CHAPTER IV.

WICLIF'S FIRST PUBLIC APPEARANCE IN THE ECCLESIASTICOPOLITICAL AFFAIRS OF ENGLAND.

SECTION I.- Wiclif as a Patriot.

AFTER having followed with attention the course of

Wiclif's purely academic career up to the present point, we can only be astonished to behold him all at once appearing upon the stage of public life. Hitherto we have known him only as a man of science-as a quiet scholar. From his youth up to the most vigorous years of manhood, he had only seldom left, so far as we can see, the precincts of the university-city of Oxford. He seems even to have visited but rarely his parish of Fillingham, to which he had been presented in 1361, and on each occasion only for a short time. We know in fact that he obtained a dispensation from his bishop to enable him to remain at the University, and devote himself without interruption to science.

It is true that as Fellow and Seneschal of Merton College, as Master of Balliol, and as Warden of Canterbury Hall, he had had practical problems of many kinds to solve, and been occupied much with business of an economic, legal, and administrative description. The judgment of his patron in high place, Archbishop Islip, when he entrusted him with the government of Canterbury Hall, is assurance to us that Wielif had already, both in Merton and Balliol, proved himself to be a man of practical talent, and upright, circumspect, and energetic in matters of business. Still, all this activity had been put forth within a narrow circle, and one

VOL. I.

which was more or less closely connected with properly scientific life. But now we see the scholar step out from the quiet spaces of the University to take part in public affairs. For it was not merely that Wiclif began to manifest his interest in the affairs of the kingdom in a Christian and literary way, which he might possibly have done without leaving his own chamber in the cloister-like buildings of his college; but he came personally forward to take an active part in the public business of Church and State. This change of position comes upon us with surprise; but yet we are not to imagine that Wiclif has become an altered man; rather must we say to ourselves that we only now come in view of what has hitherto been an unobserved side of his nature. For Wiclif was a many-sided mind; a man of high mark, who not only felt powerfully all that moved, on many different sides, his own people and times, but who, in some things, was far in advance of his age-a prophet and type of what was still in the future. And it is only when we bring into view, without abridgement, all that he united in himself, when we sharply distinguish the manifold sides of his nature, and again take them together in their innermost unity, that we shall be able to draw a true and faithful picture of his powerful personality.

At this moment it is Wiclif the patriot whom we have to place before the eye. He represents in his own person that intensification of English national feeling which was so conspicuous in the fourteenth century, when, as we have seen above, Crown and people, Norman population and Saxon, formed a compact unity, and energetically defended the autonomy, the rights and the interests of the kingdom in its external relations, and especially in opposition to the Court of Rome. This spirit lives in Wiclif with extra

ordinary force.

His great works, still unprinted, e.g., the Daneo

John, he speaks
Charta with dis-

three books De Civili Dominio, his work De Ecclesia, and
others, leave upon the reader the strongest impression of
a warm patriotism-of a heart glowing with zeal for the
dignity of the Crown, for the honour and weal of his native
land, for the rights and the constitutional liberty of the
people. How often in reading his works do we come upon
passages in which he recalls the memories of English
history! The different invasions of the country by "Britons,
Saxons, and Normans," all stand before his mind's eye; (the
Danes alone seem to be already forgotten). St. Augustine,
the "Apostle of the English," as he calls him in one place,
he mentions repeatedly, as well in learned writings as in
sermons; he frequently touches upon the later Archbishops
of Canterbury, especially Thomas à Becket; of kings
too, as Edward the Confessor and
ever and anon; he refers to Magna
tinguished consideration as the fundamental law of the
kingdom, binding equally king and nobles. That Wiclif
had made the law of England the subject of special study,
in addition to canon and Roman law, has been known since
the days of Lewis, and we have come upon several con-
firmations of this fact. In the same context where Magna
Charta is held up to view, Wiclif brings forward Statutes of
Westminster and Statutes of Gloucester; at another time he
contrasts, in connection with a particular question, the Roman
law (lex Quirina), and the English law (lex Anglicana), and
he gives his preference to the latter." But so far from
taking merely a learned interest in these subjects, and
showing only a historical knowledge of them, he manifests
the most immediate concern in the present condition of the
nation, and a primary care for its welfare, its liberties, and

its honour. It is not meant that, on this account, he limited his intellectual horizon to the national interests of his own island people. On the contrary, he has all Christendom, and indeed the whole human race, in his eye; but his cosmopolitanism has a solid and ripe patriotism for its sound and vigorous kernel.

It is not wonderful that such a man-a Churchman and highly regarded scholar on the one hand, and a thorough patriot on the other-rich in knowledge, full of insight, and inspired with zeal for the public good-should have been drawn into the career of the statesman and the diplomatist. Yet he never lost himself in purely political affairs; it was only on questions and on measures of a mixed ecclesiastical and political kind that he gave his co-operation; and in the end his whole undivided strength was concentrated upon the ecclesiastical domain.

But before we follow him into public life, it is necessary to set aside an impression which has hitherto almost universally prevailed. As early as the sixteenth century the literary historians, John Leland and John Bale, put forward the view—which, in the eighteenth, Lewis fully developed in his History, and which is still, in substance, maintained by Vaughan himself that Wiclif commenced his exertions for a reform of the Church with attacks upon the monastic system, especially upon the Mendicant Orders.

The view which is commonly taken is the following:-As early as the year 1360, immediately after the death of the celebrated Archbishop of Armagh, Richard Fitzralph, Wiclif opened an attack in Oxford upon the Dominican and Franciscan Orders, the Augustinians and the Carmelites, on the ground of their fundamental principle of living upon the free-will alms of the people. Indeed, it has even been

thought that when Richard of Armagh died, his mantle descended upon Wiclif, by whom his work was immediately taken up and carried farther. Critical investigation, however, is unable to find any confirmation of this common opinion.

Vaughan, in 1831, had followed Anthony Wood in the confident statement that Wiclif publicly censured the errors and failings of the Mendicant Orders as early as 1360, and became the object of their hostility in consequence. But in his later work, as the fruit of more careful investigation of the subject, he is no longer able to arrive at the same confident result upon the point. He remarks, with truth, that there is no direct evidence to show that Wiclif began that controversy at the precise date which he had previously assigned. But he continued to the last, notwithstanding, to be of opinion that Wiclif began his work as a Reformer with attacks upon the Monastic, and especially upon the Mendicant Orders; he believed, besides, that while the exact date at which Wiclif began the controversy could not be ascertained, it must yet be fixed at a period not much later than 1360. But on this subject we are unable to agree with him, not only because we are not aware, like himself, of any direct and decisive proof that Wiclif began his attacks upon the monks even in the years next following 1360, but because, on the contrary, we have in our hands direct proofs that Wiclif continued to speak of the begging Orders with all respectful recognition during the twenty years which elapsed between 1360 and 1380. We content ourselves in this place with stating, in anticipation, so much as this, that the reading of the unpublished writings of Wiclif, among others, yields the most weighty confirmation to the statement of his op