Wyclif’s most prominent scholar, Nicholas Herford, was said to have openly approved the brutal murder of Archbishop Sudbury.  Whatever belief such charges might gain, it is certain that from this moment all plans for the reorganization of the Church were confounded in the general odium which attached to the projects of the peasant leaders, and that any hope of ecclesiastical reform at the hands of the baronage and the Parliament was at an end.  But even if the Peasant Revolt had not deprived Wyclif of the support of the aristocratic party with whom he had hitherto cooperated, their alliance must have been dissolved by the new theological position which he had already taken up.  Some months before the outbreak of the insurrection he had by one memorable step passed from the position of a reformer of the discipline and political relations of the Church to that of a protester against its cardinal beliefs.  If there was one doctrine upon which the supremacy of the Mediaeval Church rested, it was the doctrine of Transubstantiation.  It was by his exclusive right to the performance of the miracle which was wrought in the mass that the lowliest priest was raised high above princes.  With the formal denial of the doctrine of Transubstantiation which Wyclif issued in the spring of 1381 began that great movement of religious revolt which ended more than a century after in the establishment of religious freedom by severing the mass of the Teutonic peoples from the general body of the Catholic Church.  The act was the bolder that he stood utterly alone.  The University of Oxford, in which his influence had been hitherto all-powerful, at once condemned him.  John of Gaunt enjoined him to be silent.  Wyclif was presiding as Doctor of Divinity over some disputations in the schools of the Augustinian Canons when his academical condemnation was publicly read, but though startled for the moment he at once challenged Chancellor or doctor to disprove the conclusions at which he had arrived.  The prohibition of the Duke of Lancaster he met by an open avowal of his teaching, a confession which closes proudly with the quiet words, “I believe that in the end the truth will conquer.”

[Sidenote:  Rise of Lollardry]

For the moment his courage dispelled the panic around him.  The University responded to his appeal, and by displacing his opponents from office tacitly adopted his cause.  But Wyclif no longer looked for support to the learned or wealthier classes on whom he had hitherto relied.  He appealed, and the appeal is memorable as the first of such a kind in our history, to England at large.  With an amazing industry he issued tract after tract in the tongue of the people itself.  The dry, syllogistic Latin, the abstruse and involved argument which the great doctor had addressed to his academic hearers, were suddenly flung aside, and by a transition which marks the wonderful genius of the man the schoolman was transformed into the pamphleteer.  If Chaucer