Lollards in the English Reformation

History, radicalism, and John Foxe

Susan Royal

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526128805
• eBook ISBN: 9781526128829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book examines the afterlife of the lollard movement, demonstrating how it was shaped and used by evangelicals and seventeenth-century Protestants. It focuses on the work of John Foxe, whose influential Acts and Monuments (1563) reoriented the lollards from heretics and traitors to martyrs and model subjects, portraying them as Protestants' ideological forebears. It is a scholarly mainstay that Foxe edited radical lollard views to bring them in line with a mainstream monarchical church. But this book offers a strong corrective to the argument, revealing that the subversive material present in Foxe's text allowed seventeenth-century religious radicals to appropriate the lollards as historical validation of their own theological and political positions. The book argues that the same lollards who were used to strengthen the English church in the sixteenth century would play a role in its fragmentation in the seventeenth.

Chapter 1

Lollards, evangelicals, and historians

The topic of this book is the reception of the lollards among evangelicals and Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹ The loosely connected groups of late medieval English heretics whom scholars call ‘lollards’ have aroused contentious debate for centuries. Notoriously difficult to define, lollard heresy was, in broad terms, characterised by the rejection of transubstantiation, the orthodox understanding of the Eucharist in which the material of the bread and wine were changed into the body and blood of Christ, though their appearance remained unchanged. In addition to denying transubstantiation, lollards generally abnegated the salvific effects of pilgrimages and auricular confession and were known for their critique of the clergy. They are best known for their preference for the vernacular Scripture over the Vulgate; their English version was widely circulated. Lollard critiques of late medieval piety were based on the ideas of John Wyclif and other scholars at Oxford in the 1370s, and the relationship between Wyclif and later dissenters has received robust and ongoing attention.²

The study of these men and women has been plagued by disagreements over terminology, so it is helpful to clarify some terms used in this book.³ Patrick Hornbeck’s What is a Lollard? further problematises the name ‘lollard’; one solution Hornbeck employs is to use the traditional term, ‘lollard’, but with a lowercase ‘l’. This parallels a trend in studies of nonconformity in the late sixteenth century in which scholars have adopted the use of ‘puritan’ and ‘presbyterian’ with a lowercase ‘p’.⁴ These diminutive titles tend to downplay Whiggish definitions and precise meanings that belie the complexity and grey areas inherent in discussions of religious identity.⁵ Throughout this book, ‘lollard’ appears with a lowercase ‘l’. Other, more fixed religious identities such as ‘Protestant’ and ‘Quaker’ are capitalised, while the proper nouns for more nebulous religious tendencies, like ‘puritan’, are not. In keeping with Hornbeck’s findings, many of which build on earlier studies, I restrict the adjective ‘Wycliffite’ to discussing Wyclif’s early followers.⁶

The lowercase ‘l’ also signifies some distance between twenty-first-century understandings of lollardy and what Foxe thought of the lollards. As will become clear in this chapter, Foxe had his own opinions about who the lollards were and why they were historically significant. While this book focuses on Foxe’s opinions of the lollards and the way he edited their narratives, it should be made clear from the outset that Foxe’s thoughts differed from some of his contemporaries, and may have deviated from the way lollards considered themselves. His understanding of these dissenters certainly differs from that of modern historians.

The lollards were ripe for appropriation by early evangelicals, mainly on the basis of shared beliefs. The lollard favour of vernacular Scriptures and rejection of transubstantiation, auricular confession, and pilgrimages have been mentioned already; sixteenth-century reformers also would have recognised lollard appeals against images and the veneration of saints, as well as calls for the reform of the clergy. The movement Wyclif started also repudiated clerical celibacy, criticised religious orders, and identified the papacy as antichrist, all of which chimed with evangelicals.⁷

In other ways, the medieval dissenters might seem imperfectly reformed. There were many examples of lollard views that might seem too conservative for evangelicals, and other cases where they appeared to go too far in tearing down traditional piety. Lollard perspectives on the Virgin Mary serve to illustrate the point. Some lollards prayed to Mary – which evangelicals rejected as idolatrous – while others denigrated her, which also would have been unpalatable.⁸ These vastly divergent levels of reverence are also recorded in the lollards’ understandings of the Eucharist (discussed in Chapter 4). Some lollards spoke of removing marriage from the purview of the church, promoted women’s ministry, and rejected tithes and oaths. Others went so far as to espouse pacifism and communitarianism. These issues are discussed in the chapters to come.

What this book does not be cover are instances of totally aberrant beliefs. For example, William Pottier, a London lollard who had apparently jumbled beliefs he found in a lollard text, was accused in 1508 of maintaining belief in six gods and of rejecting Christ’s passion; Elizabeth Sampson, whose opinions were recorded in the same register, held that there were more souls in heaven than would come to heaven.⁹ While these beliefs and their inclusion/exclusion by Foxe in Acts and Monuments (Pottier’s was incorporated, Sampson’s omitted) are fascinating, that they are so unusual meant that they were rejected by all later Protestants.¹⁰

It is clear that these aspects of lollard belief did not mesh with evangelical theology and that others did, and there were also areas in-between. The most notable of these was the issue of conventicles (discussed in Chapter 6). Another grey area between the lollards and early evangelicals was solifidianism. Hornbeck has shown that Wyclif’s lengthy works on predestination ‘tended to enjoy relatively limited circulation in comparison with their works-oriented counterparts’. This is consistent with Foxe’s discoveries in the archives, which revealed a preference for the Epistle of James, noted for its works-based soteriology.¹¹ Another murky issue between the two reform movements was the priesthood of all believers. While many of the lollard trial transcripts recorded a belief to the effect that ‘every good man is a priest’, this unsophisticated epigram did little to convey the evangelical notion of a priesthood of all believers as articulated by Martin Luther. This is discussed in Chapter 5.

This book is not about the lollards, but who they were according to evangelicals, especially John Foxe. As shown, Foxe built on foundations laid for him by first-generation reformers, most notably William Tyndale and John Bale, who had recognised their own movement in the tenets and struggles of the ‘known men’. When Foxe went to record their stories in his history of the true church, these men and women served as a crucial link in a chain of witnesses back to apostolic times. Foxe was fairly inclusive about whom he chose for his tome – he had to be, given the legitimacy, well-established roots, and firm historical narrative first established by Eusebius, that the Roman church enjoyed. Searching the past for opponents to this tradition, Foxe cast a wide net for those who assailed the papacy; while some, such as Marsilius of Padua, were easier fits than others (say, Robert Grosseteste), nonetheless Foxe included them all. When he discovered the Cathars, Waldensians, and lollards, though, he found groups of people whose opposition to the papacy comprised merely one facet of their rejection of the Church of Rome. This discovery led Foxe to pursue their stories and to develop their history.

Still, readers of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries outside of Acts and Monuments could find out about the lollards even if they did not have access to a copy of Foxe’s book. From the beginning of the Reformation, the lollards were seen as spiritual ancestors. As early as 1531, after briefly returning to the Church of Rome, William Barlow derided Luther for claiming the legacy of the lollards and their Bohemian brethren, the Hussites, after initially rejecting them as heretics.¹² As a result, evangelical time and effort went into to printing the tracts which purported or implied lollard origins. The first to appear in print (excepting Wyclif’s Trialogus and a version of the Wycliffite Opus Arduum) in the early 1530s in Antwerp came from the same press that was responsible for Tyndale’s other works.¹³ These works were polemical in nature, explicitly drawing a connection to the longevity of the theological positions espoused therein. Some were anticlerical in nature, such as A proper dyaloge, betwene a gentillman and an husbandman (1530), The praier and complaynt of the ploweman vnto Christ (1531), The ploughman’s tale (1536?), and Jack vp Lande (1536) which all enumerated the abuses of the clergy.¹⁴ Others were more concerned with theological doctrine, like The Lanterne of Lyght (1535?) and Wycklyffes wycket (1546), while still others focused on vernacular Scripture, such as A compendious olde treatise, shewinge, howe that we ought to have the scripture in Englisshe (1538), The dore of holy scripture (1540), and The true copye of a prolog wrytten by J. Wycklife (1550). A final group struck a martyrological tone, including The examinacion of Master William Thorpe … [with] The examinacion of … syr Jhon Oldcastle (1530). The editors of these works, their publishers, and their content are admirably covered by Margaret Aston and Anne Hudson.¹⁵

Other print sources of lollard history for early moderns were the contemporaneous chronicles, whether printed in their own right (such as Thomas Walsingham’s Ypodigma Neustriae vel Normanniae and Historia breuis, both published in 1574) or amalgamated as part of a new historical work, such as Robert Fabyan’s The Newe Cronycles of England and Fraunce (1516) and Edward Hall’s The vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548). This is not to mention the work of John Stow, Richard Grafton, and the editorial cohort responsible for Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577).¹⁶

Other sources were written by lollard opponents. In an irony inherent to early modern religious polemic, to write against another’s beliefs, one had to give voice to those beliefs.¹⁷ The resurgence of heresy in the sixteenth century drew out the work of the Roman church’s old defender, the the Carmelite Prior Provincial and anti-lollard polemicist Thomas Netter. Netter’s Doctrinale Antiquitatum fidei catholicae ecclesiae (1420s) rebuked the teachings of Wyclif and the practices of the lollards, simultaneously offering an eloquent and wide-ranging defence of the church. It proved valuable in the Roman church’s fight agains...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Lollards, evangelicals, and historians
• 2 The Christian commonwealth
• 3 The lollard legacy of persecution
• 4 Sacraments
• 5 Priesthood and tithes
• 6 Preaching and conventicles
• Conclusions
• Select Bibliography
• Index