JOHN WYCLIF.* A NEW biography of Wyclif needs no apology.
Much has been done in late years, by the publication of his works and in other ways, to throw light on his opinions and on the con- ditions of his life and action. No doubt more remains to do —the Wyclif Society is only half-way through its task—but it is much if a writer digests and makes available the material already provided.
Mr. Sergeant has several qualifications for his work ; his style, though now and then pretentious, is generally easy and pleasant, and he shows a real appreciation of the qualities of his hero and of the result of his labours. He claims, rightly, that Wyclif was not merely the harbinger of the Reformation, but its founder. Before him men of zeal • .Teln Wystif, Last of the &Manion, and First of the English Reformers. By Lewis Solved. London : G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1893. and piety had denounced the corruption of the Roman Court and the vices of the clergy; statesmen had, in practice, repelled the usurpation of the Pope ; and the philosophers of the Schools had developed theories which cut at the very root of the Pope's claims to temporal power and limited his spiritual authority. But, thus far, these various lines of opposition to Rome had been separate and inde- pendent; in Wyclif, preacher, politician, and Schoolman, they were combined, and consciously directed to the promotion of a reform of life and doctrine in the Church. Moreover, the body of teaching formulated by Wyclif did not perish with him. It was adopted with little alteration by Huss, and through the Bohemians affected Germany and the Lutheran reforma- tion, while in England secret Lollardry spread far and wide, and kept the stamp that Wyclif had impressed upon it ; so that when, after a century and a half, the reform came, it followed in great measure the lines that he had laid down.
Although Mr. Sergeant fully recognises Wyclif's importance, he does not always make the grounds of it clear; indeed, he gives us the impression that be has not f idly mastered Wyclif's opinions and ways of thought. He is at his best (as befits the author of a popular biography) in his account of the events of Wyclif's life and of his political action, but there are serious drawbacks even here. We cannot take seriously his attempt to show that the Reformer, besides being a priest and a Schoolman, was squire of Wycliffe. All he succeeds in proving is that in 1360-70 there was a John de Wycliffe who held Wycliffe Manor (he says as owner, but more likely as trustee), and there is absolutely nothing to identify this John with the Reformer, whose name may very well denote only the place of his origin. Yet Mr. Sergeant is so much in love with his notion that he enters upon a solemn disquisition as to the reasons—most honourable reasons, of course—which prevented Wyclif from presenting himself to the family living. Again, in his account of 'Wyclif's appearance before the Bishops in St. Paul's, he invents needless difficulties. The idea of Bishop Courtenay as the protagonist in the attack upon Wyclif has caught his fancy, and he allots to him a far larger share in the proceedings than is justified by the contemporary chronicle. He is much exercised, as he well may be, as to the right by which 0ourtenay, Bishop of London, summoned Wyclif before him ; but his own authority, the Chronicon Anglice, says distinctly that the citation was made by the Archbishop under pressure from the Bishops. The chronicle goes on to say that Wyclif came attended by the Duke of Lancaster, Lord Percy, and other magnates, who took their seats with the Archbishop and Bishops. Mr. Sergeant's account is :—" Then they entered the Lady Chapel, and found, according to the account in the '0 hronicon Anglice,' not only bishops, but also a number of barons. It is possible that all except Conrtenay were assembled as mere spectators of what pro- mised to be an interesting and exciting ease." This thrusting forward of Conrtenay is in itself a trifling matter, but it is significant as showing at least carelessness, if not the half- wilful blindness that leaves unseen everything which mili- tates against a preconceived idea. We do not know if it is from a similar carelessness that Mr. Sergeant goes back to the old-fashioned view that Wyclif's antagonism to the friars began early in his career. He tells us that in 1360 "we find Wyclif, now about forty years old, engaged at Oxford in the earliest stage of an acute struggle between the authorities and the friars, which endured for something like six years." Now, if Mr. Sergeant can give us any contemporary evidence of this, he will settle a point which has caused some discussion. He must be aware that he is contradicting all the recent biographers—Shirley, Lechler, and Poole—and we should expect him to assign some ground for his statement ; but he cites no authority whatever, and the only one we know is a paragraph in the eighteenth-century Life by Lewis. We miss any reference to an important transaction which cer- tainly ought not to be omitted from any Life of Wyclif. In 1378, the Duke of Lancaster desired to obtain custody of a Spanish prisoner of war, son of the Count of Denia, and as the captors, Hanle and Shakyll, would not yield him up, they were imprisoned in the Tower. Thence they escaped, knocking down the warder, and took refuge in sanctuary at Westminster, whither the Constable of the Tower followed them. They resisted his attempt to drag them from sanctuary, and in the fray Hanle was slain. Fierce indignation was exalted against
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Lancaster by this invasion of the Abbey, and Wyclif was employed to write a pamphlet in his defence. The pamphlet was afterwards incorporated as a chapter of the .De Beelesia, where, also, Wyclif's views on the privilege of sanctuary are fully developed. The pamphlet is in form very like a barrister's Opinion on a case submitted to him, declining all responsi- bility for the facts on which it is based, but taking their cor- rectness for granted and arguing from them. Both in what it does and does not say, it is characteristic of the relations between Wyclif and John of Gaunt. Shirley called attention to its interest long ago, and the De Eeclesia has been printed some years, so that it ought not to have been overlooked. Want of space can hardly be pleaded by an author who admits such stuff as this about a matter on which he has no source of knowledge :—
"In any case Wyclif was soon in high favour ; and he exer- cised an influence, amongst others, on the unhappy and doubtless scandalous Alice Perrers, who seems to have been an able manager of men, and who was certainly susceptible to the charms of his fiery and pungent eloquence."
Seeing that Alice continued her immoral life, we should have thought it beat to say as little as possible about the effect of Wyclif's eloquence, which clearly did her little good, even if she ever listened to it.
One of Mr. Sergeant's objects in writing this book is "to popularise the picture of John Wyclif as a Schoolman." With- out any pretence to originality, he gives us a very fair account of the advanced political theories maintained by the supporters of Lewis the Bavarian in his conflict with the Pope, especially of Marsiglio of Padua and William of Ockham, but he fails in connecting the opinions he describes with Wyclif. We should not expect him to enter on "a detailed examina- tion of Wyclif's scholastic and controversial writings;" any such analysis would be out of place in a book of this kind ; but we look for some notice of the way in which Wyclif's scholastic ideas affected his position. He did not share what we may almost call the democratic views of Marsiglio, but, like all the thinkers of his age, his attention had been fixed on "dominion,"—that is, on the source and sanction of authority, and he had accepted Fitzralph's theory of dominion founded in grace. This theory, shaped in analogy with the feudal tenure of land, had in Wyclif's eyes the attraction of making every man personally and directly responsible to God, as the chief lord from whom he held all his possessions. It made every man accountable to God, both for his belief and prac- tice, and allowed no priest or Church to come between them.
It is evident that this doctrine is essentially Protestant, and that, without reference to it, we cannot judge of Wyclif's relation to the Reformation, especially as it is not a mere casual opinion, but one of his central beliefs, to which he continually recurs from the beginning to the end of his career. Yet there is no attempt here to enable the reader to understand this important factor in Wyclif's action.
It would seem, indeed, that our author has little interest in Wyclif's speculations. He does not even try to give us any connected account of the Reformer's opinions, except so far as they may be gathered from Walden's list of heresies, which he warns us is not altogether trustworthy. One might read through the book without learning how, in his fierce attacks on indulgences, Wyclif had anticipated Luther; and we must look closely to discover mention of half-a-dozen other points in which the sixteenth-century Protestants followed him. The denial of transubstantiation cannot be passed over, because of its important consequences; but even here we find a very imperfect appreciation of the controversy. When Wyclif asserts that the Eucharist contains the body and blood of Christ, truly and really, "ad quemlibet ejus punctum," Mr. Sergeant translates the clause " down to the minutest par- ticular." What he understands by this we cannot say, but he clearly misses Wyclif's meaning that the presence, being sacramental and spiritual, is wholly and completely in every atom of the host, while the words also conveyed the insinua- tion that, with a corporeal and" extended "presence, this could not be. We may add that this is, unfortunately, not the only case where the meaning of the Latin has been carelessly over- looked. A page or two further on, when we come to the Chan- cellor's condemnation of the errors, we read :—" These
' pestiferous ' errors the judgment emphatically condemns, and a solemn monition--printe, secundo, fertio, of diatriclius—is launched in the usual canonical terms," Sze. The monition " districtiue " would certainly be puzzling if we could not refer to the original, which runs "in the usual canonical
terms," " monemus primo secundo et tertio, ac districtius inhibemus " (" we give a triple warning and most strictly forbid "),—that is, if any one disobeys the prohibition, he will be liable, after three warnings, to excommunication. English fares as ill as Latin. In a notice of the tract on "The Church and her Members," Mr. Sergeant makes Wyclif say of the friars "They cause many divorces and many marriages without love." The expression seemed curious, and we turned to the passage, where we found : "Many divorces and many matrimonies unleveful,"—that is, many divorces and' unlawful marriages. Mr. Sergeant probably sins in company when he tells us that Wyclif was first scholar and afterwards fellow of Balliol. It is worth while to note that in those days Balliol, as a home of learning, reached the lofty ideal to which now only All Souls can even approximate, and was a society of fellows unvexed by undergraduates. But the constitution of medireval Oxford and its colleges is a diffi- cult subject, unlikely to be mastered by one who tells us what studies were in vogue there in the eleventh century on the authority of Ingulfus. We certainly did think this old friend was effectually slain, but it appears there is some life in him yet.
In short, Mr. Sergeant has entered upon his task with in- sufficient equipment, and has added another to the names of those who, in his own words, "have ventured too lightly among the details of Wyclif's career." It is unfortunate, because, with more thorough preparation, he might have given us a really valuable book, whereas now the most we can say for it is that it is readable and right in its main lines. Its interest is augmented by engravings of all the old portraits of Wyclif, six in number. We fear that none of these can be regarded as authentic, but, like some ancient relics, they have the charm which comes of baying been for centuries the objects of belief and veneration.
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