approvingly to Repyngdon’s defiance.  “I dare go no further,” wrote the poor Friar to the Archbishop, “for fear of death”; but he mustered courage at last to descend into the schools where Repyngdon was now maintaining that the clerical order was “better when it was but nine years old than now that it has grown to a thousand years and more.”  The appearance however of scholars in arms again drove Stokes to fly in despair to Lambeth, while a new heretic in open Congregation maintained Wyclif’s denial of Transubstantiation.  “There is no idolatry,” cried William James, “save in the Sacrament of the Altar.”  “You speak like a wise man,” replied the Chancellor, Robert Rygge.  Courtenay however was not the man to bear defiance tamely, and his summons to Lambeth wrested a submission from Rygge which was only accepted on his pledge to suppress the Lollardism of the University.  “I dare not publish them, on fear of death,” exclaimed the Chancellor when Courtenay handed him his letters of condemnation.  “Then is your University an open fautor of heretics,” retorted the Primate, “if it suffers not the Catholic truth to be proclaimed within its bounds.”  The royal Council supported the Archbishop’s injunction, but the publication of the decrees at once set Oxford on fire.  The scholars threatened death against the friars, “crying that they wished to destroy the University.”  The masters suspended Henry Crump from teaching as a troubler of the public peace for calling the Lollards “heretics.”  The Crown however at last stepped in to Courtenay’s aid, and a royal writ ordered the instant banishment of all favourers of Wyclif with the seizure and destruction of all Lollard books on pain of forfeiture of the University’s privileges.  The threat produced its effect.  Herford and Repyngdon appealed in vain to John of Gaunt for protection; the Duke himself denounced them as heretics against the Sacrament of the Altar, and after much evasion they were forced to make a formal submission.  Within Oxford itself the suppression of Lollardism was complete, but with the death of religious freedom all trace of intellectual life suddenly disappears.  The century which followed the triumph of Courtenay is the most barren in its annals, nor was the sleep of the University broken till the advent of the New Learning restored to it some of the life and liberty which the Primate had so roughly trodden out.

[Sidenote:  Wyclif’s Bible]

Nothing marks more strongly the grandeur of Wyclif’s position as the last of the great schoolmen than the reluctance of so bold a man as Courtenay even after his triumph over Oxford to take extreme measures against the head of Lollardry.  Wyclif, though summoned, had made no appearance before the “Council of the Earthquake.”  “Pontius Pilate and Herod are made friends to-day,” was his bitter comment on the new union which proved to have sprung up between the prelates and the monastic orders who had so long been at variance with each other; “since