A Religious Revolt : the Lollards

Popular discontent, thus expressed on the social and economic side in the revolt of the peasants, found expression on the religious side in the rise of the Lollards. The causes of this religious revolt are not difficult to discover. The authority of the medieval church was declining : abroad, the great schism of 1378, which had brought two popes into existence, had destroyed the prestige of the church and dimmed men's reverence for it; at home the attacks made by the state since 1350, and by Wiclif during the last years of Edward III's reign, had weakened its hold upon the people. Thus the way was prepared for the spread of Wiclif's teachings, and though no sect was organized, yet a large body of followers arose, who accepted many of Wiclif's ideas. These followers were called Lollards. They denounced the sacraments, believed in preaching as the chief aid in effecting conversion, denied transubstantiation, and opposed confession and the worship of saints. Before the peasants' revolt, little had been done to check this heresy; but after 1381, though no Lollard was ever accused of participation in the uprising, a vigorous campaign, led by the zealous Courtenay, archbishop of Canter. bury, successor of the murdered Sudbury, was begun. On May 19, 1382, a council was held at Blackfriars, and Wiclif's doctrines were condemned. In the same month parliament authorized the royal officers and sheriffs to aid the ecclesiastical authorities. During the following year Oxford, where centred the intellectual life of England, was compelled to recant and to banish Wiclif's followers from its walls. In Leicestershire, in London, and in the west of England, where the Lollards were most numerous, every effort was made to crush the heresy.

The first generation of Lollards was unable to withstand these attacks of the church. As has been well said, They were not ready to be martyrs." All who were brought to trial at this time recanted and returned to the fold; but thousands, taught by the poor preachers, continued to receive the doctrines presented to them and to believe in secret or without outward display.' Wiclif died in 1384 ; but his death was only an incident in the movement. The revolt from the doctrines of the mediaeval church had begun; and in the next century, men of the second generation were willing to be burned at the stake for their faith. Furthermore, Wiclif's teaching was carried back to Bohemia by the students and others who had come to England in the train of Anne of Bohemia, Richard's first wife (1382), and had studied at Oxford. In Bohemia the new ideas bore fruit- in the movement under John Hus, who was, on the Continent, as was Wiclif in England, the great forerunner of Luther and the Protestant Reformation. The revolt of the Lollards made easier the religious reformation of the sixteenth century in England.

Period I. Richard's Misrule: Resistance of Parliament

Politically Richard's reign was a time of party struggle for the control of the government. The factions were led by the great earls, the possessors of the widest lands in England, the majority of whom were of the royal house by descent or marriage. John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, Edmund, Duke of York, and Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, were the chief of these men. In 1377 parliament had appointed a regency, from which the king's uncles had been excluded, but which was in the main controlled by John of Gaunt. The power of these nobles began, however, to decline after the peasants' revolt, and in 1382-1383 the king, though still a minor, disregarded the regency, and gathered about him a body of new advisers, among whom were Michael de la Pole, Robert Vere, Earl of Oxford, Chief Justice Tressilian, and Nicolas Brembre, chief of the grocers' gild in London. Michael de la Pole, who became chancellor in 1383, was the first merchant to attain high office in England. With these men as councillors, Richard entered upon a career of tyranny and extravagance.

RICHARD II.

From Vertue's engraving based on " an ancient original in the Quire, Westminster Abbey; ' that is, on the gilt-lacquer effigy of the king there.

John of Gaunt attempted to check the course of his nephew, but his influence was fast declining, and in 1385 he withdrew to conduct a war in Spain. In parliament alone lay the hope of resistance to the king. That body was now meeting more or less regularly every year. Though it had usually sat but a month or two at a time, it had had ample, opportunity to protest against the bad government and heavy taxes. Its protests had been embodied in the form of petitions, which the king was free to consider or not just as he pleased, and to which he generally paid little attention. In 1382 parliament impeached the fighting bishop, Spencer of Norwich, who had inaugurated a futile crusade in Flanders. In 1386, in an angry mood, it demanded by petition a view of the king's accounts, some knowledge of the king's appointments, and the dismissal of De la Pole. To this demand Richard replied in anger that he would not remove a scullion from his kitchen. But he was forced to yield and to suffer De la Pole to be impeached.

Finally, in 1388, guided by Thomas, Earl of Gloucester, and the earls of Arundel, Nottingham, Warwick, and Derby (Henry Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt), called the Five Lords Appellant, parliament accused five of the king's associates, found them guilty of treason, and put to death Tressilian, Brembre, and three others' This act of vindictive cruelty, for which the parliament has received the name Merciless," was the work, not so much of the knights and burgesses, as of the nobles who wished to use parliament as an instrument wherewith to rid themselves of their enemies. They were able to manage parliament, because the election of the members of the House of Commons was controlled largely by the great landowners. The frequency of packed parliaments and the ready subservience of many knights and burgesses will be better understood when it is remembered that attendance in parliament was a heavy burden that few were able to carry.