The Lollards
The term ‘Lollard’ comes from the Dutch for someone who mumbles or babbles prayers. It was a derogatory term that applied to the followers of fourteenth-century English theologian John Wycliffe. Wycliffe had been educated at Oxford University and had developed a deep belief in the spiritual authority of the scriptures that he believed should be readily available to all people. Thus he made the first English translation of the Bible at great personal risk. However, this was not the end of his ‘heresy.’
Wycliffe also believed that the church needed reforming so that it concerned itself solely with the teachings of the bible and less with the trappings of what he saw as empty ceremonies. For Wycliffe denied the validity of many church customs including the idea that a priest could transform communion host and wine into the body and blood of Christ. However, Wycliffe did not want to destroy the church; instead, he wished to reform it from within. He and his supporters also wanted to see the Church stripped of its temporal power and wealth and confined to purely spiritual affairs.
The idea of a weaker church was appealing to some nobles, which was why the Lollards acquired some powerful protectors. Chief amongst them was John of Gaunt, the son of Edward III, Uncle of Richard II and father of the future Henry IV. Gaunt was also Earl of Leicestershire, and so Wycliffe acquired his particular patronage when he was rector of Lutterworth between 1374 and 1384.
As the Lollards were never a structured or organized heresy, they were initially left alone. That however changed in 1381 after the outbreak of the Peasants Revolt. The Lollards, with their egalitarian principles, was held responsible for this challenge to the social order and once the revolt was quelled, King Richard II began a campaign against it and other heresies. Lollards were hunted down arrested, allowed to recant or excommunicated. By the fifteenth century, the Lollards movement had been largely driven underground.
The Lollards however, never the less quietly continued to prime English society for the protestant reformation which was to come in the early sixteenth century. Its failure to become widespread, however,pre-reformation was not because of the action of the Church and Crown but because society was not ready for it. For not enough people could read the vernacular Bible that Wycliffe held so dear- because of low literacy and the fact that printing was in its infancy.
Wycliffe’s writings were to form the basis of another pre-reformation heresy that began in fifteenth-century Prague.