RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Logos Lollards
Le Quatrieme evangile (1903); Autour d'un petit lime
(1903) ; and Les Evangiles synoptiques (1908).
Bibliography: W. J. Williams, Newman, Pascal, Loisy, and the Catholic Church, London, 1906; Publisher's Weekly, Feb. 22, 1908, p. 884; Expository Times, Aug. 1909, pp. 488-495; A. D«5trez, L'Abbe Loisy, Paris, 1909.
LOLLARDS.
Origin of the Lollards (§ 1).
Wyclif and the Early English Lollards (§ 2).
Spread of Lollardism in England (§ 3).
Lollard Memorial of 1395 (§ 4).
Ecclesiastical Opposition to Lollardism (§ 5).
The Constitutions of Arundel (§ 6).
Sir John Oldcastle (§ 7).
Suppression and Decline of Lollardism (§ 8).
Tenets of Lollardism (§ 9).
Lollard Opposition to Roman Catholic Doctrines (§ 10).
Lollard View of the Eucharist (§ 11).
The name Lollards is applied both to a semimonastic charitable society originating in Brabant in the fourteenth century and to the English followers of John Wyclif. The Brabantine Lollards are mentioned by J. Hocsem, a canon of Liege c. 1350, in a notice of the year 1309, and from his account it is obvious that they received their name from the Middle Dutch loellen (" to sing softly, hum "). They first appeared prominently on the outbreak of the plague in Antwerp c. 1350, devoting themselves to the care of the sick
i. Origin and the burial of the dead, and reof the ceived the name Alexians (q.v.) from
Lollards, their patron saint. Suspected of heresy from the very start, they were tolerated conditionally after 1347, and their dubious reputation transferred their name to the adherents of Wyclif when he began in 1380 to assail the accepted teachings of the Church in regard to the Eucharist. The term was so used for the first time by Thomas Walden and the Cistercian Crompe in 1382, who applied it to Wyclif 's friends Hereford and Repington. Five years later five itinerant preachers are described as Lollards, and the name henceforth appears frequently in English documents, finally losing all trace of its Dutch origin and becoming the national term of derision for Wyclif's followers from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century.
The middle of the fourteenth century was a period of religious transition for the English people, and the calm but intense conviction that the evils of the time must be overcome and that religious and social life must be reformed found expression in John Wyclif (q.v.). In 1378 he denied the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, receiving the support of his university, the court, the nobles, and the knights. Finding his model in the mendicant monks, he sent his closest friends, including Hereford, Aston, Bedeman (all members of the University of Oxford), Purvey (his
2. Wyclif vicar at Lutterworth), Thorpe, Parker,
and the and Swinderby, to preach among the
Early farmers and the artizans. For the
English first time in English history an appeal
Lollards, was made to the people rather than to
the scholars, and dogma was superseded
by the Bible, which was made the sole source of
faith and practise. Yet, though the stereotyped
sermons of the mendicant orders were replaced by a new note of religious conviction, Wyclif had no ground of opposition to the ideals of St. Francis and St. Dominic, as is amply proven by his Short Rule of Life with its close affinities to the aims of St. Francis. Their followers, on the other hand, he bitterly assailed, not only for their teachings about the Eucharist, but also for their adherence to the two antipopes of the Great Schism (see Schism) after 1378, for their opposition to free preaching, and for their hostility to the Bible in the vernacular. Wyclif accordingly sent out his " Poor Priests " to invade the territory of the mendicant orders. Bound by no vows and no formal consecration, poor, and yet not mendicant, they wandered from village to village, barefoot, with a long staff in token of their pastoral vocation and coarse habits of reddish brown to symbolize poverty and toil. Prelates, priests, and abbots scorned and hated them, but the people loved them and flocked around them.
This was the beginning of the Lollard movement, which stirred England to its depths for nearly a century and a half and formed the essential basis of the Reformation. [It seems probable that Wyclif and his " Poor Priests " did not originate the type of Evangelical life and thought known as Lollardism. They rather evoked and made aggressive older forms of Evangelical life which survived the Roman Catholic conquest and may have been influenced by continental Evangelicals like the Waldenses, with whom they had much in common. The movement seems too extensive to be ascribed solely to the preaching of Wyclif's evangelists. a. h. n.J The ranks of the " Poor Priests " were soon increased by many of the laity, who boldly opposed the authority of the Church, while some of the nobility who did not fear the wrath of the powerful John of Gaunt, such as the count of Salisbury, likewise joined them. Among the common people their success was enormous,
3. Spread until their adherents were believed to
of Lollard- number at least half the population.
ism in [This estimate is too high. It is not
England, likely that one in ten was a Lollard. a. h. n.] Their weapon was the Bible in the vernacular, and true to their doctrine that each priest had the same power to bind and loose as pope or bishop, they ordained others to extend their work. By the middle of the fourteenth century the Lollards were at their zenith, at least numerically, but even during Wyclif's lifetime they met a rude shock when in 1382 Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury, urged Parliament to take measures against the " Poor Priests," whom he accused of disobedience to their ecclesiastical superiors, stirring up class hostility, and propagating heresy. This was averted by Richard II., but on the insistence of the primate he placed the matter under the jurisdiction of the ordinaries, which were to proceed against the Lollards through their own episcopal officials. The result was the excommunication of Aston and the suspension of Hereford, Repington, and Bedeman from university privileges. On Dec. 31, 1384, Wyclif died, but the movement which he had inaugurated lived and grew.
Lollards