But soon after this no fewer than five Bulls, or letters from the Pope, were sent against Wyclif.  In one the University of Oxford was ordered to imprison him; in others Wyclif was ordered to appear before the Pope; in still another the English bishops were ordered to arrest him and try him themselves.  But little was done, for the English would not imprison an English subject at the bidding of a French Pope, lest they should seem to give him royal power in England.

At length, however, Wyclif was once more brought before a court of bishops in London.  By this time Edward III had died, and Richard, the young son of the Black Prince, had come to the throne.  His mother, the Princess of Wales, was Wyclif’s friend, and she now sent a message to the bishops bidding them let him alone.  This time, too, the people of London were on his side; they had learned to understand that he was their friend.  So they burst into the council-room eager to defend the man whose only crime was that of trying to protect England from being robbed.  And thus the second trial came to an end as the first had done.

Wyclif now began to preach more boldly than before.  He preached many things that were very different from the teaching of the Church of Rome, and as he was one of the most learned men of his time, people crowded to Oxford to hear him.  John of Gaunt, now no longer his friend, ordered him to be silent.  But Wyclif still spoke.  The University was ordered to crush the heretic.  But the University stood by him until the King added his orders to those of the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Then Wyclif was expelled from the University, but still not silenced, for he went into the country and there wrote and taught.

Soon his followers grew in numbers.  They were called Poor Priests, and clad in long brown robes they wandered on foot through the towns and villages teaching and preaching.  Wyclif trusted that they would do all the good that the old friars had done, and that they would be kept from falling into the evil ways of the later friars.  But Churchmen were angry, and called his followers Lollards or idle babblers.

Wyclif, however, cared no longer for the great, he trusted no more in them.  It was to the people now that he appealed.  He wrote many books, and at first he wrote in Latin.  But by degrees he saw that if he wanted to reach the hearts of the people, he must preach and teach in English.  And so he began to write English books.  But above all the things that he wrote we remember him chiefly for his translation of the Bible.  He himself translated the New Testament, and others helped him with the Old Testament, and so for the first time the people of England had the whole Bible in their own tongue.  They had it, too, in fine scholarly language, and this was a great service to our literature.  For naturally the Bible was a book which every one wished to know, and the people of England, through it, became accustomed to use fine stately language.