Perhaps the best indicator of the popularity and vitality of the late medieval church in England is the fact that very few people appear to have been attracted to, or motivated by, unorthodox or outright heretical views. There had probably been a low level of heresy, doubt and dissent among the population of England even before the fourteenth century, but such views did not in general provide any great cause for alarm to the established church. The heretical movements of Waldenses and Cathars which, over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, seriously threatened the fabric of the traditional religious order in certain parts of the continent had hardly any impact at all in the British Isles. However, from the late fourteenth century onwards, the lay and ecclesiastical authorities became increasingly concerned with the rooting out and the prosecution of the native heresy known as Lollardy. Lollardy ultimately drew its inspiration from the radical teachings of the Oxford theologian John Wyclif, although the link between the two is not always clear. Although Lollard views could vary from one group or from one individual to another, Lollards broadly shared Wyclif’s belief that the institutional church was corrupt and in need of reform; they frequently attacked the avariciousness of the clergy; frowned upon the use of images; disapproved of pilgrimages and the cult of the saints in general; and roundly denounced the doctrine of transubstantiation by which the bread and wine of the mass were believed miraculously to change into the body and blood of Christ. Other aspects of established church life that were sometimes attacked by Lollards included such features as church music and overelaborate ceremonial, and the rite of baptism and mortuary payments.
The precise scale and nature of heresy in late medieval England remains a matter of some debate among historians, a problem mainly due to the nature of the surviving sources. On the one hand, while we should not exaggerate the probable numbers of heretics active at any one time, it is clear that the records of many heresy trials and prosecutions have been lost or destroyed, and those few records that do survive surely represent the tip of a larger iceberg.10 It is also conceivable that some individuals may have held heretical views who never attracted the attention of the authorities. After all, the punishment for relapsed heretics was death (by burning), and such a sanction may have led some quietly and unobtrusively to conform in public while privately adhering to less orthodox ideas and practices. On the other hand, the extant records of heresy trials do not reveal very much at all about the positive beliefs and practices of those accused or prosecuted by the authorities; rather, they tend to tell us what heretics did not believe. It is now often difficult to determine what these positive beliefs were, or whether there was a unifying or coordinating element in Lollard organization, belief and practice which is now hidden from view. There clearly were significant Lollard groups that did maintain contacts between one another, passing on devotional texts and providing ‘missionaries’ and general moral support, who therefore represented the more organized wing of Lollardy. But there were many others who appear to have been isolated individuals whose antipathy towards the traditional church may have stemmed from personal feelings and particular circumstances but who did not regard themselves as part of a ‘movement’ and had never heard of Wyclif. Above all, we should remember that dissent is usually defined by those whose task it is to prosecute it, but such definitions have a habit of changing according to the scale of the perceived threat. In late medieval England, the growing perception by church and state that heresy posed a significant challenge to the established order meant the formulation of an increasingly more hardline definition of what actually constituted heresy, and so it began to encompass certain beliefs or incidents that were formerly not regarded in such a negative light, such as disputes that arose between clergy and laity over tithe payments. The heretical credentials of some individuals who were brought before the ecclesiastical courts in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries must be seriously doubted, such as the weaver from the diocese of Salisbury who made the curious claim that the ‘land was above the sky’, or a Hertfordshire man who denied the need for baptism and spoke against images but who also asserted that there was no God ‘except the sun and the moon’.11 Such examples as these indicate that simple ignorance rather than adherence to Lollardy could lead some into deep trouble. Above all, the term ‘Lollard’ is deeply problematic, since the contexts in which it was used are at best often vague and unclear. The word Lollard itself appears to have been derived from the Dutch and was used in that language as the word for a ‘mumbler’ (of prayers). While the word was certainly used by Englishmen as a term of abuse by contemporaries against heretics, it also had a rather more fluid meaning that was applied to those who displayed puritanical or evangelical religious tendencies but whose orthodoxy was nevertheless not in question. The fact that Margery Kempe was described by one individual as a ‘fals strumpet, a fals Loller and a deceyver of the pepyl’ demonstrates the elusive character of contemporary notions of heresy and orthodoxy.12 ‘Lollardy’ and ‘heresy’ were often, therefore, phenomena the medieval authorities and society chose to see or define as such, but for historians working today it is perhaps best not to place too much confidence in such labels.
Similarly, the question of anti-clericalism also needs to be addressed with some care. That the usually hostile sentiments directed towards the clergy found in Lollard writings and confessions were sometimes echoed in wider society, for instance in the orthodox writings of commentators such as Chaucer or Langland, may suggest wider discontent with the traditional church. However, while through the agency of church courts the late medieval laity actively identified and protested against the moral failings of their clergy (usually complaints relating to fornication and the keeping of concubines, aggressive behaviour, drunkenness), such complaints need not constitute proof of any deep-seated anti-clerical sentiment. Despite not infrequent criticisms about moral laxity among the clergy, there is, in fact, very little evidence for lay disapproval of the pastoral role of their clergy, and no real impression that people either despised or rejected their priests. Rather, it seems that, from time to time, the laity regarded it their duty to point out where the clergy were failing both in order to maintain or improve standards and to ensure that priests were fulfilling their roles properly. Such a critique was quite different from the questioning of the role per se of the clergy found in Lollard writings and confessions. In any case, the clergy themselves were not unaware of their failings, and the sermons produced by them were often shrill in their condemnation of the corrupt or morally dissolute members of their profession.
The greatest failure of the late medieval church in England was, arguably, its inability to satisfy adequately the demand for the scriptures to be made available in the vernacular. The wariness of the authorities in England in relation to the production of a vernacular Bible was due to the fact that such a project was promoted with vigour by Wyclif and many later Lollards, and from 1408 heretical versions of the Bible were officially condemned. However, Bible-reading per se was not condemned by the authorities and, although always regarded with some degree of suspicion, even the possession of English Bibles by the laity, usually by members of the gentry and aristocratic families, was not necessarily problematic, provided that they did not contain Lollard prologues or marginalia. But we should be wary of assuming that the scriptures enjoyed a restricted circulation only amongst the clergy, elite groups and heretics. Indeed, access to the Bible was possible for all levels of society. For instance, Bible commentaries, and sometimes even Bibles, could be found in many parish chained libraries, while above all sermons, which of course required no particular level of functional literacy, drew widely upon materials found in the scriptures and were fundamental in instructing the laity in religion.
The fact that the vast majority of those heretics (or those who were branded as such) presented by the church courts came from the lower ranks of society (weavers, carpenters, shoemakers and the like) perhaps implies that Lollardy existed more or less undetected among the gentry who, in the privacy of their private manorial chapels and oratories, could experiment with more unorthodox expressions of piety. Certainly, whilst the possession of vernacular devotional materials, particularly Bibles, cannot of course be taken as proof of heresy, it might have created the right environment for a more personal and more scripture-based religion amongst such groups which bordered on the unorthodox. The historian K. B. McFarlane suggested that evidence for a more personal, and perhaps even heretical, brand of piety might be found in some late fourteenth - and early fifteenth-century wills drawn up by the so-called ‘Lollard Knights’.13 These knights, who were connected to the court circle of Richard II, were noted in contemporary monastic chronicles as having extended a measure of protection to the early proselytizers of the Wyclifite heresy. McFarlane noted that all of these wills were written in the vernacular, which was unusual, since most wills drawn up at this time were still written in Latin or French, and second, he noted that they also contained certain phrases which strongly emphasized the individual’s sense of unworthiness and the rejection of elaborate funerals. The wills identified by McFarlane are striking and somewhat unusual, and certainly indicate a more personalized and inward-looking brand of faith that was not shared by the majority of society, but we need to be careful in assuming that these documents betray heretical or Lollard sentiments. Indeed, a more recent consideration of these and similar wills has suggested that most exhibit perfectly orthodox beliefs, such as the desire for the provision of memorial masses or the endowment of obits as well as bequests made to the religious orders.14 Thus, the evidence of wills (which are in any case only partial statements of religious belief) suggests that while the gentry may have been socially distant from the mass of the population, it is doubtful that we can discern in their wills any significant level of detachment from prescribed norms, and certainly very little evidence for heresy. Indeed, overall, the available evidence seems to suggest that Lollardy had very few advocates among elite groups, a fact that helped to ensure that the incidence or promotion of outright dissent would always remain limited and tightly controlled.
World History
