Lollardy and Sedition 1381-1431

Lollardy and Sedition 1381-1431 M. E. Aston Past and Present, No. 17. (Apr., 1960), pp. 1-44. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-2746%28196004%290%3A17%3C1%3ALAS1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23 Past and Present is currently published by Oxford University Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/oup.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Sat Jul 14 16:04:56 2007 LOLLARDY AND SEDITION 1381-1431* BEFORE 1381, THOUGH THE ENGLISH GOVERNING CLASSES HAD < - encountered heretics as well as rebels against society, they had never had to deal with either on a large or concerted scale. By the end of May 1382 both had been on their hands, and heresy (in the event) had come to stay. Wycliffe, who before he moved on to full consideration of the Eucharist had found employment snd patronage in the highest political quarters, had already passed the watershed of his career by the time of the outbreak of the Peasants' Revolt. But nothing is heard of those adherents of his views who, though hardly perhaps his true successors, form the mainstay of the ~ o l l a i d movement, until the country had been shaken by the achievements of the lower classes in the summer of I38I. Then, when Archbishop Courtenay had taken the place of the murdered Sudbury, were begun which revealed the establishment of Wycliffe's followers elsewhere than in the university, and then, too, Wycliffites appear for the first time being publicly abused as "L~l lards" .~ A heretical movement and a major upheaval among the lower orders of society had arrived, in point of time, together. Did this coincidence of timing at all affect the attitude of the government, secular and ecclesiastical, towards the double challenge ? Was the reception of the heresies of Wycliffe and his followers conditioned by the shock of the unprecedented happenings of 1381, by the fears engendered in that resounding year, as well as by their inherent political implications ? Was Lollardy itself in any sense a doctrine of social revolt, involved in and responsible for rebellion and sedition? And was the course of the Lollard movement influenced by the political crises and disturbances of the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, as well as by its "own" rebellion of 1414, and another, less recognised, attempted rising which followed? These are indeed controversial questions; it would be a rash historian who claimed to have answered any of them. But unanswerable questions are not always the least deserving of attention, particularly if they were raised by contemporaries. ~ o l l a r d ~was, of course, in origin and remained throughout, primarily and essentially a theological movement, to which its own considerable literature and the records of ecclesiastical proceedings bear abundant witness. But the structure of medieval politics and political theory were such * I am grateful to Mr. K. B. McFarlane for his criticism and advice. 2 PAST AND PRESENT that extreme and penetrating statements on the nature of the church and the priesthood could hardly fail to have some bearing upon society and upon the state. And this did not pass unnoticed at the time. * * * There can be no doubt, from the views expressed on both sides of the matter, as to whether contemporaries were aware of the social and political implications of Wycliffe's teaching. From the first admonitory papal missive there appeared in official documents a number of solemn warnings that it was the whole of society, and not the church alone, whose position was at stake. Such sentiments were echoed, amplified and broadcast, in the works of pamphleteers and versifiers who reflected the orthodox point of view, while on the other side, Lollard tractarians found a constant cause of complaint in the slanderous accusations to which they were being subjected. As Daw Topias put it, when defending his fellow friars against the Lollard polemic of Jack Upland: "But sith that wickide worme, Wiclyf be his name, began to sowe the seed of cisme in the erthe, sorowe and shendship hath awaked wyde, in lordship and prelacie hath growe the lasse grace".= Among the papal letters condemning Wycliffe's teaching which were sent from Rome in the spring of 1377, was one addressed to the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London, enjoining them, among other things, to take steps to indicate to the English government the danger of the views being developed in its midst. The king, his sons, the princess of Wales and other magnates and royal counsellors, were to be fully informed and shown that the condemned conclusions were not only theologically erroneous but, if properly understood, threatened to destroy the whole state.3 It may have been no accident that the eighteen propositions chosen from Wycliffe's writings for special reprobation emphasised the subversive nature of his ideas on the question of temporal, as well as ecclesiastical, lordship: "God cannot give civil dominion to man for himself, and his heirs, in perpetuity" . . . "Charters of human invention concerning perpetual civil inheritance are impossible".' I t is not difficult to see the radical implications of these statements, and, as the papal letter indicates, it was nothing if not easy to read 3 LOLLARDY AND SEDITION, 1381-1431 into Wycliffe's philosophy ideas for a programme of devastating revolution. His theories upon dominion, on the grace of the righteous as the basis of authority, the exaltation of the power of the state over the church, and the right of temporal rulers to correct ecclesiastics, were, as the church was not slow to realise, far-reaching. And their implications, as subsequent writers and events were to demonstrate, were not confined to the church and its members. If property could be removed from a delinquent church in time of necessity, might not the same argument equally well be applied to secular owners ? If tithes could be withheld from a sinful priest, could not rents and services be withheld from a tyrannical and unjust overlord? And if lay lords could and should correct churchmen, might not others in turn claim the power to correct them? Such later interpretations could be -and were -denied, but more than one prophet has made his reputation on what he did not say. We can hardly blame contemporaries for doing Wycliffe an injustice: if they were prejudiced they were also, in the main, less subtle than the great schoolman. And after the insurrection of 1381 had happened - and Pope Gregory, had he still been alive, might have pointed a certain moral - they do not seem to have been over-scrupulous in attributing the blame. Yet, whatever the obscurities and controversies which surround his reputation and writings, Wycliffe himself was most emphatically not the advocate of revolution on the lines of 1381. After the revolt, for all his vituperance, (and he did not hesitate to draw his own deduction^),^ he showed himself as an undoubted member of the establishment which had suffered. The clergy were certainly to blame, indeed they deserved worse - but the people were unjustified in proceeding to murder; temporal lords had offended in the impositions they had imposed - but such things as had been done should never be attempted against them; it was treachery to God and the church for an archbishop to be chancellor - but that did not excuse the manner of his death.6 The "reformer" himself, however abusive in language and revolutionary in theory, clearly did not envisage taking the enemies' house by such a storm, or over- throwing "Caim's Castlesw7 in one great insurrectionary outburst. Had he done so his career -and that of the early Lollard movement -might have been very different. The St. Albans chronicler was, like Wycliffe, anxious to derive the lesson from 1381 -though in his case it was tinged with personal animosity directed towards the memory of one for whom he cherished scant respect. For the first cause of the rising to which Walsingham 4 PAST AND PRESENT drew attention was the failure of the late Archbishop Sudbury to suppress the heresy of Wycliffe and his followers, who had "spread their preaching and defiled the people far and wide through the country" with their erroneous views on the Euchar i~ t .~ Later he tells us that John Ball, who had been preaching for over twenty years and pleasing the people by his abuse of both ecclesiastical and secular lords, himself "taught the perverse doctrines of the perfidious John Wycliffe"; and that his end was delayed by Bishop Courtenay out of anxiety for the state of his By the end of the century the story had gained in standing. Though less venomous and extreme, Henry Knighton saw Ball as Wycliffe's John the Baptist, preparing the ways for the master, "and he also, it is said, disturbed many by his doctrine".1° From another source comes the (unverified) story of how the hero of Blackheath, Wycliffe's "beloved followsr", when he was condemned publicly confessed that "he had been a disciple of Wycliffe for two years, and had learnt from him the heresies which he taught", and that "there was a certain company of Wycliffe's sect and doctrine who had arranged a sort of confederacy, and had organised themselves to go round the whole of England preaching the matters which Wycliffe had taught, so that the whole country should together agree to their perverse doctrine".ll The chorus is so remarkably united that it may seem rather like a refrain - but even untrue refrains may be remembered and repeated with effect. The chroniclers, who could afford the luxury of a certain irresponsibility, and were habitually discriminating with their solicitude for reputations, were prepared to be specific. Parliament, it seems, was not. If, as some thought, the parliament of November 1381 expressed views about the ways in which church matters might have affected the revolt, these were not officially recorded, but by the following spring, with the immediate problems solved and time to reflect, a new parliament was able to return to the question of how to prevent the recurrence of such a catastrophe. "For fawte of lawe yif comouns rise, Than is a kyngdom most in drede".12 No such reminders can have been necessary. And one of the important outcomes of this parliament was the legislation which gave statutory authority for the issue of commissions to sheriffs and other local officials, upon certification of a bishop in chancery, to arrest and imprison troublesome preachers. No names were given, but the terms of the statute surely leave little doubt what sort of people its framers had in mind. I t has been found, it states, 5 LOLLARDY AND SEDITION, I38I-143I (referring to the Blackfriars Council, where twenty-four of Wycliffe's conclusions had just been condemned), that various ill-disposed persons "in certain habits under the guise of great holiness" have been going from county to county and from town to town without any proper ecclesiastical licence, and preaching not only in churches and cemeteries, but also in fairs, markets, and other public places, endangering souls, the faith, the church and the whole realm. "Which persons", it continues, "preach also diverse matters of slander to make discord and dissension between the various estates of the realm, both temporal and spiritual, to the commotion of the people and the great peril of the whole realm".13 The borrowed phraseology -taken from letters of Archbishop Courtenay 13-makes it certain that it was intended to include among these anonymous and peripatetic speakers, Lollard preachers, whose beguiling appearance was habitually described in official pronouncements of the succeeding generation in these, or similar, words: "sub magnae sanctitatis velamine" became the regular advertisement to warn the unwary away from these most seductive of whited sepulchres.15 The charge is there -with plenty of plaintiffs. But there are no defendants. For there are no grounds to believe in John Ball's alleged association with Wycliffe, and considerable research has yielded no evidence to support the view that Wycliffe's teaching or Lollard preaching were either significant instruments, or in any way connected with the 1381 revolt.16 Even so, it is possible to be impressed by the charge alone, for it represents a considerable and undeniable body of contemporary opinion which apparently believed, and acted on the belief, that there was such a connection. "It is noteworthy", added one writer as an afterthought, looking back on the events of 1381-2, "that so much division and dissension was created everywhere in England by John Wycliffe and his associates, that catholics were afraid that their preaching would lead to a new rising against the lords and the church".17 Such fears were not easily dispelled. Those who had "leide heore jolit6 in presse"la when the commons began to rise could never shake it out again with quite the same abandon, and heretics were gravely compromised by the folds. Somehow, through deliberate falsification, fixed prejudice, or plausible hypothesis, the conviction seems to have become established that Lollardv was associated with revolt. And opinions once lodged are themselves historical facts: and, as such, may influence events. If it was possible, not long after the happenings of 1381, to regard Wycliffe's followers as potential rebels and instigators of sedition, 6 PAST AND PRESENT later events seemed to add substance to the interpretation. Adam Usk's memory was not very clear when, after a lapse of some thirty-five years, he came to chronicle the history of Richard 11's minority, which he had seen himself as a young man, near the beginning of his career. But, having recently experienced a genuine Lollard rebellion, he entertained few doubts that Wycliffe's disciples "by preaching things pleasing to the powerful and rich, namely the withholding of tithes and offerings, and the removal of temporalities from the clergy", had sown the seed of "many disasters, plots, disputes, strife and sedition, which last until this day, and which I fear will last even to the undoing of the kingdom . . . The people of England, wrangling among themselves about the cld faith and the new, are every day as it were, on the very point of bringing down upon their own heads ruin and r e b e l l i ~ n " . ~~ After the first quarter of the fifteenth century the common repute of a Lollard was even less enviable than it had been a generation earlier. When Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales it was still a light - almost friendly - jesting matter for the host to "smelle a loller in the wind".20 But in the summer of 1413 Margery Kempe's enemies were able to taunt her with threats of the fire, and when she was accused of Lollardy four years later (probably when Oldcastle, no longer officially Lord Cobham, was still at large), she was arrested by two yeomen of the duke of Bedford, who alleged that "she was Cobham's daughter and was sent to bear letters about the country".21 By then the Lollards had produced open rebels and traitors, and as secular proceedings became more common, so false accusations and summary treatment of innocent persons became more easy. And, as the Lollard programme itself developed, the burden of disrepute carried in the name was cumulative. While in I411 Lollards and heretics are mentioned alongside homicides and other malefactor^,^^ in I417 the commons, complaining of disturbances to the peace caused by violent breaking of forests, chases and parks, remarked that the offenders were "probably of the opinion of Lollards, traitors and rebels".23 By 1425 there was no doubt that Lollardy was on a par with treason, felony, "or any such other high poynt"," and six years later Lollards were described as "traitors and enemies of the king"." T o be called a Lollard -as to be called a Quaker or a Ranter -was to be abused at the outset in the very derivation of the name, but the name had grown in content. Opinion and legislation must here have reacted upon each other, and those who were deemed sufficiently dangerous to be punished as rebels and traitors naturally tended to become equated with such. 7 LOLLARDY AND SEDITION, 1381-143I I t was undoubtedly true that a Lollard might endanger a good deal more than his own and his neighbour's soul. But it is also undeniable that if current opinion represents a deformity of this truth, it was a deformity which those in authority had every reason to cultivate, and which the nature of our sources may tend to exaggerate. The stress which churchmen and statesmen laid upon the seditious and treasonable aspects of certain Lollard aspirations is likely to reflect their concern to warn those in responsible positions away from dalliance with the sect. The movement certainly found adherents and patrons in high places, and long before Sir John Oldcastle is known to have given it his allegiance, two independent sources provide between them the names of ten reputed Lollard knights, (including a group attached to the royal household), some at least of whose guilt seems established." Material is not lacking to show how the Lollard case was being presented to attract the support of just such persons. But, when argument was translated into action and issued in rebellion, the evidence for Lollard deeds and intentions comes almost completely from the other, and hostile, side." The story can hardly be a whole one when we have to watch it at moments of crisis from an entirely adverse viewpoint. And throughout it is necessary, of course, to make a particular discount for the racy exaggerations with which - in terminology of impending disaster -men of affairs and preachers alike, were then accustomed to spice their arguments. * * * What were the aspects of the Lollard movement which fostered or facilitated the growth of such fears ? Lollardy was a variable creed - if indeed its heterogeneous and ill-assorted conclusions can be dignified by such a name - and seems at some points certainly to refute this contemporary interpretation. For example there is the pacifism which formed one of the twelve articles of the 1395 manifesto: objections to Christian fighting Christian, and to "homicide through war or alleged law of justice in a temporal cause, without spiritual revelation"," could, logically, have been associated with passive resistance in domestic issues. There were, too, Lollard teachers who (like Wycliffe himself) stressed the duty of obedience owed by the oppressed servant to the tyrannical master: