uncouth and obsolescent verse, and had he possessed a finer artistic sense and a higher poetic imagination, his book might have been, like Chaucer’s, among the lasting glories of our tongue.  As it is, it is forgotten by all but professional students of literature and history.  Its popularity in its own day is shown by the number of MSS. which are extant, and by imitations, such as Piers the Plowman’s Crede (1394), and the Plowman’s Tale, for a long time wrongly inserted in the Canterbury Tales.  Piers became a kind of typical figure, like the French peasant, Jacques Bonhomme, and was appealed to as such by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century.

The attack upon the growing corruptions of the Church was made more systematically, and from the stand-point of a theologian rather than of a popular moralist and satirist, by John Wiclif, the rector of Lutterworth and professor of divinity in Baliol College, Oxford.  In a series of Latin and English tracts he made war against indulgences, pilgrimages, images, oblations, the friars, the pope, and the doctrine of transubstantiation.  But his greatest service to England was his translation of the Bible, the first complete version in the mother-tongue.  This he made about 1380, with the help of Nicholas Hereford, and a revision of it was made by another disciple, Purvey, some ten years later.  There was no knowledge of Hebrew or Greek in England at that time, and the Wiclifite versions were made not from the original tongues but from the Latin Vulgate.  In his anxiety to make his rendering close, and mindful, perhaps, of the warning in the Apocalypse, “If any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life,” Wiclif followed the Latin order of construction so literally as to make rather awkward English, translating, for example, Quib sibi vult hoc somnium? by What to itself wole[8] this sweven?[9] Purvey’s revision was somewhat freer and more idiomatic.  In the reigns of Henry IV. and V. it was forbidden to read or to have any of Wiclif’s writings.  Such of them as could be seized were publicly burned.  In spite of this, copies of his Bible circulated secretly in great numbers.  Forshall and Madden, in their great edition (1850), enumerate one hundred and fifty MSS. which had been consulted by them.  Later translators, like Tyndale and the makers of the Authorized Version, or “King James’s Bible” (1611), followed Wiclif’s language in many instances; so that he was, in truth, the first author of our biblical dialect and the founder of that great monument of noble English which has been the main conservative influence in the mother-tongue, holding it fast to many strong, pithy words and idioms that would else have been lost.  In 1415, some thirty years after Wiclif’s death, by decree of the Council of Constance, his bones were dug up from the soil of Lutterworth chancel and burned, and the ashes cast into the Swift.  “The brook,” says Thomas Fuller, in his Church History, “did convey his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow seas; they into the main ocean.  And thus the ashes of Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over.”