Early in 1395, while Parliament sat at Westminster, a paper of twelve “conclusions” was fastened to the doors of St. Paul’s and of Westminster. It attacked the worldly wealth of the clergy, the Roman priesthood, the miracle of the Mass, pilgrimages and images, and compulsory confession, and it closed with a prayer:

Wherefore, we earnestly desire and beseech God for his great goodness sake, that he will wholly reform our Church (now altogether out of frame) unto the perfection of his first beginning and original.¹ The Twelve Conclusions of the LollardsWestminster, 1395

That prayer was posted more than a century before Luther’s theses, by men whom their enemies called Lollards. For a hundred and forty years they read the Scriptures in English, in workshops and barns and by candlelight, under the shadow of the stake. They were often confused, frequently afraid, and sometimes plainly wrong. But when Tyndale’s printed New Testament began to come into England in 1526, some of the first hands that reached for it were theirs. John Foxe, who gathered the memories of the last of them, gave them the name they had used among themselves, and then the name by which his own readers would know them:

After the great abjuration aforesaid, which was under William Smith Bishop of Lincoln: they were noted and termed among themselves by the name of known men, or just fast men: as now they are called by the name of Protestants.² John FoxeActes and Monuments, 1583

This page tells their story. The Wycliffe Bible, the statute of 1401, and Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions each have a page of their own on this site, and are linked below rather than told again in full.

A Name of Reproach

No one chose to be called a Lollard. Gavin Richardson notes that the word was Dutch for a mumbler, “undoubtedly a term of derision,” perhaps mocking their doctrine as nonsense, perhaps mocking “the incessant stream of vernacular Scripture that fell from the lips of these ‘Bible men.’”³ Their learned opponents preferred a pun. The great Carmelite catalog of their errors was called Fasciculi Zizaniorum, “bundles of tares,” as though lollium, the darnel sown among the wheat, were the root of the name. Others heard in it the old word for an idler. Chaucer, who was no enemy, has his Host swear an oath at the Parson, and when the Parson objects, the Host cries, “I smell a Loller in the wind,” while the Shipman protests that this preacher would “springen cockle in our cleanë corn.”⁴ David Daniell calls it “an imprecise pejorative term (rather like the modern ‘commie’),” and that is the right instinct. Their enemies could pin it on almost anyone who departed from orthodoxy.⁵

The Lollards had their own account of why they were called so. The prologue to the revised Wycliffite Bible, usually ascribed to John Purvey, says plainly what it was that earned the name:

to eschewe pride and speke onour of God and of his lawe, and repreue synne bi weie of charite, is matir and cause now whi prelatis and summe lordis sclaundren men, and clepen hem lollardis, eretikis, and riseris of debate and of treson agens the king.⁶ Prologue to the Wycliffite Bibleascribed to John Purvey

Among themselves they were “brothers” and “sisters” in Christ, and, as Foxe found in the bishops’ registers, “known men” and “just fast men.” Bishop Reginald Pecock thought the first title came from Wycliffe’s rendering of 1 Corinthians 14:38, “If eny man unknowith he schal be unknown”: to be a known man was to be one who knew the written Word.⁷ Like “Christian” at Antioch, and like “Huguenot” and “Puritan” after it, the name of reproach outlived those who coined it.

Wycliffe’s Poor Preachers

The movement began in Oxford. John Wycliffe came to the university in 1354, began lecturing on theology in 1370, and over the following decade wrote with growing boldness against papal power, clerical wealth, and the doctrine of transubstantiation.⁸ He did not stay in the lecture hall. He sent out preachers, his “poor priests,” to carry the Scriptures in the mother tongue to anyone who would hear, and the translation that bears his name was made to put into their hands.⁹ At first the English Bible must have traveled in fragments, copied and carried by these preachers. One of them, William Swinderby, was known for preaching anywhere and at any time; on one occasion his pulpit was set between two millstones.¹⁰

The friars and canons who watched this happen were appalled. Henry Knighton, canon of Leicester, wrote the complaint that has been quoted ever since:

This Master John Wycliffe translated it out of the Latin into the Anglican, not the Angelic tongue, and thus laid it more open to the laity and to women who could read, than it had formerly been to the most learned of the clergy … And in this way the Gospel pearl is cast abroad, and trodden under foot of swine.¹¹ Henry KnightonCanon of Leicester

Knighton also complained that the new sect had won “soldiers, with dukes and earls,” and that it filled the land “like suckers growing out of the root of a tree.” Copies of the English Scriptures were soon being made in folio for the great houses as well as in small volumes for daily use.¹² The movement had friends at court, among the gentry, and in the university, and for a few years it seemed that it might carry Oxford with it.

Its first leaders were Oxford men: Nicholas Hereford, who worked on the translation; John Purvey, Wycliffe’s curate and intimate friend, who revised it;¹³ John Aston; and Philip Repington, canon of Leicester. William Thorpe, examined by the archbishop many years later, remembered what had drawn him to them:

Syr, Master John Wycliffe was holden of full many men, the greatest clearke that they knew then living, and therewith he was named a passing ruely man & an innocent in his living … Therefore sir, this foresaid learning of M. John Wycliffe, is yet holden of full many men and women, the most agreeable learning unto the living and teaching of Christ & of his Apostles.¹⁴ William Thorpebefore Archbishop Arundel, 1407

The Earthquake Council, 1382

In May 1382 Archbishop William Courtenay gathered a council of bishops and doctors at the house of the Dominican friars in London, the Blackfriars, to examine Wycliffe’s teaching. Foxe tells what happened as they sat down to their business: “a wonderful and terrible earthquake fell, through out all England.” Several of the bishops took fright and wanted to abandon the matter, but Courtenay steadied them, and the council went on to condemn Wycliffe’s articles, some as heretical and some as erroneous, “not according unto the sacred Canons of the holy Scripture, but unto their own private affections and traditions.”¹⁵ It has been called the Earthquake Council ever since.

Oxford was then brought to heel. In 1387 Purvey, Hereford, and Aston were forbidden to preach in the diocese of Worcester; commissions went out in 1388 to seize the writings of Wycliffe and Hereford; and in 1392 a Leicester man named William Smith was made to do penance in the market place and hand over the English Gospels and Epistles he had spent eight years copying by hand.¹⁶ Wycliffe himself withdrew to his parish at Lutterworth, where he died in 1384, unmolested.¹⁷ Several of his Oxford disciples did not stand. Repington made his peace with the church so completely that he rose to be bishop of Lincoln; in the next generation, Eadie observes, two bishops of Lincoln had each been in earlier days “a keen Wycliffite.”¹⁸ Thorpe never forgave the defection, though he would not let it shake him:

For though some of those men be contrary to the learning that they taught before, I wote well that their learning was true which they taught … thus they choose now rather to blaspheme God, then to suffer a while here persecution bodily, for sothfastnesse that Christ shed out his heart blood for.¹⁹ William Thorpe

The Twelve Conclusions, 1395

Queen Anne of Bohemia, who loved the Scriptures in English, died in 1394. That same year, while King Richard II was in Ireland, Thomas Arundel, then archbishop of York, and Robert Braybrooke, bishop of London, crossed the sea to beg him to come home and defend the church against those “holding of Wickleffes teaching.” In the Parliament called at Westminster early in 1395, the Lollards answered with their Twelve Conclusions, set up on the door of St. Paul’s and at Westminster.²⁰

The Conclusions read like a charge sheet. The first complains that “the Church of England began first to dote in tēporalities after her stepmother the great church of Rome.” The second denies that the Roman priesthood, “feigned to be a power higher then angels,” is the priesthood Christ ordained. The fourth calls “the feigned miracle of the Sacrament of bread” the great source of the people’s idolatry. Others attack exorcisms and blessings, clergy in secular office, purchased prayers for the dead, and auricular confession. The eighth, against pilgrimages and images, contains a sentence of real beauty: alms should be given to the poor and needy man, “for he is the image of God in more perfect similitude and likeness then any block or stone.”²¹

Not every conclusion would pass in a Reformed pulpit. The tenth condemns all killing, in war or by any “pretensed law of justice,” as “expressly contrary unto the new Testament”; the twelfth objects to the “multitude of arts not necessary” in the realm.²² The document is a cry for reformation, not yet a confession of faith, and it should be read that way. But it ends where a true reformation must begin, with a prayer that God would restore His church “unto the perfection of his first beginning.”

The Fire Is Lit, 1401

In 1399 Henry of Lancaster took the throne from Richard II. A usurper needs friends, and the bishops were the friends Henry needed. Arundel, now archbishop of Canterbury, was his ally, and in 1401 Parliament passed the statute de haeretico comburendo, “concerning the burning of a heretic.” Under it, Eadie writes, “a simple decree of a bishop sufficed to send a man to the stake.”²³

The first to die was William Sawtrey, a London priest who had once abjured and then returned to his convictions. He was degraded from his orders, step by step, in the vestments of each, and handed to the secular power. Foxe called him “the true and faithful martyr of Christ, the first of all them in Wycliffe’s time” to be burned.²⁴ The fire did its work on others. John Purvey, whom the Carmelite Thomas Walden called “the Library of Lollordes,” and Nicholas Hereford were imprisoned at Saltwood and recanted at Paul’s Cross. Purvey was in prison again in 1421.²⁵

William Thorpe Before the Archbishop, 1407

Of all the Lollard documents, the most human is the account William Thorpe wrote of his own examination. Thorpe had been a traveling preacher for more than twenty years. On the third Sunday after Easter in 1407 he preached at St. Chad’s in Shrewsbury that the sacrament of the altar, after consecration, remained material bread, that images should not be worshiped, and that men should not go on pilgrimages. He was arrested and brought in August 1407 before Archbishop Arundel at Saltwood Castle. Friends had begged him, if he were examined, to write down “mine apposing, and mine answering,” and he did.²⁶

He began by asking leave to state his faith, and recited the Creed at length, article by article: the Trinity, the incarnation, the virgin birth, the cross, the resurrection, and the return of Christ in judgment. Then the two men came to pilgrimage. Thorpe drew a picture that Chaucer’s readers would have recognized:

some other pilgrims, will have with them bag pipes: so that every town that they come through, what with the noise of their singing, and with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of their Canterbury bells, and with the barkyng out of dogs after them, that they make more noyce, then if the king came there away.²⁷ William Thorpe

The archbishop was not amused. “Leud Iosel,” he said, “thou seest not far enough in this matter”:

I say to thee, that it is right well done, that pilgrims have with them both singers and also pipers: that when one of them that goeth barefoot, striketh his to upon a stone, and hurteth him sore, & maketh him to blede: it is well done that he or his fellow begin then a song, or else take out of his bosom a bagpipe.²⁸ Thomas ArundelArchbishop of Canterbury

And Thorpe replied: “sir, S. Paul teacheth men to weep with them that weep.” It is hard to improve on that. Arundel could also threaten. Eadie records his oath: “By God, I shall set upon thy shins a pair of pearls, that thou shalt be glad to change the voice” — the pearls being fetters.²⁹ What became of Thorpe no one knows. Foxe searched and found nothing: “What was the ende of this good man and blessed servant of God William Thorpe, I find as yet in no story specified.” He thought it most likely that Thorpe died in prison, by sickness or by violence.³⁰ But his little book survived, and more than a century later it passed through the hands of William Tyndale on its way into print, as we shall see.

The Constitutions of Oxford

What Parliament had not done, the church did for itself. A convocation met at Oxford in July 1408 under Arundel, and its Constitutions were promulgated at St. Paul’s in January 1409. The seventh struck directly at the English Bible: “no man shall, hereafter, by his own authority, translate any text of the Scripture into English,” nor read any translation made “in the time of John Wyckliff, or since,” until it was allowed by the bishop.³¹ Daniell draws out what made England unusual: when vernacular Bibles had circulated in Europe for sixty years, “To translate the Bible into the vernacular remained illegal—in England alone.”³²

The church offered an approved substitute. In 1410 Arundel licensed Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesu Christ, a devotional retelling of the Gospels which, Daniell notes, “was written to supersede the Lollard translations of the Gospels.”³³ Sir Thomas More later recorded that Caxton would not print the Wycliffite Scriptures for fear of Arundel’s law. And yet, Eadie observes, “The great majority of the Wycliffite Scriptures still preserved were written after the ban of Arundel and his Convocation had been issued.”³⁴ The prohibition made the forbidden book precious.

John Badby, 1410

John Badby was a tailor of the diocese of Worcester, a layman with no learning to boast of. In March 1410 he was brought before Arundel and the bishops at St. Paul’s, with the Duke of York and other lords looking on, and would not retract his opinion that the consecrated host was not the body of Christ. That afternoon the king’s writ arrived, and he was taken to Smithfield, put in an empty barrel, and chained to the stake. Henry, Prince of Wales, the future Henry V, was there, and pleaded with him. The prior of St. Bartholomew’s brought out the sacrament with twelve torches and showed it to him:

And then they demanded of him how he believed in it, he answering: that he knew well it was hallowed bread, and not gods body. And then was the tun put over him, and fire put unto him. And when he felt fire, he cried, mercy (calling belike upon the Lord) and so the Prince immediately commanded to take away the tun, and quench the fire.³⁵ John FoxeActes and Monuments

The prince offered him his life, goods enough, and a yearly stipend from the royal treasury if he would recant. Badby refused, and was put back into the barrel and burned.³⁶ A tailor in a barrel turned down a royal pension. Whatever Badby understood or misunderstood about the Supper, he understood that his conscience belonged to God.

Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham

The Lollards’ most powerful protector was a soldier. Sir John Oldcastle, a Herefordshire knight who became Lord Cobham by marriage, had fought for the Crown. He was also, the bishops complained, “a principal favorer, receiver, and maintainer” of Lollard preachers, sending them to preach without license in the dioceses of London, Rochester, and Hereford.³⁷ After Henry V came to the throne in 1413, Lollard tracts belonging to Oldcastle were seized in Paternoster Row and shown to the king, who was horrified.³⁸ Oldcastle was examined before Arundel. Asked what he believed concerning holy church, he answered:

My believe is (as I said afore) that all the scriptures of the sacred Bible are true. All that is grounded upon them I believe thoroughly. For (I know) yt is God’s pleasure that I should so do. But in your lordelye laws and idle determynacyons have I no believe.³⁹ Sir John Oldcastlebefore Archbishop Arundel, 1413

He was condemned as a heretic and sent to the Tower, from which he escaped within weeks. In January 1414 a body of Lollards gathered by night in St. Giles’s Fields outside London. The king, forewarned, rode out with his men, and those who had assembled were captured or scattered. The indictment dated the gathering to the Wednesday after Epiphany, January 10, and charged that Oldcastle’s intent was “to destroy his sovereign Lord the king.”⁴⁰ The reprisals were severe. Sir Roger Acton, John Brown, the preacher John Beverley, and thirty-six others were “first hanged and than brent” in St. Giles’s Fields, and Parliament enacted that those who read the Scriptures in their mother tongue should “forfeit land, catel, lif, and goods, from theyr heyres for ever.”⁴¹ Many fled, Bale wrote, “into Germany / Boheme / France / Spain / Portyngale / and into the welde of Scotland / Walys / and Ireland.”⁴²

Oldcastle stayed hidden for four years, chiefly in Wales, with a price on his head. Late in 1417 the Lord Powis took him and brought him bound to London, and on Tuesday, December 14, 1417, Parliament condemned him and he was drawn to a new pair of gallows in St. Giles’s Fields. Bale describes the end:

he fell downed enoughtlye upon his knees / desyerynge almighty God to forgive his enemies … Than was he hanged up there by the myddle in cheanes of iron / and so consumed a live in the fire / praysynge the name of God so longe as his life lasted.⁴³ John BaleBrief Chronicle, 1544

Hanged as a traitor and burned as a heretic: the double sentence summed up the church’s case against the Lollards ever after. The stage remembered him less kindly: Oldcastle “was the original model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff.”⁴⁴

Constance, Bohemia, and the River Swift

The Lollards did not stay in England. When Anne of Bohemia died and her household went home, the Reformer’s books went with them, and in Prague they fell into the hands of Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague. Hus praised the English Bible as an unprecedented gift to the English nation, and the traffic ran both ways: in 1431 a Bohemian Wycliffite, Paul Craw, was burned at St. Andrews.⁴⁵

The Council of Constance, which burned Hus and Jerome, met in 1415, and it condemned both the writings and the bones of Wycliffe to the flames. The sentence was carried out in 1428 under Archbishop Chichele by Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln. Thomas Fuller told the story two centuries later in words that have never been bettered:

they took what was left of his bones, and burned them to ashes, and cast them into the Swift, a neighbouring brook running hard by. Thus this brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over.⁴⁶ Thomas FullerChurch History of Britain

The Hidden Years

After 1414 the Lollards lost their knights and their scholars. What remained was a movement of craftsmen, small farmers, and their wives: weavers and tailors, bakers and carpenters, readers and listeners. It went underground, and for long stretches the authorities thought it had gone altogether. Anne Hudson, the leading modern scholar of the movement, puts it this way:

It is credible that between 1440 and 1485 the authorities were lulled by the superficial conformity of Lollard communities into thinking that the heresy had disappeared, or at least had declined to such an insignificance that it could safely be ignored.⁴⁷ Anne Hudson

The hidden years have left their traces in the court books. In 1429 a woman named Margery Baxter was charged because she had asked her maid to “come and hear her husband read the law of Christ out of a book he was wont to read by night.” Those who could not read memorized: Alice Colins was regularly sent for to the meetings “to recite unto them the Ten Commandments and the Epistles of Peter and James.”⁴⁸ Foxe marveled at what they paid for the Word: “some gave five marks, some more, some less for a book. Some gave a lode of hay for a few chapters of S. James or of S. Paul in English.”⁴⁹ They were strongest in London and in Essex, Kent, Buckinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, and the cloth country of Gloucestershire and the Vale of Severn, where, Daniell notes, “cloth-workers and Lollardy had long been linked.”⁵⁰

The church tried argument as well as fire. Reginald Pecock, bishop of Chichester, wrote his Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy in 1449 to answer the “Bible men” by reason. His reward was to be condemned himself and confined for life, without ink or paper. Strangely, Pecock had confessed his own desire that “Scripture were lerned of the comon people in their modir language.”⁵¹

The movement reached Scotland too. John Resby, an English follower of Wycliffe, was burned at Perth in 1408; in 1425 the Scots Parliament passed an “Act of Heretickis and Lollardis”; and the new University of St. Andrews made its graduates swear to resist the Lollards. In 1494 some thirty gentry of Ayrshire, the “Lollards of Kyle,” were accused before King James IV, who acquitted them all. As John Knox later wrote, “the greatest part of the accusation was turned to lawchter.”⁵²

The Known Men

In the first years of the sixteenth century the bishops woke again. Foxe, working from the registers of Lincoln and London and from the memories of old men and women still living, recorded what followed. In 1506, under Bishop William Smith, William Tilsworth was burned at Amersham, and his only daughter, Joan Clerk, “was compelled with her own hands to set fire to her dear father.” Others were branded on the cheek with a hot iron, “and thus bare they the prints and marks of the Lord Jesus about them.” Their offense, according to the old witnesses, was “that they would talk against superstition and idolatry, and were desirous to hear & read the holy Scriptures.”⁵³ Foxe summed up what they held:

Four principal pointes they stood in against the Church of Rome, in pilgrimage, adoration of saints, in reading scripture books in English, and in the carnal presence of Christ’s body in the sacrament.⁵⁴ John Foxe

Smith, Foxe says, was “somewhat eger & sharp,” but sent many home quietly. His successor John Longland was another matter. In 1520 and 1521 Longland put suspects on oath and made them name everyone they knew, with nine set interrogatories. Foxe describes the result: “they caused the wife to detect the husband: the husband the wife, the father the daughter, the daughter the father, the brother to disclose the brother, and neighbor the neighbor.”⁵⁵ Eadie gives examples from the records: Thomas Colins informed against his own father, because his father had taught him the Ten Commandments; Robert Pope informed against his wife, his son, and his father. When Roger Parker blamed John Phip for burning his books, Phip answered “that he had rather burn his books than that his books should burn him.”⁵⁶

In 1514 Richard Hun, a London tailor accused of keeping English Gospels and Epistles, was found hanged in the bishop of London’s prison at St. Paul’s, the Lollards’ Tower. The coroner’s jury found that he had been murdered and named the bishop’s chancellor among the killers.⁵⁷ In 1519, at Coventry, parents were burned for teaching their children “the Lord’s prayer, and ten Commaundementes in English.” The children were taken to the Gray Friars and warned, on pain of the same death, “in no wise to meddle anymore with the Lord’s prayer, the Creed, and Commandments in English.”⁵⁸ Foxe, writing in the safety of Elizabeth’s reign, looked back at them and was ashamed of his own generation:

To see their travails, their earnest seeking their burning zeales, their readinges, their watchinges, their sweet assemblies, their love and concord, their godly living, their faithful meaning with the faithful, may make us now in these our days of free profession to blush for shame.⁵⁹ John Foxe

Old Manuscripts and the New Testament

In March 1526 copies of a printed English New Testament, with no translator’s name on the title page, began to circulate in England.⁶⁰ It found a network waiting for it. In Tyndale’s time, Daniell writes, “it was ‘clothmen’ who carried the Word as well as the product from village to village,” and the Lollard districts were the cloth districts.⁶¹ When Bishop Tunstall swept Essex in 1528, he “sought out Lollards and Lutherans” alike, and the geography of those who had the new Testament, Daniell observes, “matches pretty well that of known Lollards.”⁶²

One confession from that campaign shows the old and the new meeting face to face. In 1526 John Tyball of Steeple Bumpstead in Essex, whose mother and wife shared his opinions, went up to London with his friend Thomas Hilles to buy a New Testament from Robert Barnes at the Austin Friars. They showed Barnes the books they already had, “as of the four Evangelists, and certain Epistles of Peter and Paul in English”:

which books the said Friar did little regard, and made a twit of it, and said — a point for them! for they be not to be regarded toward the new printed Testament in English; for it is of more cleaner English.⁶³ Confession of John Tyball1528

They paid three shillings and twopence. Barnes asked them to keep it close. Tyball had already used his books to win the curate of Bumpstead to “his learning and opinions.”⁶⁴ John Pykas, a Colchester baker, had bought a New Testament in English from a Lombard of London for four shillings, and found the preaching of Thomas Bilney “best for his purpose.”⁶⁵ Michael Reeves notes that when Luther’s writings began coming into England, they were well received “especially among those affected by the thinking of Wycliffe’s Lollards from more than a century earlier.”⁶⁶

The reformers knew whose heirs they were. In 1530 Tyndale himself edited The Examinations of Thorpe and Oldcastle for the press at Antwerp, and the text of Thorpe that Foxe later printed came, he said, from a copy “corrected by master William Tyndale.”⁶⁷ Their enemies knew it too. The proclamation of 1529 against heretical books, with Tyndale’s New Testament first on the list, ordered officers to “destroy all heresies and errors commonly called Lollardies”; and when Bishop Stokesley banned a list of books at Paul’s Cross on December 3, 1531, it included “A book of Thorpe or of John Oldcastle.”⁶⁸ Cardinal Wolsey, dying in 1530, warned the king against “this new sect of Lutherans,” and reached back to Wycliffe and Oldcastle for his warning.⁶⁹ In August 1531 Bilney himself was burned at Norwich, in the hollow outside the city gate known as the Lollards’ Pit.⁷⁰ And as late as 1538 John Lambert, on trial for his life, could say: “I did once see a book of the New Testament, which was not written in my estimation this hundred years, and in my mind right well translated.”⁷¹

“Where Was Your Church Before Luther?”

When Roman Catholic controversialists asked the Protestants where their church had been before 1517, the Lollards became part of the answer. Foxe put it bluntly:

they are much begyled and miss informed, which condemn this kind of doctrine now received, of novelty, asking where was this church and religion xl. years ago, before Luther’s time? … if they think this doctrine be so new, that it was not heard of before Luther’s time how then came such great persecution before Luther’s time here in England?⁷² John Foxe

The Puritans and their contemporaries took up the argument. Thomas Bedford’s Luther’s Predecessors (1624) carried the question on its title page, and judged Wycliffe’s doctrine, “howsoever there may be, some few small slips, or harsh phrases,” to be “for the substance … sound and good.” Of the Lollards who abjured under Arundel’s Constitutions he wrote a sentence of real pastoral insight: “Thus while Christ had the inward hearts of men, Antichrist would needs possess the outward body, and make them sing his song.”⁷³ Archbishop George Abbot answered a Catholic writer who claimed that all England had been papist until Henry VIII:

Were John Wicklefs bones burnt, because he was a Papist? And were the Bulls of the pope denounced against him for that cause? And were the Arch-bishop Arundels constitutions against his Followers so severe, because they were Papists?⁷⁴ George AbbotArchbishop of Canterbury, 1624

A century later Daniel Neal began his History of the Puritans with Wycliffe, whose “doctrine remained, and the number of his disciples, who were distinguished by the name of Lollards, increased after his decease.”⁷⁵ The law had come to the same conclusion. Until 1626 every English sheriff swore to “seek and suppress the errors and heresies commonly called Lolleries.” In that year Sir Edward Coke was made sheriff of Buckinghamshire to keep him out of Parliament, and he objected to the oath on the ground that “Lollard was only another name for Protestant.”⁷⁶

Cautions and Counterarguments

The Lollards have been claimed, praised, and caricatured for six hundred years. A preacher who wants to use them should know where the ground is firm.

They were not yet the Reformation. Lollardy was never a church with a confession. The historian John Thomson suggested that it was better seen “as a series of attitudes from which beliefs evolved rather than as a set of doctrines,” with two tendencies that did not always agree, “one towards a scriptural fundamentalism and the other towards a common-sense rationalism.”⁷⁷ The Twelve Conclusions condemn all warfare and all capital punishment; the fourth describes the bread of the altar, after Wycliffe, as the body of Christ “accidentally.” Wycliffe himself, as Kleyn and Beeke note, “never came to a clear understanding of the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone.”⁷⁸ The Lollards were strong on the authority of Scripture, the English Bible, and the errors of Rome. They were much less clear on grace. Collinson notes that Tyndale and the Wycliffite texts share a “markedly un-Lutheran” respect for the Epistle of James, a book the Lollards read constantly.⁷⁹ Honor them as forerunners, not as Reformers born early.

Sedition and the sword. The Lollards were accused from the first of stirring up rebellion. Eadie shows that the official inquiry into the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 never blamed Wycliffe’s Bible, tracts, or preachers, and that his followers were found “among the tradesmen in towns, and among the middle classes,” not among the serfs.⁸⁰ But the Oldcastle affair is harder. Foxe and Bale denied that any rising took place in 1414. Bale says the king “found no such company”; Foxe suggests that the Lollards in the thickets near St. Giles were “coming only with their books, and with Beuerlay their preacher.”⁸¹ This is the pleading of an advocate, and it should be used with care. Foxe himself records that Oldcastle “was attained of treason by the Act,” with the king, lords, and commons assenting, and even Eadie, who admired him, concedes that his enthusiasm “may have led himself or incited his followers to some political indiscretions.”⁸² Earlier, in 1400, the Earl of Salisbury, “a noted Lollard,” had died in a rising against Henry IV.⁸³ A pulpit should not repeat Foxe’s denial as settled fact. The Lollards’ faith did not depend on Oldcastle’s politics, and the men who died with Badby’s courage do not need his sword.

Most of them recanted. Hereford, Purvey, and Repington all submitted in some measure, and Repington became a bishop. Aston, by Thorpe’s account, held to the end. In the later period, Mozley wrote, “Usually … they abjured and were put to punishment”: they carried their faggots, wore the badge, did their penance, and went home to read again.⁸⁴ This is not a reason to despise them. Peter denied his Lord three times. But it is a reason not to present them as a company of martyrs. Most were frightened Christians who read the Bible in secret and bent when the bishop came.

The numbers. Knighton’s claim that “of every two persons you met in the street, one was a Lollard” is the exaggeration of an alarmed opponent.⁸⁵ The figures for the persecutions of the 1520s are disputed too. Revisionist historians have argued that the purges of Lollards, though they produced “figures in the hundreds,” kept “turning up the same names, suggesting a much smaller core,” and that dissent can be discounted as a force in English history. Daniell answers that anticlericalism “was still formidable, at all levels of society,” and that the church’s alarm needs explaining.⁸⁶ The honest course is to say that the Lollards were a persistent minority, strong in certain trades and districts, and not to guess at a figure.

A “Premature Reformation”? Anne Hudson calls Lollardy the “Premature Reformation” and holds that it “prepared the ground for the reformation in England.” Eamon Duffy, on the other side, argues that late medieval English Catholicism was “a highly successful enterprise” and warns against a Protestant historiography that will not take medieval religion seriously. Richardson’s balanced verdict is that Lollardy was “Janus-like,” anticipating the Reformation but emerging from a vigorous religious culture.⁸⁷ Whether Tyndale himself drew on Lollard ideas is also disputed. Donald Smeeton has argued for strong Lollard themes in Tyndale’s theology, but Patrick Collinson concludes that “there is no documented evidence whatsoever to sustain his thesis.”⁸⁸ The firm ground is narrower: the Lollards kept the English Scriptures alive in certain places, and those places received the printed Testament gladly.

The sources and their errors. Much of what we know comes from Foxe, and through him from the bishops’ own registers. That is a strength. But Daniell warns that “Foxe’s emotional colouring can be high,” and Foxe’s story of Joan Clerk at Amersham rests on the memories of aged witnesses some sixty years after the event.⁸⁹ Several dates and details in the sources need correcting:⁹⁰

• Foxe dates Sawtrey’s burning 1400 and Badby’s 1409 by the old reckoning, in which the year began on March 25; by modern reckoning they were 1401 and 1410.
• Bale dates Oldcastle’s death 1418 and Arundel’s death 1415. Oldcastle died on December 14, 1417, and Arundel early in 1414 (Heaton’s 1413 follows the old reckoning).
• Bedford and Neal both say that Wycliffe’s bones were burned forty-one years after his death, and Neal places the Council of Constance in 1425. Constance condemned him in 1415; the bones were dug up and burned in 1428, forty-four years after his death.
• The Constitutions of Oxford are variously dated 1407, 1408, and 1409: drawn up in 1407, adopted by the convocation of July 1408, and promulgated in January 1409.
• Richardson says the Twelve Conclusions were “nailed to the doors of Westminster Hall”; Foxe says they were “fastened up upon the church door of S. Paul in London, and also at Westminster.”
• Richardson counts “some 250” surviving Wycliffite Bibles; Kenyon’s older figure, followed on our Wycliffe Bible page, is about 170. Richardson’s figure is the more recent.
• Wycliffe’s title “the Morning Star of the Reformation” is often said to come from Foxe. It does not appear in the 1583 Actes and Monuments as we have it, and its origin is uncertain. It is best presented as a traditional title.

Claimed by everyone. Anglicans used the Lollards to prove the continuity of the Church of England, Puritans to prove that reform was older than Henry VIII, and Coke to make a legal point. Any successionist scheme of church history, which looks for “an unbroken chain of churches, baptisms, or principles” running back to the apostles, will be tempted to make them a link in it.⁹¹ The Lollards were not Anglicans, Puritans, or Baptists before their time, and the evidence will not bear the weight of a succession. Their real link to the Reformation is not a chain of churches but an open Bible.

The language of Antichrist. Lollard writing is often violently apocalyptic. The pope is Antichrist; the friars are his tail; the end of the world is at hand. Richardson notes that “generous allowance must be made for hyperbole” in such sermons.⁹² A modern preacher may share many of their convictions about Rome and still decline to borrow their invective.

What Scripture Says

The parents at Coventry died for doing what Moses commanded every Israelite household to do:

And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. Deuteronomy 6:6–7

The known men met in kitchens and barns to read and recite the Word to one another, in a day when, as in Samuel’s youth, “the word of the LORD was precious” (1 Samuel 3:1). The prophet describes such a company:

Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name. And they shall be mine, saith the LORD of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels. Malachi 3:16–17

And their long, hidden labor bore fruit they never saw. Michael Reeves asks what encouragement the Lollards offer to those who see little success when God’s Word is proclaimed, and points to Paul:⁹³

I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. 1 Corinthians 3:6–7

Many of the Lollards were weak. They bore the faggot, kissed the book, and promised never to read again, and then went home and read. Thorpe was stronger than most, and even he began his defense by confessing that Christ “suffered therefore, most wrongfully, greatest repriests and despisinges.”⁹⁴ The Savior they read about in their worn manuscripts is the One of whom it was written:

A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory. Matthew 12:20

He did not quench the flax. For a hundred and forty years He kept it smoking in the cottages of Buckinghamshire and the weavers’ rooms of Essex, until the day came when a printed Testament crossed the sea and the whole house caught fire. The Lollards prayed that God would reform His church “unto the perfection of his first beginning.” He heard them. He did it in His own time, and by His Word.

Further Reading

• John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London: John Day, 1583) — vol. 1 (EEBO-TCP), for the Twelve Conclusions, Sawtrey, Thorpe, Badby, and Oldcastle; vol. 2 (EEBO-TCP), for the known men
• John Bale, A Brief Chronicle Concerning the Examination and Death of … Sir John Oldcastle (1544) — EEBO-TCP text
• Thomas Bedford, Luther’s Predecessors: or an Answer to the Question of the Papists: Where Was Your Church before Luther? (London, 1624) — EEBO-TCP text
• Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) — the standard modern study
• John A. F. Thomson, The Later Lollards, 1414–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965)
• Gavin Richardson, “‘Reform our church all out of joint’: The Lollard Movement and the Medieval Origins of the Reformation,” in Reformation 500, ed. Ray Van Neste and J. Michael Garrett (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2016)
• David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994)
• John Eadie, The English Bible, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1876), chaps. 2–4

Forerunners   John Wycliffe   The Wycliffe Bible

Sources

1. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 4th ed. (London: John Day, 1583), vol. 1, bk. 5, “The book of Conclusions, or Reformations, exhibited to the Parliament holden at London, and set up at Paul’s door and other places … 1395.” Online at EEBO-TCP. Quotations from Foxe on this page follow the lightly regularized EEBO-TCP text. Gavin Richardson gives a modern rendering of the same prayer: “We pray that God in his endless goodness reform our church all out of joint to the perfection of the first beginning”: Richardson, “‘Reform our church all out of joint’: The Lollard Movement and the Medieval Origins of the Reformation,” in Reformation 500, ed. Ray Van Neste and J. Michael Garrett (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2016), ch. 1. ↩
2. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, bk. 7, on the persecution in the diocese of Lincoln under Bishops Smith and Longland. Online at EEBO-TCP. ↩
3. Richardson, “Reform our church all out of joint,” in Reformation 500, ch. 1. ↩
4. John Eadie, The English Bible: An External and Critical History of the Various English Translations of Scripture, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1876), chap. 4. Eadie also notes that the name had earlier been applied to the Beghards of the Netherlands and other continental groups. ↩
5. David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 15; Richardson, “Reform our church all out of joint,” ch. 1. ↩
6. General Prologue to the later Wycliffite version, quoted in Frederic G. Kenyon, “English Versions,” in James Hastings, ed., A Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), §9. ↩
7. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4; Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, bk. 7. ↩
8. Richardson, “Reform our church all out of joint,” ch. 1. See the page on John Wycliffe. ↩
9. See the page on The Wycliffe Bible. ↩
10. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
11. Henry Knighton, quoted in Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
12. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4, quoting Knighton. ↩
13. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 3. On Hereford and Purvey as translators, see The Wycliffe Bible. ↩
14. “The examination of William Thorpe, penned with his own hand,” in Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5. ↩
15. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5, on the council of 1382. The archbishop’s own mandate, printed by Foxe, places the assembly “within the territories of the priory of the friers preachers of London” on May 17, 1382. ↩
16. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
17. Richardson, “Reform our church all out of joint,” ch. 1; Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans, vol. 1, chap. 1. ↩
18. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4, on Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln, and “his predecessor in the same see.” ↩
19. “The examination of William Thorpe,” in Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5. ↩
20. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5. Foxe gives his source for the text as the royal archives (Ex Archiuis Regijs). Richardson notes that the Latin original survives chiefly in orthodox refutations: “Reform our church all out of joint,” ch. 1. See the page on Anne of Bohemia. ↩
21. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5, Conclusions 1, 2, 4, and 8. ↩
22. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5, Conclusions 10 and 12. ↩
23. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. The statute, its terms, and its later history are treated on the page De Haeretico Comburendo (1401). ↩
24. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5, on William Sawtrey. Foxe dates the burning 1400 by the old reckoning, under which the year began on March 25; it took place in early March 1401. ↩
25. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5, citing Walden; Thomas Bedford, Luther’s Predecessors: or an Answer to the Question of the Papists: Where Was Your Church before Luther? (London: Felix Kingston for George Winder, 1624). Online at EEBO-TCP. ↩
26. “The examination of William Thorpe,” with Thorpe’s preface and the certificate from Shrewsbury, in Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5. ↩
27. “The examination of William Thorpe,” in Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5. ↩
28. Ibid. ↩
29. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
30. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5. ↩
31. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. The full text, with notes, is on the page The Constitutions of Oxford, which follows the dating “drawn up in 1407, promulgated in 1409.” ↩
32. Daniell, William Tyndale, 94. ↩
33. Ibid., 96. ↩
34. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
35. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5, “John Badby Artificer.” Foxe dates the proceedings 1409 by the old reckoning. ↩
36. Ibid. Eadie spells the name “Bradbee” and quotes Dean Hook’s verdict that he was “really a great man”: English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
37. Bedford, Luther’s Predecessors; cf. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5. Eadie quotes Lord Brougham’s description of him as “a knight greatly distinguished in the wars”: English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
38. W. J. Heaton, Our Own English Bible: Its Translators and Their Work, chap. 21. ↩
39. John Bale, A Brief Chronicle Concerning the Examination and Death of the Blessed Martyr of Christ Sir John Oldcastle the Lord Cobham ([Antwerp], 1544). Online at EEBO-TCP. ↩
40. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5, in his defense of the Lord Cobham against Alan Cope, where he reproduces and disputes the indictment and the preface to the statute. On how Foxe and Bale read the same events, see Cautions below. ↩
41. Bale, Brief Chronicle; Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
42. Bale, Brief Chronicle. ↩
43. Bale, Brief Chronicle. For the capture and the date, Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5, “Concerning sir John Oldcastle the Lord Cobham,” quoting the parliament roll: “on Twesday the xiv. day of December.” Eadie gives “Christmas, 1417.” ↩
44. “Pre-Reformation Movements,” in Church History Charts. ↩
45. Heaton, Our Own English Bible, chap. 21; Eadie, English Bible, 1: chaps. 2 and 4. See the page on John Hus. ↩
46. Thomas Fuller, The Church History of Britain, quoted in Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
47. Anne Hudson, quoted in Richardson, “Reform our church all out of joint,” ch. 1. ↩
48. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
49. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, bk. 7. ↩
50. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4; Daniell, William Tyndale, 15–16. ↩
51. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
52. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4, quoting the continuator of Fordun and John Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland. See the page on the Reformation in Scotland. ↩
53. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, “William Tilsworth Martyr.” Foxe names his witnesses, including William Page and Agnes Wetherley, “being about the age of an hundredth years.” ↩
54. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, bk. 7. ↩
55. Ibid. ↩
56. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. Eadie reports that more than five hundred men and women were arrested in the diocese of Lincoln about 1520 and 1521; on such figures, see Cautions below. ↩
57. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, bk. 7, the coroner’s inquest on Richard Hun; Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. See also The Wycliffe Bible. ↩
58. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “At Coventry. An. 1519.” See De Haeretico Comburendo (1401). ↩
59. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, bk. 7. ↩
60. Daniell, William Tyndale, 174. ↩
61. Ibid., 16. ↩
62. Ibid., 178. ↩
63. Confession of John Tyball, April 28, 1528, printed in Christopher Anderson, The Annals of the English Bible, vol. 1 (London: William Pickering, 1845), 183–84. See also J. F. Mozley, William Tyndale (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 348–49. ↩
64. Anderson, Annals, 1:183. ↩
65. Mozley, William Tyndale, 66; Patrick Collinson, “William Tyndale and the Course of the English Reformation,” Reformation 1 (1996). ↩
66. Michael Reeves, The English Reformation and the Puritans, study guide (Sanford, FL: Ligonier Ministries, 2015), lesson 1, “Tyndale and the Early Reformers,” 5. ↩
67. Mozley, William Tyndale, 345–46, citing Foxe and Bale; Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5, introduction to Thorpe’s examination. More ascribed the edition to George Constantine. ↩
68. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4; Anderson, Annals, 1:305–6. ↩
69. Anderson, Annals, 1:253. ↩
70. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 13. See the page on Thomas Bilney. ↩
71. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
72. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, bk. 7. Foxe adds of the Lincoln persecutions: “this was before the name of Luther was heard of in these countries among the people.” ↩
73. Bedford, Luther’s Predecessors. ↩
74. George Abbot, A Treatise of the Perpetual Visibility, and Succession of the True Church in All Ages (London: Humphrey Lownes for Robert Milbourne, 1624). Online at EEBO-TCP. ↩
75. Neal, History of the Puritans, vol. 1, chap. 1. ↩
76. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
77. John A. F. Thomson, The Later Lollards, 1414–1520, quoted in Richardson, “Reform our church all out of joint,” ch. 1. ↩
78. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5, Conclusions 4 and 10; Diana Kleyn with Joel R. Beeke, Reformation Heroes, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2009), chapter on John Wycliffe. ↩
79. Collinson, “William Tyndale and the Course of the English Reformation”; Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4, on the books named in the Lollard depositions. ↩
80. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 2. ↩
81. Bale, Brief Chronicle; Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5, in his defense of the Lollards against Alan Cope. ↩
82. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5, “Concerning sir John Oldcastle the Lord Cobham”; Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
83. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4. ↩
84. Mozley, quoted in Daniell, William Tyndale, 178. ↩
85. Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 2. ↩
86. Daniell, William Tyndale, 188. ↩
87. Richardson, “Reform our church all out of joint,” ch. 1, quoting Hudson and Duffy. ↩
88. Collinson, “William Tyndale and the Course of the English Reformation,” discussing Donald Dean Smeeton, Lollard Themes in the Reformation Theology of William Tyndale. ↩
89. Daniell, William Tyndale, 178; Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, “William Tilsworth Martyr.” ↩
90. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5; Bale, Brief Chronicle; Bedford, Luther’s Predecessors; Neal, History of the Puritans, vol. 1, chap. 1; Heaton, Our Own English Bible, chap. 21; Eadie, English Bible, 1: chap. 4; Richardson, “Reform our church all out of joint,” ch. 1; Kenyon, “English Versions,” §§7–10. ↩
91. James A. Patterson, “Anabaptist Kinship Revisited: Implications for Baptist Origins and Identity,” in Reformation 500, ch. 2, on the successionist approach to Baptist origins. ↩
92. Richardson, “Reform our church all out of joint,” ch. 1; Bale, Brief Chronicle, for Oldcastle’s own use of the image. ↩
93. Reeves, The English Reformation and the Puritans, lesson 1, discussion question 2, 8. ↩
94. “The examination of William Thorpe,” in Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 1, bk. 5. ↩