THE ENGLISH CHURCH BEFORE THE REFORMATION.*
111 the course of last year we welcomed the appearance of the first instalment of a projected series on the history of the English Church, under the joint editorship of the Dean of Winchester and the Rev. William Hunt. That opening volume, written by Mr. Hunt, gave in a compact form and in clear, well-ordered, and interesting fashion the complete story of the Anglo-Saxon Church. Dean Stephens himself was announced as the author of the second volume, covering the period from the Conquest down to the end of the thir- teenth century. But, circumstances having prevented his bringing out his personal contribution as soon as he hoped, the public have received in advance of it what will afterwards stand as the third volums—Canon Capes's—on the English Church, nominally in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but really starting from the accession of Edward I., 1272. It amply fulfils the favourable expectations with regard to this important series raised by Mr. Hunt's work. Based, like his, on a careful examination of historical "sources," it is similarly characterised both by a spirit of judicial fairness and by a genuinely sympathetic touch. With Canon Capes's volume in his hand, the reader in A.D. 1900 is, we do not say presented with a living picture of the religious and eccle- siastical aspects of English life in the period dealt with—only a great dramatist could attempt that, and he might lament- ably mislead—but powerfully aided to form for himself a real working conception of those far-away conditions of existence for the Christian citizen.
In the main the story which Canon Capes has to tell is a sorrowful one,—of advancing decline in various principal branches of Church life, widely recognised, but only struggled against in partial, fitful, and ineffective fashion; of reforming
• The English Church in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. By W. W. Cape& LondOn : Macmillan and Co. [4. GI] efforts, begun apparently under auspices promising a large measure of support, both in high and in humble quarters, but speedily losing _their influential adherents, and drifting on, without any clear or coherent leadership or . aims, t9- be trampled ruthlessly down by the forces of coarse and inter- ested reaction, and of not unnaturally alarmed Catholic orthodoxy and national conservatism. Lord Halifax may have been ill-advised when of late he referred to some constitutions of Archbishop Peckham (who became Primate in 1279) in support of his views on a contested point of ritual. But none the less is it true that Pecklram was a great ecclesiastical reformer in the administrative sphere, and that, if his efforts had been sustained and followed up, the colossal abuses which went far to give to Wycliffite sentiment such element of a subversive temper as it had would have been kept from reaching dimensions irre- ducible by moderate measures. For, grave as they already were, the account given by Canon capes of Peck.hain's actual achievements shows that the evils with which he wrestled so resolutely had not then attained =manageable proportions. Acting under instructions from Pope Nicholas m., he deter- mined to enforce the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) against pluralists, and "acted in grim earnest, calling the offenders sons of Belial, sacrilegious usurpers of bene- fices: He made even the haughty Antony de Bek, of Durham, disgorge some of the plunder, and give up five of the benefices which he had held. He refused entirely to accept De La More, the Bishop-elect of Winchester, because he was a pluralist, —a ground of objection almost =mown before. He did the like at Rochester, and refused for a time to sanction the promotion of John de Kirkeby, the King's treasurer. He protested at the King's indifference to the abuse ; ordered sequestration in other cases, expostulated even with Cardinals and Popes because of the favour shown to an offender whom he had deprived. To non-residents, again, he would have no mercy shown. Roger Longespee, Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, was peremptorily told to
attend to the duties of his See Certain parishes were being neglected. so large amounts were ordered for the poor at the incumbent's cost." At the same time, ". strict disciplinarian as he was, he showed anxiety to protect the parochial clergy from the exactions of officials. The Archdeacon of Hereford was to be sharply warned, as also the Bishops of Coventry and Lincoln, to exact no more than their legal dues." Peckham was a friar, and a noble example of loyalty in great place to the high aims of the mendicant Orders in their early days. But Rome did not back him, and even the good Monarch Edward I. was out of sympathy with him; for his attitude was hostile to the King's endeavours after the much-needed definition of the respective spheres of the secular and spiritual Courts. And probably his bearing was harsh and unconcilia- tory. Yet while he lived and laboured, he was of the very salt of the Church, delaying, so far as his power went, the corruptions which were preying upon her.
No Primate of the succeeding age had an intensity and strength of purifying purpose like that of Peckham. Yet there were forces at work during a large part of the four- teenth century which for a time seemed to offer hope of Church reform on national lines. Canon Capes brings out with great clearness the influence of the secular on the ecclesiastical aspects of English history during that period. In particular he shows not only how powerful was the national move- ment against the exercise of Papal patronage in regard to benefices in the Church of England, but how that movement must have been stimulated and strengthened by the fact that
the Papal Court was at Avignon, and therefore naturally under French influences during a period of profound Anglo-
French hostility. Strangely enough, the initiative was not taken in this matter by the powerful and ambitious Sovereign who, with his brilliant son, smote down the chivalry of France.
Edward III. seemed to prefer himself to make direct arrange- ments with the Pope for the promotion of any Churchmen in whom he was particularly interested. But the English nobility and people became deeply possessed with the deter- mination that "aliens "—by which, as our author points out, they meant French Cardinals, Abbots, and other ecclesiastics
—should not be foisted into the enjoyment of English Church offices and their emoluments. Accordingly, year after year from 1343, strongly sibideTrainonstiiiirces— and petitions were presented by the -Commons in Parliament, apparently with the full sympathy of the Lords, against the diversion of English Chnreh endowments to foreign uses. And at last in 1351 there was passed "the memorable Statute of Provisors, which enacted that for all ecclesiastical dignities and benefices the lawful rights of the electors and patrons should be secured, and that preferments to which the Pope had nominated should be forfeited for that turn to the Crown; and further, that any holder, of Papal provisions, who disturbed or impeached the rightful occupants duly collated by the lawful patrons, should be arrested and brought before the Courts Of Law for the offence." The operation of this drastic measure was fortified, two years later, by the passage of the first of the formidable .Prwmunire statutes, denouncing, under penalty of imprisonment, outlawry, and forfeiture of lands and goods, the practice of carrying to any Courts outside the realm appeals on matters—such as the temporalities of ecclesiastical benefices—the cognisance of which belonged to the King's Courts.
Parallel, or nearly so, with these important national efforts towards administrative independence in the ecclesiastical sphere, there were in progress the first stages of that pro- foundly interesting movement for reform in the realm of doctrine, ritual, Church endowments, and morals which we associate with the name of John Wycliffe. That movement was, of course, primarily of learned origin. For, as Canon Capes says, "there can be no doubt that Wycliffe was the leading figure in the academic circles of - his day; one of the last of the great schoolmen, before he became known as the earliest of the reformers. Waiters who loathed his later influence regarded him as the flower of • Oxford scholarship," incomparable ' in learning, ' transcend- ing all in the subtlety of his thought." And it was mainly • by the strenuous exercise of that power of subtle thought
• that, late and reluctantly, he came to the fateful conclusion that the received doctrine of transubstantiation—that limit- ing and technical analysis of the Eucharistic Mysteries, elaborated by scholastic philosophy, and pronounced exclu- sively orthodox by the Fourth Lateran Council—was essen- tially unsound, equally unscientific and unscripturat We have .said that it was " mainly " (rather than altogether) by intellectual effort on the theoretical side of the problem that Wycliffe arrived at this negative position. For Canon Capes points out that the vehemence with which he assailed the pre- tension of the priest to" annihilate the substance of the bread," by the words of consecration, evidently sprang from a con- nection in his mind of that pretension "with the extravagance of sacerdotal claims, with the impostures and the mercenary temper which he denounced so strongly in the ecclesiastical system of his time, and in the widely extended practices of the masses for the dead." In substitution for the theory which he rejected of the manner of the Presence of our Lord in the Eucharist, Mr, Capes . thinks that, on the whole, Wycliffe came nearest to what has been known as consubstantia- tion, but commonly he seems to shrink from formal defini- tion, using his keen logic mainly for negations, and he quotes approvingly the words of John Damascenus : 'We must believe that "this is my body," not inquiring how." In a similar avoid- ance of attempts at positive definition in the sphere of sacra- mental mysteries has lain much of the reverent wisdom and the comprehensive virtue of the Church of England since the Reformation. But if in that respect Wycliffe, in his latest years, was a forerunner of the reformed national Church of the last three centuries, there is much in the general scope and the progressive tendency of his teachings which seems to make him the spiritual ancestor of the Puritan rather than of the Anglican, though of the Puritan with a strange belief in the Royal supremacy in the ecclesiastical sphere. His latest views not only of the supreme authority of Scripture, but of the absence of authority deserving of respect in anything else, would plainly, as Canon Capes points out, have led, if they had been made the basis of a national reformation, to a com- plete rupture of ecclesiastical continuity, as well as to the sacri- fice of a large part, if not all, of the symbolism and also of the endowments of the Church. Wycliffe found no time—and little wonder amid the manifold abuses of his day—for a philosophy of reconstruction
" We cannot find in any of his works a. definite scheme of an organised church order to replace the hierarchical system which he vehemently attacked. A Presbyterian clergy, ministering in homely guise in buildings unadorned, receiving the necessaries of food and clothing from the free-will offei ings of their flock, bearing their frequent protest at the worldliness and pride and faulty Gospel of the old church, laying little stress on any forms but very much on preaching—such seems the ideal of h is homilies."
Such an ideal could never be that of the English people as a whole, as their action in the seventeenth century abundantly proves. And we are inclined to think that it was a real recog- nition that Wycliffism as left by its founder, and still more as expounded by his followers when deprived of his guidance, offered no basis for a Church in touch with the broad and many-sided character of the nation, which was largely accountable for the rapid failure of the Lollard movement. After all, as is well shown by Mr. Capes in his admirable concluding chapter, the mediaeval Church, notwithstanding all its manifold abuses, ministered in various ways to the brightening and humanising of the life of the people. And as appears from another chapter—happily illustrated by examina- tion of old churchwardens' accounts—there was a widely diffused amount of local generosity and effort towards the maintenance and beautifying of parish churches, which affords a powerful presumption that the services and the symbolism of the Church largely satisfied the fundamental needs of her children.
Hence, apart from the prejudice which Lollardiem may have suffered from a supposed connection with Socialistic and subversive schemes, and from the association, real or imaginary, of Oldcastle, after his condemnation as a heretic and his escape from the Tower, with Welsh rebels and Scottish enemies, it is not altogether surprising that there was no effective resistance, either popular or upper-class, to its sup- pression. Yet, as Canon Capes is careful to point out in his excellent chapter on the cruel persecution of the poor sectaries, the movement lived on through the fifteenth century. "Sour and censorious the Lollards might well be, for they had little cause to love the rulers of the Church; uncritical they were, and narrow in their Bible readings, for they had little chance of sounder learning." For Oxford, where the learning and orthodoxy of Wycliffe had still many influential defenders twenty years and more after his death, was resolutely " purged " of the heretical taint by Archbishop Arundel in 1407-11. "But the leaven of their earnest influence was working silently among the people." How deeply and widely that influence had gone was shown when the refugees of Mary's reign came back from Geneva, and found it so com- paratively easy to organise a movement for a Reformation in which religious symbolism and ceremonial should be reduced to a minimum and continuity with the past deemed an in- different, if not an evil, thing. Thus in the end "the Church had cause to rue in bitter earnest the stern intolerance of her summary treatment of dissent in earlier days."
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