Lollard presence display more conventional patterns of benefaction, and apparently similar shifts in priorities have been discerned in places like Beverley in East Yorkshire, where no Lollards were detected.56
In any case, for all their ferocious talk about pilgrimages and priests, Lollards were quite capable of aping the instincts of popular religion. When Joan Boughton was burned in 1494, supporters gathered her ashes and kept them ‘for a precious relic in an earthen pot’. Wyclif himself was regarded as ‘a saint in heaven’. Some Hertfordshire Lollards believed that where his bones were burnt, there ‘sprang up a well or well-spring’.57
Not everything the Church offered was rejected. Thomas Boughton, shoemaker of Hungerford in Berkshire, confessed in 1499 that he always ‘had a great mind to hear sermons and preachings of doctors and learned men of the Church’. As long as preachers ‘spake the very words of the gospels and epistles such as I had heard afore in our English books’, he listened to them gladly. But he rapidly became weary if they talked of tithes or offerings, or ‘began to declare scripture after their doctors’. Thomas Geffrey of Uxbridge persuaded John Butler to come with him on several Sundays to London, ‘to hear Doctor Colet’.
Some themes in orthodox religion evidently rang true for Lollards, including Colet’s emphasis on an authentic piety unencumbered by external observances. The Londoner George Browne’s rejection of the adoration of the cross in 1518 seems jarringly counter-cultural: he could see no reason for people to worship something that was ‘an hurt and pain unto our Saviour Christ in the time of his passion’.58 Yet it is unlikely Browne could have reached such a conclusion outside of the intensely Christocentric, passion-focused devotional culture of the late Middle Ages.
Lollards were book people. But not all the texts discovered in their possession were Wycliffite tracts or volumes of scripture. Quite often they were works produced for, and popular with, a mainstream orthodox readership. These included books of general religious instruction like the Kalendar of Shepherds, the Prick of Conscience and Dives and Pauper, as well as Ars Moriendi (art of dying) treatises, Books of Hours and expositions of the paternoster, Creed and Commandments.
Lollards no doubt often read these books against the grain of authorial intention. Alice Cottismore drew the counter-intuitive conclusion that the Golden Legend and an unnamed saint’s Life ‘did speak against pilgrimages’. John Edmunds of Burford was persuaded towards his memorialist position on the eucharist by reading the Kalendar of Shepherds, and discovering there that ‘the sacrament was made in the remembrance of Christ’. In fact, the author of this hugely popular work made only the unexceptionally orthodox statement that followers of Christ ‘receive the sacrament of the altar in mind of his passion’.59 But Edmunds’ misreading underlines a shared emphasis on the value of religious instruction and pious reflection in the printed vernacular.
The audacity of Wyclif’s early followers in translating the bible, and then seeking to distribute it with provocative appended commentary, led to a peculiar state of affairs: the banning of all translations of scripture without explicit episcopal authorization. By contrast, vernacular translations of scripture were fairly freely available before the Reformation in France, Germany, Italy and the Low Countries. In theory at least, English book owners wishing to read the life of Christ had to make do with vernacular texts loosely based on the gospel narratives, such as Nicholas Love’s hugely popular Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus.60
Contemporaries themselves can appear remarkably unaware of this anomaly. Thomas More asserted in 1529 that the ban was specific to Wyclif’s translation, and that non-Wycliffite vernacular versions were readily to be found in English homes and churches. This was almost certainly not the case. More probably saw Wycliffite scriptures and mistook them for non-Wycliffite ones approved by the bishop of the diocese. He believed such bibles to be orthodox because they were in the hands of orthodox people. A significant number of surviving manuscripts of the Wycliffite bible are known to have belonged to people with no plausible connections to Lollardy: a handful of religious houses, including Syon Abbey and the London and Sheen Charterhouses, several priests and seemingly orthodox laypeople, a virtually complete run of Lancastrian, Yorkist and Tudor kings. Richard III was many things, but he was certainly not a Lollard.61
Wycliffite bibles were even mentioned in wills, which brought them to the attention of officials of the church courts. The wealthy Suffolk clothier John Clopton, whose orthodoxy received lavish expression in the vestments, images and stained-glass windows he bestowed upon Long Melford parish church, cheerfully bequeathed ‘my bible in English’ to the archdeacon of Suffolk in 1504. Richard Cook, mayor of Coventry, left two English bibles in his will of 1507, one to Holy Trinity Church, Coventry, and one to the church of St Matthew’s, Walsall. Cook’s wife had dealings with Coventry Lollards, but there is no conclusive evidence he himself was one, and the public nature of the bequest hardly suggests a traffic in contraband goods.62 Richard Hunne’s bible was said to have been left lying around, sometimes for a month at a time, in St Margaret’s Church, Bridge Street, for anyone to peruse. Witnesses reported Hunne sitting reading it openly in the doorway of his house. Hunne was at the very least a ferocious anticlerical, and the charges at his posthumous trial maintained he possessed ‘books containing infinite errors’. But his bible had once belonged to a fellow parishioner, Thomas Downes, who does not look much like a Lollard. Downes asked in his will to be buried before the image of the Virgin, and left money for torches to burn before the rood, and at the elevation during mass.63
The fact that orthodox people used an apparently heretical and forbidden text is perhaps less surprising in view of the facts that the Wycliffite bible was a straightforward translation of the Vulgate, and that the great majority of Wycliffite bible texts circulated separately from the overtly heretical General Prologue. A large number of around 250 surviving manuscripts of Wycliffite scripture can be linked to orthodox practice. Over a third of them contain lectionaries, or more properly speaking, capitularia: tables enabling readers to identify the texts to be recited at mass each Sunday or feast day, and allowing them to read them in advance or even follow along during the service.64 In all likelihood, the manuscript production of Wycliffite bibles was from an early stage geared to the needs of an orthodox clientele. The text layout, and sheer size, of many surviving manuscripts suggests they were intended for public reading in church, though how often this actually happened is unknown. What is clear is that the ambience of vernacular scripture was not overwhelmingly heretical. One Wycliffite New Testament even opens with an indulgenced prayer, offering readers 80,000 years of pardon from purgatory.65
There is no evidence of episcopal licensing for individuals to possess vernacular scripture. But many evidently did so, with little fear of reprimand or retribution. It seems implausible that so many manuscripts of the Wycliffite bible could have survived – far more than for any other Middle English work – if bishops had really been determined to suppress it in all circumstances.66 Informally at least, orthodox priests and laypeople were trusted not to abuse the privilege. There was an element of class prejudice in this. The gentlefolk and urban elites, for whom engagement with vernacular scripture was one thread in a rich pattern of devotional reading and orthodox practice, were a cut above the cappers and weavers of Lollard bible circles.
But Lollards were not prosecuted for being lower middle class; or for the mere fact of possessing English books. What mattered was how they chose to interpret them. For those already believed to hold heretical opinions, the ownership of vernacular scripture might indeed clinch the case against them. In somewhat circular fashion, vernacular bibles are described by officials as ‘books of heresy’, when found in the possession of people suspected of being Lollard heretics.67
Lollardy matters to a study of the Reformation, though not because it suggests the terminal weakness of the Church, or the inevitability of any particular direction for future change. Lollardy was a small part of the whole, but it reminds us that the religious landscape of later medieval England was mottled and varied, and that the boundaries between orthodoxy and dissent, though at times vigilantly guarded, were also profoundly permeable. It suggests too how official definitions of tolerable and intolerable religious practice were not unquestioningly accepted, even by those who regarded themselves as conventionally Catholic and orthodox. Furthermore – an instructive straw in the wind – it reveals that the Church’s institutional machinery lacked the capability to impose complete uniformity of belief and practice, even with the apparent backing of the secular authorities.
Most of all, Lollardy’s existence, and persistence, reveals the capacity of ordinary men and ordinary women, orthodox and heretic alike, to think seriously and deeply about issues of conscience and belief. And it prepares us for the paradox at the very heart of the Reformation story – a story of how shared visions of faith produced deep and lasting divisions in religion.