§ 40. JOHN WYCLIF. 317
/Ing than any priest, and that the temporal lords may seize the [possessions of the clergy if pressed by necessity." The duke V>f Lancaster, the clergy's open foe, headed a movement to confiscate ecclesiastical property. Piers Ploughman had an extensive public opinion behind him when he exclaimed, "Take her lands, ye Lords, and let her live by dimes (tithes)." The Good Parliament of 1376, to whose deliberation Wyclif con^ tributed by vojce^ajid_peni^^aA^ emphatic the
public complaints against the hierarchy. "The Oxford professor's attitude had become too flagrant to be suffered to go unrebuked. In 1377, he was summoned^ before the tribunal of William Courtenay, bishop of London, at St. Paul's, where the proceedings opened with a violent altercation between the bishop and the duke. The question was as to whether Wyclif should take a seat or continue standing in the court. Percy, lord marshal of England, ordered him to sit down, a proposal the bishop pronounced an unheard-of indignity to the court. At this, Lancaster, who was present, swore he would bring down Courtenay's pride and the pride of all the prelates in England. "Do your best. Sir," was the spirited retort of the bishop, who was a son of the duke of Devonshire. A popular tumult ensued, Wyclif being protected by Lancaster.
Pope Gregory XL himself now took notice of the offender in a document condemning 19 sentences from his writings a^s erroneous and dangerous to Church and state. In fact, he issued a batch of at least five bulls, addressed to the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of London, the University of Oxford and the king, Edward III. The communication to Archbishop Sudbury opened with an unctuous panegyric of England's past most glorious piety and the renown of its Church leaders, champions of the orthodox faith and instructors not only of their own but of other peoples in the path of the Lord's commandments. But it had come to his ears that the Lutterworth rector had broken forth into such detestable madness as not to shrink from publicly proclaiming false propositions which threatened the stability of the entire Church. His Holiness, tlierefore, called upon the^Jchbishop to have
318 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 12i»4-1517.
John jsent tQ,42iigon and kept in bonds till final sentence should be passed by the papal court. ^ It seems that the vicechancellor of Oxford at least made a show of complying with the pope's command and remanded the heretical doctor to Black Hall, but the imprisonment was only nominal.
Fortunately, the pope might send forth his fulminations to bind and imprison but it was not wholly in his power to hold the truth in bonds and to check the progress of thought. In his letter to the chancellor of Oxford, Gregory alleged that Wyclif was vomiting out of tlie filthy dungeon of his heart most wicked and damnable heresies, Avhereby he hoped to pollute the faithful and bring them to the precipice of perdition, overthrow the Church and subvert the secular estate. The disturber was put into the same category with those princes among errorists, Marsiglius of Padua and John of Jandun.^
The archbishop's court at Lambeth, before which the offender was now cited, was met by a message from the widow of the Black Prince to stay the proceedings, and the sitting was effectually broken up by London citizens who burst into the hall. At Oxford, the masters of theology pronounced the nineteen condemned propositions true, though they sounded badly to the ear. A few weeks later, March, 1878i_Gxeg.ary d|ed, and the pa])al_schism broke out. No further notice was taken of Gregory's ferocious bulls. Among other things, the nineteen propositions affirmed that Christ's followers have no right to exact temporal goods by ecclesiastical censures, that the excommunications of pope and priest are of no avail if not according to the law of Christ, that for adequate reasons the king may strip the Church of temporalities and that even a pope may be lawfully impeached by laymen.
With the year l^JTS Wyclif's distinctive career as a doctrinal refonufr opens. lie had defended English rights against foreign encioiichinent. He now assailed, at a number of points, t]ie theological structure the Schoolmen and mediieval popes had laboriously reared^ and the abuses that had crept into the Church. The spectacle of Christendom divided by two papal courts, each fulminatinganathemasagainst the other, was
1 Gee and Hardy, p. 105 sqq. '^ Fasc, pp. 242-244.