It was in vain that the clergy attempted to stifle the new movement by their old weapon of persecution.  The jealousy entertained by the baronage and gentry of every pretension of the Church to secular power foiled its efforts to make persecution effective.  At the moment of the Peasant Revolt Courtenay procured the enactment of a statute which commissioned the sheriffs to seize all persons convicted before the bishops of preaching heresy.  But the statute was repealed in the next session, and the Commons added to the bitterness of the blow by their protest that they considered it “in nowise their interest to be more under the jurisdiction of the prelates or more bound by them than their ancestors had been in times past.”  Heresy indeed was still a felony by the common law, and if as yet we meet with no instances of the punishment of heretics by the fire it was because the threat of such a death was commonly followed by the recantation of the Lollard.  But the restriction of each bishop’s jurisdiction within the limits of his own diocese made it impossible to arrest the wandering preachers of the new doctrine, and the civil punishment—­even if it had been sanctioned by public opinion—­seems to have long fallen into desuetude.  Experience proved to the prelates that few sheriffs would arrest on the mere warrant of an ecclesiastical officer, and that no royal court would issue the writ “for the burning of a heretic” on a bishop’s requisition.  But powerless as the efforts of the Church were for purposes of repression, they were effective in rousing the temper of the Lollards into a bitter fanaticism.  The heretics delighted in outraging the religious sense of their day.  One Lollard gentleman took home the sacramental wafer and lunched on it with wine and oysters.  Another flung some images of the saints into his cellar.  The Lollard preachers stirred up riots by the virulence of their preaching against the friars.  But they directed even fiercer invectives against the wealth and secularity of the great Churchmen.  In a formal petition which was laid before Parliament in 1395 they mingled denunciations of the riches of the clergy with an open profession of disbelief in transubstantiation, priesthood, pilgrimages, and image-worship, and a demand, which illustrates the strange medley of opinions which jostled together in the new movement, that war might be declared unchristian and that trades such as those of the goldsmith or the armourer, which were contrary to apostolical poverty, might be banished from the realm.  They contended (and it is remarkable that a Parliament of the next reign adopted the statement) that from the superfluous revenues of the Church, if once they were applied to purposes of general utility, the king might maintain fifteen earls, fifteen hundred knights, and six thousand squires, besides endowing a hundred hospitals for the relief of the poor.

[Sidenote:  Disasters of the War]