[Sidenote:  Wyclif]

What gave point to this challenge was the assent of the prelates to the proceedings of the Parliament; and the pride of Urban V. at once met it by a counter-defiance.  He demanded with threats the payment of the annual sum of a thousand marks promised by King John in acknowledgement of the suzerainty of the See of Rome.  The insult roused the temper of the realm.  The king laid the demand before Parliament, and both houses replied that “neither King John nor any king could put himself, his kingdom, nor his people under subjection save with their accord or assent.”  John’s submission had been made “without their assent and against his coronation oath” and they pledged themselves, should the Pope attempt to enforce his claim, to resist him with all their power.  Even Urban shrank from imperilling the Papacy by any further demands, and the claim to a Papal lordship over England was never again heard of.  But the struggle had brought to the front a man who was destined to give a far wider scope and significance to this resistance to Rome than any as yet dreamed of.  Nothing is more remarkable than the contrast between the obscurity of John Wyclif’s earlier life and the fulness and vividness of our knowledge of him during the twenty years which preceded its close.  Born in the earlier part of the fourteenth century, he had already passed middle age when he was appointed to the mastership of Balliol College in the University of Oxford and recognized as first among the schoolmen of his day.  Of all the scholastic doctors those of England had been throughout the keenest and most daring in philosophical speculation.  A reckless audacity and love of novelty was the common note of Bacon, Duns Scotus, and Ockham, as against the sober and more disciplined learning of the Parisian schoolmen, Albert and Thomas Aquinas.  The decay of the University of Paris during the English wars was transferring her intellectual supremacy to Oxford, and in Oxford Wyclif stood without a rival.  From his predecessor, Bradwardine, whose work as a scholastic teacher he carried on in the speculative treatises he published during this period, he inherited the tendency to a predestinarian Augustinianism which formed the groundwork of his later theological revolt.  His debt to Ockham revealed itself in his earliest efforts at Church reform.  Undismayed by the thunder and excommunications of the Church, Ockham had supported the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria in his recent struggle, and he had not shrunk in his enthusiasm for the Empire from attacking the foundations of the Papal supremacy or from asserting the rights of the civil power.  The spare, emaciated frame of Wyclif, weakened by study and asceticism, hardly promised a reformer who would carry on the stormy work of Ockham; but within this frail form lay a temper quick and restless, an immense energy, an immovable conviction, an unconquerable pride.  The personal charm which ever accompanies real greatness