Book of Fire (2 page)

This was, of course, heresy, and Wycliffe’s Bible reading led him into further clashes with fundamental Catholic dogma. A list of fifty charges against him was prepared for Simon Sudbury, the archbishop of Canterbury. Most were theological, touching on such things as the nature of the sacraments and the efficacy of auricular confession. His attacks on the powers of the pope, and the wealth of the Church, however, were highly attractive to powerful laymen, who cast a jealous eye on clerical privileges and landed estates and buildings.

Wycliffe was summoned to London to explain himself in 1377 in front of the archbishop and William Courtenay, the bishop of London. He had powerful protectors, however. Lord Percy, the earl marshal of England, escorted him with a number of barons in a large retinue. What followed between the lords spiritual and temporal was farce; a century and a half later, it would be replayed in earnest. Percy and the barons sat with the archbishop and bishops in the Lady Chapel of St Paul’s.

Percy told Wycliffe ‘to sytt down, for because, sayed he, he haythe much to answeare, he hath neade of a better seate’. The fiery Courtenay claimed it ‘to be agaynst reason that he sholde sytt there, and also contrary to the lawe for hym to sytt’. Hereupon, ‘very contumelyous wordes did ryse betwene Syr Henrye Percy and the bishopp, and the whoole multytude begane to be troubled.’ Percy advanced on the bishop, ‘swearynge that he wolde pulle down both the pryde of hym and of all the bishopps in Englande … [and] whysperynge in his eare sayed he had rather draw hym forthe of the churche by the eare …’. When they heard this, Londoners ‘angerlye with a loud voice cryed out, swearynge
they wolde not suffer theyr Bishopp to be injured …’. The court broke up in confusion. The following day a mob attacked Percy’s palace in the Savoy, plundering it and forcing him to escape by river to Kennington.

Pope Gregory XI sent bulls to the king and the Oxford authorities, chiding the university for its ‘idleness and sloth’ in allowing Wycliffe to ‘vomit’ heresies ‘from the poisonous confines of his breast’, and demanding that he be thrown into prison. Wycliffe’s supporters said darkly that the university proctors should not arrest an Englishman ‘at the command of the pope lest they sholde seeme to gyve the pope dominyon and royale powere in Englande’. The vice-chancellor merely forbade Wycliffe to leave his rooms.

Within a year, Gregory was dead and the papacy sank into a moral squalor that greatly aided Wycliffe’s cause. Successive popes had undergone a ‘Babylonian captivity’ since 1309, when they had been torn from Rome and relocated at Avignon under pressure from the French crown. Gregory had returned to Rome shortly before his death. A Roman mob terrorised the conclave that met to choose his successor, fearful that the cardinals would elect a Frenchman, who would return with his high-spending court to Avignon. To back their demands for a Roman pope, they piled firewood in the rooms above the conclave and banged on the floor with pikes and halberds. A fake pope, an elderly Roman cardinal, was got up in papal robes and paraded for the benefit of the crowd. In fact, the conclave elected Bartolomeo Priganano, the absentee archbishop of Bari, who took the name of Urban VI.

Urban had been sober, even austere, but his elevation unhinged him. He became violent and drank heavily, declaring that ‘I can do anything, absolutely anything I like.’ A group of cardinals fled from Rome, and declared Urban’s election invalid since it was held under the threat of mob violence. They elected Robert, the cardinal bishop of Geneva, in his place. He took the name of Clement VII. The existing curia, the papal court, followed
Clement back to Avignon. Urban created twenty-nine new cardinals to make up a new curia of his own, and stayed in Rome.

There had been two popes and two courts before, but never had there been two popes elected by the same cardinals. A Great Schism was born, tearing at the loyalties of nations and religious orders. The two popes excommunicated one another, and placed supporters of their rival under interdict. France, Burgundy, Savoy, Naples, the Spanish kingdoms and Scotland declared for Clement. England, Germany, Poland, Hungary and the Scandinavian kingdoms were faithful to Urban, a thankless task, for his mania continued unchecked; when he found that five cardinals had consulted a jurist to see whether insanity was just grounds for dethroning him, he had them tortured within earshot of the garden where he strolled, reading his breviary oblivious to their screams. Four of them were not seen again.

Wycliffe revelled in this proof of papal depravity. ‘I always knew that the pope had cloven feet,’ he mocked. ‘Now he has a cloven head.’ The pope – both popes – were the ‘most cursed of dippers and purse-heavers’ who ‘vilified, nullified and utterly defaced’ the commandments of God. Wycliffe justified the power and wealth enjoyed by secular princes and lords, a concession that many of them would later find tempting, on the grounds that it was necessary for them to ‘teach the fear of God by harshness and worldly fear’.

He held that auricular confession, heard by a priest, was superfluous; the only effective confession was that made silently by the sinner to God. He ridiculed pilgrimages, prayers to saints, the sale of pardons and indulgences, and the veneration of relics – all parts of the fabric of medieval faith, and cash cows for the Church – as non-scriptural and inefficacious. He challenged the Catholic doctrine of the real presence, denying that the consecration of the bread and wine during the Eucharist changed their substance into the body and blood of Christ. Worshippers had treated the Host
with special reverence for generations. Bells were rung and candles lit as it was elevated during the mass, the faithful gazing up at it as evidence of Christ’s Passion and of their own salvation. It was ‘Goddys’ flesh’, ‘Cristes own bodi … as hale as he toke it of that blessed maiden’; it bound the faithful to the Church, for only an ordained priest could celebrate its mysteries. Yet Wycliffe insisted that it was no more than a symbol – ‘neither Christ nor any part of him, but the efficacious sign of him’ – and this denial struck at the heart of Catholic grandeur.

A peasants’ revolt broke out in May 1381, sparked off by the imposition of a poll tax, but blamed in part on Wycliffe’s radical preaching and his championship of the poor. The mob, led by Wat Tyler and Jack Straw, was inflamed by a sermon preached on Blackheath – ‘[T]here shall be neither vassal nor lord … Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve?’ – and broke into London, sacking palaces and dragging Archbishop Sudbury from the Tower, where he had fled for shelter, and killing him.

William Courtenay, a tougher man, a hounder of heretics, replaced him as archbishop. He convoked a council that met at Blackfriars in London on 17 May 1382. It condemned twenty-four of Wycliffe’s propositions as ‘heretical and erroneous’. A powerful earthquake shook the city as it sat. Courtenay described the tremors as a portent of the purging of noxious heresies from the bowels of the earth. To Wycliffe, they were proof of God’s anger at the Church.

He was forbidden to teach at Oxford and forced to retire to his rectory at Lutterworth. From here he continued to rail against the clergy, who paraded with ‘costly saddles, bridles with dangling bells, rich garments and soft furs’, happy to ‘see the wives and children of their neighbours dying with hunger’. He whittled his sharp and early sense of English nationalism. ‘Already a third and more of England is in the hands of the Pope,’ he thundered.
‘There cannot be two temporal sovereigns in one country; either Edward is King or Urban is king. We make our choice. We accept Edward of England and refute Urban of Rome.’

Spurning Latin as the language of Church oppression, he wrote almost entirely in English now. Since ‘the truth of God standeth not in one language more than in another’, he said, the Bible should be translated into English so that ‘it may edify the lewd people as it doth clerks in Latin … No man is so rude a scholar but he may learn the gospel according to its simplicity.’ He posed an apparently unanswerable question: ‘Why may we not write in English the gospel and other things dedicating the gospel to the edification of men’s souls?’

Why not, indeed? The Vulgate then in use across Catholic Christendom was itself a translation, of course. It had been painstakingly rendered from the original Greek and Hebrew at the end of the fourth century by St Jerome, in order to resolve the many differences in earlier Latin manuscripts, and became the standard
editio vulgata
. The Bible had also existed in Syriac, Coptic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian and Aramaic for a millennium or more before Wycliffe. By the ninth century, it had been translated into Persian and Arabic, and the brothers Cyril and Methodius had created the outline of the Cyrillic alphabet to render it into Slavonic.

The earliest Old English translations to survive were made by Caedmon, a seventh-century monk at Whitby and a former cowherd who had felt a divine urge to learn to read and write. ‘He sang of the world’s creation, the origins of the human race, and all the story of Genesis,’ the scholar and theologian the Venerable Bede wrote of Caedmon; ‘he sang of Israel’s exodus from Egypt and entry into the Promised Land …’ An Anglo-Saxon translation of the gospels made from the Vetus Italica, the pre-Vulgate Latin Bible, was said to be the work of Bede himself. His student Cuthbert described how the great scholar completed his work on
St John’s gospel on his deathbed in the monastery at Jarrow in May 735. ‘In the evening, his pupil said, Dear Master, one sentence is still wanting,’ Cuthbert recalled. ‘Write it quickly, exclaimed Bede. When it was finished … he repeated the Gloria Patria, and expired in the effort.’ Passages from Exodus and the first fifty psalms were translated into Anglo-Saxon in the ninth century, perhaps by the pious King Alfred. A section of Genesis was worked on by the grammarian abbot Aelfric in the late tenth century. An anonymous scholar translated the four gospels into West Saxon. Metrical versions of Genesis and Exodus existed in Middle English from the mid-thirteenth century; before his death in 1349, the Yorkshire mystic-poet Richard Rolle had translated and glossed, or made comments and explanations, on the Psalter in English.

Nothing resembling a complete version of the Bible had been attempted before Wycliffe. The earliest work was done under his follower Nicholas Hereford, a fellow of Queen’s College at Oxford. He had translated the Old Testament from Genesis to Baruch when he was condemned with Wycliffe by the 1382 Blackfriars council, and fled abroad for fear that Archbishop Courtenay would have him burnt. The task was continued by John Purvey, who worked at Lutterworth until Wycliffe’s death at the end of 1384. The new English Bibles were eagerly sought after – it was said that a man would give a cartload of hay for a few sheets of St Paul – but bulky and time-consuming to produce. Each was an individual labour of magnitude, painstakingly hand-copied on to parchment and bound between boards. The English language was in headlong development – Latin was resented as alien and ecclesiastical; French, falling from fashion during the long French wars, was banned from use in the law courts in 1362, the year before parliament was opened with speeches in English for the first time – and the language in the Wycliffe Bibles would soon seem almost as outdated as Anglo-Saxon.

‘Nellen ge deman,’ a verse in the Anglo-Saxon gospel runs,
‘daet ge ne syn fordemede.’ In Wycliffe, that is rendered: ‘Nyle ze deme, that se be nat demyd.’ But the sentence in Tyndale – ‘iudge not, lest ye be iudged’ – needs only the substitution of ‘
you
’ for ‘
ye
’, to pass muster in our own English.

Nicholas and Purvey worked from the Vulgate, rather than the Greek and Hebrew originals. If much of their translation was a plodding word-for-word affair, they sometimes captured a graceful lilt – ‘If I speke with tungis of men and aungels, sothli I haue not charite’ – and above all they gave the English their first direct contact with the word of God in their own language.

The Church was angered and frightened. The Bible, the ecclesiastical chronicler Knighton observed, was now ‘more open to the laity, and even to women who were able to read, than formerly it had been even to the scholarly and most learned of the clergy’. Knighton did not find this admirable. To him, it meant that ‘the gospel pearl is thrown before swine and trodden underfoot … and become a joke, and this precious gem of the clergy has been turned into the sport of the laity …’.

Hostility to Wycliffe’s followers escalated. The term ‘Lollard’ was applied to them, a derivation from the Dutch
lollen
, to mumble, and used in English to describe religious eccentrics and vagabonds. A violent opponent, Thomas Netter, railed at ‘so many of this sect of Wycliffe, standing in the line of battle, provoking the Church to war; fearlessly they preach, they publish their doctrines, they boast of their strength …’ Unlicensed preachers roamed the dioceses, ignoring summons to be silent. Lollards kept schools and held disputations and Bible readings; they made some progress among gentry and merchants, though most were artisans, weavers, millers, thatchers, butchers, and many were women.

The ‘Bible-men’ denied all rituals that were non-biblical. They ate meat on fast days. They did not keep Sunday as a special day. They did not confess. They failed to gaze up when the Host was elevated at mass. Some held that the sacramental bread had not
even a symbolic significance. Eleanor Higges of Burford was arraigned for putting the sacrament in her oven and eating it.

A list of the teachings in secret Lollard conventicles was prepared for Thomas Arundel, who succeeded Courtenay as archbishop of Canterbury. They were said to mock confession, indulgences, pilgrimage and the use of images; two Lollard chaplains at Leicester used a wooden statue of St Katherine as fuel to cook a meal. The pope, the Church hierarchy and the ‘private religions’ of monks and friars were described as conspiracies against the scriptures. Lollards maintained that only God could beatify; the pope was powerless to make a saint. The sacraments were described as ‘dead signs of no value … a mouthful of bread with no life’.