[Sidenote:  The Lollard movement]

The persecution of Courtenay deprived the religious reform of its more learned adherents and of the support of the Universities.  Wyclif’s death robbed it of its head at a moment when little had been done save a work of destruction.  From that moment Lollardism ceased to be in any sense an organized movement and crumbled into a general spirit of revolt.  All the religious and social discontent of the times floated instinctively to this new centre.  The socialist dreams of the peasantry, the new and keener spirit of personal morality, the hatred of the friars, the jealousy of the great lords towards the prelacy, the fanaticism of the reforming zealot were blended together in a common hostility to the Church and a common resolve to substitute personal religion for its dogmatic and ecclesiastical system.  But it was this want of organization, this looseness and fluidity of the new movement, that made it penetrate through every class of society.  Women as well as men became the preachers of the new sect.  Lollardry had its own schools, its own books; its pamphlets were passed everywhere from hand to hand; scurrilous ballads which revived the old attacks of “Golias” in the Angevin times upon the wealth and luxury of the clergy were sung at every corner.  Nobles like the Earl of Salisbury and at a later time Sir John Oldcastle placed themselves openly at the head of the cause and threw open their gates as a refuge for its missionaries.  London in its hatred of the clergy became fiercely Lollard, and defended a Lollard preacher who ventured to advocate the new doctrines from the pulpit of St. Paul’s.  One of its mayors, John of Northampton, showed the influence of the new morality by the Puritan spirit in which he dealt with the morals of the city.  Compelled to act, as he said, by the remissness of the clergy who connived for money at every kind of debauchery, he arrested the loose women, cut off their hair, and carted them through the streets as objects of public scorn.  But the moral spirit of the new movement, though infinitely its grander side, was less dangerous to the Church than its open repudiation of the older doctrines and systems of Christendom.  Out of the floating mass of opinion which bore the name of Lollardry one faith gradually evolved itself, a faith in the sole authority of the Bible as a source of religious truth.  The translation of Wyclif did its work.  Scripture, complains a canon of Leicester, “became a vulgar thing, and more open to lay folk and women that knew how to read than it is wont to be to clerks themselves.”  Consequences which Wyclif had perhaps shrunk from drawing were boldly drawn by his disciples.  The Church was declared to have become apostate, its priesthood was denounced as no priesthood, its sacraments as idolatry.

[Sidenote:  Lollardry and the Church]