is the father of our later English poetry, Wyclif is the father of our later English prose.  The rough, clear, homely English of his tracts, the speech of the ploughman and the trader of the day though coloured with the picturesque phraseology of the Bible, is in its literary use as distinctly a creation of his own as the style in which he embodied it, the terse vehement sentences, the stinging sarcasms, the hard antitheses which roused the dullest mind like a whip.  Once fairly freed from the trammels of unquestioning belief, Wyclif’s mind worked fast in its career of scepticism.  Pardons, indulgences, absolutions, pilgrimages to the shrines of the saints, worship of their images, worship of the saints themselves, were successively denied.  A formal appeal to the Bible as the one ground of faith, coupled with an assertion of the right of every instructed man to examine the Bible for himself, threatened the very groundwork of the older dogmatism with ruin.  Nor were these daring denials confined to the small circle of scholars who still clung to him.  The “Simple Priests” were active in the diffusion of their master’s doctrines, and how rapid their progress must have been we may see from the panic-struck exaggerations of their opponents.  A few years later they complained that the followers of Wyclif abounded everywhere and in all classes, among the baronage, in the cities, among the peasantry of the countryside, even in the monastic cell itself.  “Every second man one meets is a Lollard.”

[Sidenote:  Lollardry at Oxford]

“Lollard,” a word which probably means “idle babbler,” was the nickname of scorn with which the orthodox Churchmen chose to insult their assailants.  But this rapid increase changed their scorn into vigorous action.  In 1382 Courtenay, who had now become Archbishop, summoned a council at Blackfriars and formally submitted twenty-four propositions drawn from Wyclif’s works.  An earthquake in the midst of the proceedings terrified every prelate but the resolute Primate; the expulsion of ill humours from the earth, he said, was of good omen for the expulsion of ill humours from the Church; and the condemnation was pronounced.  Then the Archbishop turned fiercely upon Oxford as the fount and centre of the new heresies.  In an English sermon at St. Frideswide’s Nicholas Herford had asserted the truth of Wyclif’s doctrines, and Courtenay ordered the Chancellor to silence him and his adherents on pain of being himself treated as a heretic.  The Chancellor fell back on the liberties of the University, and appointed as preacher another Wyclifite, Repyngdon, who did not hesitate to style the Lollards “holy priests,” and to affirm that they were protected by John of Gaunt.  Party spirit meanwhile ran high among the students.  The bulk of them sided with the Lollard leaders, and a Carmelite, Peter Stokes, who had procured the Archbishop’s letters, cowered panic stricken in his chamber while the Chancellor, protected by an escort of a hundred townsmen, listened