§ 45. THE LOLLARDS. 357
landed endowments for the church, degrees of rank among the. clergy, the religious orders, the mass, oaths and war. Their tenet that no statute is valid which is not found in the Scriptures he also attempted to confute. In advance of his age, the bishop declared that fire, the sword and hanging should not be resorted to till the effort had been made " by clene wit to draw the Lollards into the consent of the true faith." His sensible counsel brought him into trouble, and in 1457 he was tried by Archbishop Bouchier and offered the alternative of burning or public recantation. Pecock chose the latter, and made abjuration at St. Paul's Cross before the archbishop and thousands of spectators. He was clothed in full episcopal robes, and delivered up 14 of his writings to be burnt.^ He was forced to resign his see, and in 1459 was, at the pope's instance, remanded to close confinement in Thorney Abbey. His Mepressor had been twice burnt in Oxford.
There se^is to have been ag^reement among the Lollards in denying the material presence of Christ in the eucharistic bread and in condemning pilgrimages, the worship of images ajjd auricular confession. They also held to the right of the people^ fo read the Scriptures in their own tongue. ^ The expression, "God's law, was widely current among them, and was opposed to the canon law and the decisions of the Church courts. Some denied purgatory, and even based their salvation on faith,^the words, "Thy faith hath saved thee," being quoted for this view. Some denied that the marriage bond was dependent upon the priest's act, and more the scriptural warrant and expediency of priestly celibacy.*
LoUardy was^ an anticipartkin of the Reformation of the
1 Among these works was the Provoker, in which Pecock denied that the Apostles had compiled the Apostles' Creed. See Introd. to Babington's Ed. of the Repressor in Rolls Series, and art. Pecock in Diet. Natl. Biog., XLIV. 198-202.
2 Knighton, II. 155, complains of the Lollards having the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue. Such a translation he said the laity regarded as melior et dignior qnam lingua latina. ' So Walsingham, II. 253.
* Summers, p. 60, speaks of an unpublished Lollard MS. of 37 articles which deal with clerical abuses, such as simnny, quarrelling, holding secular offices, oaths, the worship of images, the eucharist and papal authority.
358 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
sixteenth century,, and did something in the ^vay of preparing the mind of the English people for that change. Professed by. many clerics, it was-efti-phfttieaJly a movement of laynieiL In_ the early Reformation period, English Lutherans were at tijnes represented as the immediate fi)llowers_olW^£lii' Writing in 1523 to Erasmus, Tonstall, bishop of London, said of Lutheranism that "it was not a question of some pernicious novelty, but only that new arms were being added to the great baud of Wycliffite heretics."^
§ 44. John Huss of Bohemia.
Across the seas in Bohemia, where the views of Wyclif were transplanted, they took dsfiper root than in England, !md assumed an organized form. There, the English Reformer was called the fifth evangelist and^in its earlier stages, the m^ivement went by the name of Wycliffism. It was only in theja^r periods that the names Hussites and Hussitisiji were substituted for Wycliffites and Wycliffism. Its chief spokesmen were John Huss and Jerome of Prag, who died at the stake a t Coa- •stance for their avowed allegiance to Wyclif. ^"Through Huss, Prag became identified with a distinct stage in the history of religious progress. Distinguished among its own people as the city of St. John of Nepomuk, d. 1383, and in the history of armies as the residence of Wallenstein, the Catholic leader in the Thirty Years' War, Prag is known in the Western world pre-eminently as the. home of Huss. Through his noble advocacy, the principles enunciated by Wyclif became the subject of discussion in oecumenical councils, called forth armed crusades and furnished an imposing spectacle of steadfast resistance against religious oppression. Wycliffism passed out of view in England ; but Hussitism, in spite of the most bitter persecution by the Jesuits, lias trickled down in pure though small streamlets into the religious history of modern times, notably through the Moravians of Ilerrnhut.
During the reign of Charles IV., king of Bohemia and emperor, 1346-1378, the Bohemian kingdom entered upon the
1 Trevelyan, p. 349.
John Huss of Bohemia