§ 39. THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND. 313
see, the English benefices, however, held by cardinals being exempted. The chronicler Merimuth, in a noteworthy paragraph summing up the curial practice of foraging upon the English sees and churches, emphasizes the persistence and shrewdness with which the Apostolic chair from the time of Clement V. had extorted gold and riches as though the English might be treated as barbarians. John XXII. he represents as having reserved all the good livings of England. Under Benedict XII., things were not so bad. Benedict's successor, Clement VI., was of all the offenders the most unscrupulous, reserving for himself or distributing to members of the curia the fattest places in England. England's very enemies, as Merimuth continues, were thus put into possession of English revenues, and the proverb became current at Avignon that the English were like docile asses bearing all the burdens heaped upon them.^ This prodigal Frenchman threatened Edward III. with excommunication and the land with interdict, if resistance to his appointments did not cease and if their revenues continued to be withheld. The pope died in 1353, before the date set for the execution of his wrathful threat. While France was being made English by English arms, the Italian and French ecclesiastics were making conquest of England's resources.
The great name of Wyclif, which appears distinctly in 1366, represents the patriotic element in all its strength. In his discussions of lordship, presented in two extensive treatises, he set forth the theory of the headship of the sovereign over the temporal affairs of the Church in his own dominions, even to the seizure of its temporalities. In him, the Church witnessed an ecclesiastic of equal metal with Thomas a Becket, a man, however, wlio did not stoop, in his love for his order, to humiliate the state under the hand of the Church. He represented the popular will, the common sense of mankind in regard to
1 Inter curiales vertitiir in proverbium quod Anglici s^int boni asini, omnia onera eis imposita et intolerahilia supportantes. Merimuth, p. 175. To these burdens imposed upon England by the papal see were added, as in Matthew Paris' times, severe calamities from rain and cold. Merimuth tells of a great flood in 1339, when the rain fell from October to the first of December, so that the country looked like a continuous sea. Then bitter cold setting in, the country looked like one field of ice.
314 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
the province of the Church, the New Testament theory of the spiritual sphere. Had he not been practically alone, he would have anticipated by more than two centuries the limitation of the pope's power in England.
§ 40. John Wyclif.
" A good man was there of religioun That was a pore Persoue of a town ; But rich he was of holy thought and werk ; He was also a lerned man, a clerk, That Christes gospel trewly wolde preche.
****** This noble ensample to his shepe he gaf, That first he wrought and after that he taught.
****** A better priest I trow that nowhere non is, He waited after no pompe ne reverence ; Ne maked hitn no spiced conscience. But Christes lore and his apostles twelve He taught, but first he folwed it himselve." ^
— Chaucer.
The title. Reformers before the Reformation, has been aptly given to a group of men of the 14th and 15th centuries who anticipated many of the teachings of Luther and the Protestant Reformers. They stand, each by himself, in solitary prominence, Wyclif in England, Jolm Huss in Bohemia, Savonarola in Florence, andJWesseljGoch and NVescl in Northern ( irruiuny.^ ToTHese men the sculptor has given a place on the pedestal of his famous group at Worms representing the Reformation of the 16th century. They differ, if we except the moral reformer, Savonarola, from the group of the German mystics, who sought a purification of life in quiet ways, in having expressed open (Ussent from the Church's ritual and doctrinal teachinjjs. They also differ from the group of ecclesiastical reformers, D'Ailly, Gerson, Nicolas of Clamanges, who concerned themselves with the fabric of the canon law and did not go beyond the correction of abuses in the administration and morals of the Church. Wyclif and his successors were doctrinal reformers. In some
* Often supposed to be a description of Wyclif.