Lollards

Lollards, members of a late 14th-century movement of religious dissent who referred to themselves as “the brethren” or the “known men”. Originally, Lollards was a pejorative term, derived from a Middle English word for “mumble”, and meaning (roughly) “dimwit”. They appeared as a popular response to the teaching of John Wycliffe, an Oxford theologian and teacher, and latterly rector of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire.

Wycliffe wrote in obscure and technical Latin, and none of the vernacular works later attributed to him can be authenticated. His ideas, however, were spread and translated by a group of his followers who called themselves the Poor Preachers, and had extensive influence at the beginning of the 15th century. The Lollards had no creed and no organization. They have been described as a state of mind rather than a movement, but there was a large measure of agreement between Wycliffe and the early preachers.

The core of Lollardy was its Biblicism, and its belief in the use and availability of vernacular Scripture (see Bible). An English bible, known as the “Wycliffe Bible”, although probably not by him, circulated in numerous manuscripts in the 20 years after his death in 1384. The Lollards were consequently deeply sceptical of any teaching or practice that did not appear to them to be biblically sanctioned. They rejected transubstantiation, the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and all reverence traditionally paid to images, or to any material substance, such as holy bread and holy water. In the same way, they rejected prayers to the saints, particularly the Virgin Mary, prayers for the dead, and elaborate liturgies or church buildings. They were also anti-clerical in the sense that they rejected the sacramental power of the priesthood, insisting that priests should be teachers, and exemplars of virtuous living. Some of them rejected the whole concept of an ordained ministry, but most argued that a priest’s effectiveness must depend upon the quality of his life rather than the validity of his orders.

They rejected outright the authority of the pope, and this at first gave them a certain aristocratic following and political importance. Richard II was at odds with the pope, and in 1393 the statutes of Provisors and Praemunire sought to curb papal power in England. The official Church, however, was relentlessly opposed to Lollard ideas, which undermined its entire position, and after 1399 Henry IV was sufficiently in need of ecclesiastical support to throw the whole weight of the royal authority behind their persecution. Heresy became a statutory offence, carrying the death penalty, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, forbade all unauthorized translation of the Scriptures in 1409. This repression prompted a rebellion in 1414, which is usually known as the Oldcastle Rebellion after the name of one of its leaders, Sir John Oldcastle, who was later executed. Coming at the beginning of the reign of Henry V, this enabled the government to associate Lollardy with treason, and effectively killed it as a socially acceptable movement. Thereafter, it went underground, having neither aristocratic nor intellectual leaders. Nevertheless, it remained strong in some areas, notably Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Essex, Kent, and London. Lollards were not, on the whole, made of the stuff of martyrs. Most continued to attend their parish churches, while holding private meetings for prayer and Scripture reading; a number were clergy, particularly friars. When denounced or caught (as they often were), they usually submitted, and the few who were burned at the stake had normally relapsed after an earlier recantation.

In the early years of the 16th century there appears to have been an upsurge of Lollard activity, but this may be an illusion caused by the greater vigilance of the ecclesiastical authorities, who were facing a renewed challenge from humanist scholars at that time. There were certainly more victims of persecution. John Spilman and Thomas Man were both burned in 1518 for carrying out an extensive preaching ministry from Colchester to Newbury and Amersham. Neither was apparently willing to recant. Such men, as was claimed, may have made many converts, but they were illiterate and devoid of new ideas. The new ideas were provided by the earliest Protestants, who began to infiltrate the universities in the 1520s (see Protestantism). These were followers of Martin Luther, and later of Huldreich Zwingli, and their relationship with existing Lollardy is extremely controversial. Some existing Lollard manuscripts, such as Wycliffe’s Wicket and the Lantern of Light, were printed in the 1530s, and there were some similarities between the new teaching and the old, but the links were not straightforward. Both were keen on vernacular Scripture, but the followers of William Tyndale, whose English New Testament appeared in 1526, were contemptuous of the antiquated Lollard versions. Both opposed images and transubstantiation, but the Lollards had never taught justification by faith alone, which was the cornerstone of Protestantism. The most that can be said with any certainty is that Lollardy had created a tradition of dissent and an enthusiasm for the Bible.

At first this made Protestants and Lollards natural allies, but the latter never had any enthusiasm for the Royal Supremacy which created Protestant establishments from 1547 to 1553 and again after 1559. The Lollards had more affinity with the Freewillers of the 1550s, and later with the Family of Love. It is probably safe to say that by the early 17th century, the Lollard tradition had been transmuted into the beginnings of Independency (see Congregationalism).

John Foxe, whose Acts and Monuments is one of our main sources for Lollard history, represented them as members of the True Church, a view based mainly on their antipathy to images and to the papacy, but he never admitted that they did not constitute a Church, and that they could never have become an establishment.