In the spring of 1401 the Parliament of England, at the urging of the bishops, enacted the statute that has ever since been known by the words of its writ: de haeretico comburendo, “concerning the burning of a heretic.” Its official title was more decorous: The Orthodoxy of the Faith of the Church of England asserted, and provision made against oppugners of the same, with the punishment of hereticks.¹ Its purpose was to stamp out the Lollards, the followers of John Wycliffe, who were carrying the Scriptures in English into the parishes and homes of England. For the next century and more it hung over every man and woman who dared to read God’s Word in the mother tongue.

The Occasion

Henry IV had seized the throne from Richard II in 1399, and his title was weak. Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury and the king’s kinsman, had been a chief actor in that revolution. John Eadie observes that the king, “feeling his infirmity of title, and his obligation to his cousin the primate and to the church,” announced in the first year of his reign his determination to support the clergy “in the extirpation of heresy.” The statute followed in the second year, “apparently passed by Parliament at the instigation of the clergy, led by Archbishop Arundel.” When the Commons petitioned for its terms to be softened, “the royal reply was, that the law should be made more severe.”²

What the Statute Provided

The statute’s preamble describes the Lollards as a dangerous novelty:

Divers false and perverse people of a certain new sect … do perversely and maliciously in divers places within the said realm, under the color of dissembled holiness, preach and teach these days openly and privily divers new doctrines, and wicked heretical and erroneous opinions contrary to the same faith and blessed determinations of the Holy Church.³

Their crimes, it continues, were that “they make unlawful conventicles and confederacies,” they “hold and exercise schools,” and “they make and write books.”⁴ The remedy was severe. No one might preach without the license of the diocesan bishop. All who held heretical books were to surrender them “within forty days from the time of the proclamation of this ordinance and statute.” Bishops might arrest and imprison anyone defamed or suspected of heresy. And any who refused to abjure, or who relapsed after abjuring, were to be handed over to the sheriff or mayor, who was bound to carry out the bishop’s sentence without delay:⁵

Before the people in an high place cause to be burnt, that such punishment may strike fear into the minds of others, whereby no such wicked doctrine and heretical and erroneous opinions, nor their authors and fautors, in the said realm and dominions, against the Catholic faith, Christian law, and determination of the holy church, which God prohibit, be sustained or in any way suffered.⁶

Eadie draws out what this meant in practice: “The church was now dominant, and the civil power was bound to execute without hesitation or loss of time the bishop’s sentence. Offenders were at once thrust beyond the protection of the common law.” Before 1401, he notes, “no death warrant would have been issued on a mere ecclesiastical sentence”; now “a simple decree of a bishop sufficed to send a man to the stake.”⁷

The First Fires

The first to die was William Sawtrey, a priest of St. Osyth’s in London, burned at Smithfield in early March 1401, by a royal writ issued while the bill was still before Parliament.⁸ W. J. Heaton remarks that no man had been burned for heresy in England “for ages,” until Arundel became “the adviser of Sautre’s death, and then of others.”⁹ The fire did its intended work. John Purvey, Wycliffe’s secretary and the reviser of the Wycliffite Bible, was, in Eadie’s words, “terrified by the fate of Sautre” and recanted publicly at Paul’s Cross.¹⁰

Others did not recant. In 1410 John Badby, a tailor, was burned in a barrel at Smithfield in the presence of the Prince of Wales, the future Henry V. In 1417 Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, was hanged in chains as a traitor and burned at the same time as a heretic.¹¹ More than a century later the statute was still at work. On April 4, 1519, seven Lollards were burned at Coventry for teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer in English, and John Bale remembered watching, as a boy of eleven, the burning of a young man at Norwich for possessing the Lord’s Prayer in English.¹² Even the dead were not safe: when the chancellor of Worcester dug up and burned the corpse of the evangelical William Tracy in 1532, it was precisely because he had not waited for the king’s writ de haeretico comburendo that Tracy’s family could sue him and win.¹³

The Long Life of the Law

The statute did not stand alone. It was reinforced by Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of Oxford (drawn up in 1407, promulgated in 1409), which forbade any man on his own authority to translate Scripture into English or to read such a translation, and by a further Act against the Lollards in 1414. Together they made English Scripture and the English stake companions for more than a century.

Its later history follows the fortunes of the English Reformation. The Act of 1401 was repealed under Henry VIII in 1534 and the remaining heresy statutes swept away under Edward VI in 1547. Under Mary I, in 1554, Stephen Gardiner “procured the re-enactment of the old and savage Act of Henry IV, de Hæretico Comburendo,” and under it nearly three hundred men and women went to the fire, among them John Rogers, Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and Thomas Cranmer.¹⁴ The revived statutes were repealed in the first year of Elizabeth I, in 1559,¹⁵ though the writ itself was not finally abolished until 1677.¹⁶

Cautions for Accurate Use

It did not name Bible translation. Several popular writers say the statute “made it a crime to own or produce an English translation of the Bible” or made translating “a capital offense.”¹⁷ The text says no such thing in so many words. It targets unlicensed preaching, conventicles, schools, and the making and keeping of heretical books. Eadie judges that those books “must have included the English Bible,” and in practice they did; but the express prohibition of translation belongs to Arundel’s Constitutions, not to this Act.¹⁸ The two are often run together, and the distinction is worth keeping.

It was an Act of Parliament, not a papal decree. The statute was English law, passed by king and Parliament. Yet it was enacted at the bishops’ instigation, its offenses were defined by the church’s own “determinations,” and its executions waited only on a bishop’s sentence. The church judged; the sheriff lit the fire.

It was not wholly new. Eadie cautions that the old belief of Foxe, Burnet, and Collier, that the Act was “an entire novelty in the law of England,” does not rest on good foundation; the Act “presupposes the existence of its penalty, and only ordains that it be inflicted uberius et celerius, ‘more fully and more swiftly.’” What was new was the speed and the ease of it.¹⁹

Protestants inherited the writ. Honesty compels us to add that the writ de haeretico comburendo survived the Reformation at common law, and that under Elizabeth and James I a handful of Anabaptists and anti-Trinitarians were burned by it, the last in 1612.²⁰ The sword of the magistrate is no fit instrument for the conversion of souls, whoever wields it.

Why This History Is Kept

The statute of 1401 set out to make Scripture fearful. It aimed to “strike fear into the minds of others,” and for a time it did. But it could not bind the Word. The Lollards read on in barns and fields; Tyndale’s New Testament crossed the sea in bales of cloth; and the very queen under whom the Act was last revived was succeeded by one under whom it was repealed and the English Bible set in every church. “I suffer trouble, as an evil doer, even unto bonds; but the word of God is not bound” (2 Tim. 2:9).

Roman Catholic Decrees Next: Constitutions of Oxford

Sources

1. John Eadie, The English Bible: An External and Critical History of the Various English Translations of Scripture, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1876), chap. on the Lollards and the Act de Heretico Comburendo. The statute is printed in Statutes of the Realm, vol. 2 (London, 1816), 125–28. ↩
2. Eadie, English Bible, 1, on the Act de Heretico Comburendo. ↩
3. 2 Henry IV, c. 15, preamble, as quoted in David Teems, Tyndale: The Man Who Gave God an English Voice (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012), xi. ↩
4. 2 Henry IV, c. 15, in Statutes of the Realm, 2:125–28; cf. Eadie, English Bible, 1, on the Act de Heretico Comburendo. ↩
5. 2 Henry IV, c. 15, in Statutes of the Realm, 2:125–28. ↩
6. 2 Henry IV, c. 15, as quoted in Teems, Tyndale, xii. ↩
7. Eadie, English Bible, 1, on the Act de Heretico Comburendo. ↩
8. Ibid. Sawtrey’s writ was issued in late February 1401; the statute received the royal assent shortly afterward, in March. ↩
9. W. J. Heaton, Our Own English Bible: Its Translators and Their Work, chap. on Wycliffe and Arundel. ↩
10. Eadie, English Bible, 1, on Purvey’s revision of the Wycliffite Bible. ↩
11. Eadie, English Bible, 1, on the Act de Heretico Comburendo. Eadie spells Badby’s name “Bradbee.” ↩
12. John Piper, Filling Up the Afflictions of Christ (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), 44, quoting David Daniell’s introduction to William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man (London: Penguin, 2000). ↩
13. Editor’s introduction to William Tyndale, “The Testament of William Tracy Expounded,” in An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, ed. Henry Walter, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1850). ↩
14. Eadie, English Bible, on the Marian persecution and John Rogers. ↩
15. Act of Supremacy, 1 Elizabeth I, c. 1 (1559); cf. Teems, Tyndale, xi–xii. ↩
16. Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Act, 29 Charles II, c. 9 (1677). ↩
17. Steven J. Lawson, Pillars of Grace (Orlando: Reformation Trust, 2011), chap. on William Tyndale; Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chap. on Tyndale. Cf. Lawson, The Daring Mission of William Tyndale (Sanford, FL: Reformation Trust, 2015), xviii–xix, where translating is called “a capital crime.” ↩
18. Eadie, English Bible, 1, on the Act de Heretico Comburendo. See the text of Arundel’s seventh Constitution on The Constitutions of Oxford. ↩
19. Eadie, English Bible, 1, on the Act de Heretico Comburendo. ↩
20. Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman were burned in 1612 by royal writ under James I. ↩