John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers/Chapter 3

by Lewis Sergeant

DOMINICAN (BLACK) FRIAR. 13TH CENTURY.
(FROM MIGNE'S "ENCYCLOPÉDIE.")

CHAPTER III.

MONKS AND FRIARS.

T would be impossible to plot out a faithful picture of the life and character of Wyclif without adding two other sketches to the background, which already reveals the aggressions and the subjection of the Papacy in the fourteenth century. No one who wishes to bring that picture clearly before his mind can afford to leave out of sight the striking figures of the monks and friars by whom the path of the earlier and later Reformers was beset. Still less could the career of Wyclif be appreciated by one who has not made himself in some degree familiar with the Schoolmen whose teaching Wyclif imbibed at Oxford, and whose progressive ideas and ardent love of truth he interpreted to the humblest of his fellow-countrymen.

Let us begin by recalling to memory the more notable monastic Orders of the Christian Church, and especially their institutions and representatives in England, as they existed during the Reformation epoch—an epoch, be it always borne in mind, by no means coincident with the reigns of a few Tudor monarchs, but inaugurated by the intellectual courage of the Schoolmen, prepared by the combative independence of the Plantagenet kings, and merely arriving at its crisis in the sixteenth century.

Seven hundred years divided St. Benedict and his sister Scholastica from the Spaniard Dominic and the Italian Francis of Assisi, who founded the two Orders of Preaching and Begging Friars. The vows of the Benedictine monks bound the members of this Order to self-abnegation, chastity, and other virtues, and the guiding idea of the founder seems to have been that of refuge from the vices, troubles, and distractions of the world. The Cistercians, Carthusians, and other monastic bodies which had been established between the years 900 and 1200 were governed in the main by Benedict's rules, and may be regarded as Benedictines themselves. Ecclesiastical writers have claimed for the same Order no fewer than forty popes, two hundred cardinals, and something like five thousand archbishops and bishops. From the earliest systematic introduction of Christianity into England the Benedictines played an active part in the conversion of the people. They accumulated vast wealth, and secured for themselves a strong vantage-ground by the establishment of abbeys and monasteries. Comprised within the borders of the Church, yet not strictly a part of the Church organism, this Order occupied a comparatively independent position in regard to the ecclesiastical and the secular authorities, in alliance with Rome but not absolutely subject to her, often opposing its interests to those of Church, Crown, and People, powerful as a friend or as an enemy, yet "dead in law," and crippled by statutory disabilities.

With the accumulation of wealth and privileges, it was inevitable that abuses and corruptions should find their way into the monasteries, and that an intense jealousy should be aroused against these privileged communities, both amongst the secular clergy and amongst the people at large. The unquestioned annals of the time show that there was ample ground for the protests raised on all hands against the immunities as well as the morals of the monks. Very possibly, indeed, there has been too much generalisation from particular instances, and a too wholesale condemnation of houses which in many cases were homes of unaffected piety and distinguished learning. The Carthusians and Bernardines maintained to the last a special repute for learning and virtue. The abounding charity of the monastic bodies has never been denied, and that something less than justice has been done to their average and relative morality is at once a natural supposition and capable of proof.

There is no need of exaggeration in order to justify the portraits drawn by Langland and Chaucer, by Wyclif and his Oxford sympathisers, by the Poor Priests and the song-writers of the Lollard movement. They painted what they saw, and their pictures were recognised as true. If the satires had been mere lampoons, the songs and sermons nothing more than scandalous exaggerations, England would not have witnessed a dissolution of monasteries early in the fifteenth century; for no measure of that kind would have been ventured upon in advance of popular opinion. One hundred and ten years before the beginning of the great dissolution in the reign of Henry VIII., it is recorded that more than a hundred religious houses were suppressed; so closely is the parallel drawn between the final reformation and its first rehearsal.

The fact is that the abbots and monks had been corrupted by their wealth, as the secular clergy had been corrupted by their participation in politics and their relaxation of religious observances. The higher regulars, who were still supposed to shape their lives by the regula monachorum, had the faults and weaknesses shared by all close corporations. Their policy was to add land to land and house to house, to maintain the dignity and revenues of their abbeys, and to live, each according to his rank, as pleasant and companionable men of the world. Chaucer's monk, whom the poet describes on his April jaunt to Canterbury, was fond of sport and display, of horses and hounds:

"An out-rider that loved venerye;
A manly man, to be an abbot able,
Ful many a dainty horse had he in stable.
... The rule of Saint Maure and of Saint Beneyt,
Because that it was old and somdel strayt,

This ilke monke let forby him pace,
And held after the newe world ...
Therefore he was a pricasour aright;
Greyhounds he had as swift as fowl in flight;
Of priking and of hunting for the hare
Was all his lust, for no cost wolde he spare."

It was a dissolute age; the country was demoralised by war, by the ostentation of the rich and the desgerate impoverishment of the masses, by the almost complete immunity of the clergy from civil constraint, and by the license in which many of them as a natural consequence indulged. Of course the manners and morals of the time are not to be measured by the standard which is set up in our own days. A clergyman of the nineteenth century does not frequent ale-houses, attend cock-fights and boxing-matches, or rule the roost at boisterous convivialities. He does not even hunt with a good conscience, and if he dices or plays cards he does not indulge the taste in a mixed company, or in places of public resort. All these things were done freely and openly by jovial monks and seculars in the fourteenth century. The parish parsons were generally too poor for showy vices, but the poorest men could be "common ale-goers," and throw the dice for the cost of a tankard. From lowest to highest—not without exceptions—there was an ascending scale of vicious ostentation. The court, the chase, the tournament, and the pilgrimage itself were frequently mere parades of wantonness, and they were constantly attended by the regular clergy—by abbots and abbesses, priors, monks, and nuns.

A century before the birth of Wyclif, the monks were confronted with dangerous rivals, who, whilst they began by carrying back the minds of men to the earlier models of ascetic discipline, with marvellous promptitude imitated and surpassed the evil examples of their predecessors. In the thirteenth century alone, as many as seven or eight new Orders of religious brethren found their way to England. In London, at Oxford and Cambridge, and at scores of places throughout the country, they received gifts of houses and land, forgetting their fervour in proportion as they accumulated their wealth. Amongst them were the Crossed or Crutched Friars, the Augustinian Friars, the Penitential Friars, and the Carmelites or White Friars. But the largest and most famous of the new Orders were the Dominicans and Franciscans, whose arrival in England and Oxford was practically simultaneous.

It would be difficult to find a greater contrast amongst the devoted pioneers of the Catholic Church than that which is afforded by the two saints Benedict and Dominic. Both set the stamp of their vigorous personality upon many succeeding ages; and the brotherhoods which they founded have done as much as any other single cause to determine the character of their Church in its relations with the world. It is in the ideas which underlie their institutions that the contrast becomes marked and significant. The Benedictine monasteries, brotherhoods and sisterhoods alike, were in the first place essentially refuges from the world. In the case of Benedict himself, and of his immediate followers, the refuge was sought not only against a turbulent and vicious world, but also against the formal and unsatisfying character of the teaching and worship of the day. The English monasteries retained to some extent their specially defensive and social features; men and women resorted to them in order to live a peaceful, regular, and reasonably holy life; and, apart from the abuses which crept into the system, prevailing in some houses but conspicuously absent from the best, this was their object and the end which they achieved.

The Castilian Dominic had a very different aim in founding his Order of Preaching (Black) Friars. The Church had reached a stage at which the desire for protection against secular persecutions could no longer be a pressing cause of retirement from the world. What Dominic felt himself moved to establish was a mission into the world, not a refuge from it. His plan was to send forth missionaries with a distinct and well considered purpose; aggression was the moving principle of his life and of his teaching. He was the flaming sword of the Church, devoted to the persecution and destruction of heretics, for the saving of their souls and the relief of true religion. He has a threefold title to fame, such as few amongst the great military conquerors have surpassed. He it was who devised the terrible campaigns against the Albigenses, who inspired the creation of the courts of Inquisition, and who sent out the Preaching Friars against the sheep which had wandered from the fold.

The friars had his own example to guide and encourage them. The fiery fanatic himself undertook to wrestle with the ill-fated adherents of Pierre de Vaud, and the other heretics of Languedoc; and, when his preaching had failed to reach their souls, the Inquisitors were called in to deal with their bodies. It was a system beautiful in its simplicity; but to do it justice required a subtle and keenly tempered mind.

Innocent III. found it possible in the thirteenth century to set up in parts of Italy, France, and Spain, these irregular courts of divine vicarial justice, having the power of life and death, yet denying the very semblance of legality to the accused. Not only could he create them by his own fiat, but he was also able to call in the aid of the executive arm, and to throw the expenses of his tribunal on the State. In 1233, Gregory IX. expressly assigned the control of the Inquisition to the Dominican Order, which was declared to be in every country exclusively responsible to the Holy See. A generation later, the Franciscans were associated with the Dominicans in this control; but the Black Friars never ceased to be the leading spirits of the campaign inaugurated by their founder.

England was not a soil in which the exotic Inquisition could flourish. The Interdict had not long been removed, and the Fair of Lincoln was but four years passed, when the first Dominicans found their way to this country in 1221. As a matter of course they betook themselves at once to the universities. They had powerful backers, and soon acquired houses and land. Their influence grew rapidly, and, if it had been possible to imitate at Oxford and London what was done at Toulouse and Paris, under Louis the Saint and his mother Blanche of Castile, there were doubtless fanatics enough in England to be ready participants in the Dominican crusade. But it was not possible. Apart from the absolute bar which English independence of character would have offered to the creation of a new tribunal at the instance of a foreign potentate,—in spite of the fact that England was for her own purposes a tributary of Rome,—still the long succession of wars with France, the increasing jealousy of papal interference, and perhaps even the political sympathy evoked by the religious tyranny in Languedoc (our next neighbour in Gascony and Guienne) would have sufficed to prevent it.

We may assume that Dominic saw the impossibility as clearly as anyone. If he gave a special mandate to his English missionaries, as is likely enough, he would remind them that they were not to expect any help from the arm of the Inquisition, and that, for the present at least, no rack or funeral pyre could aid them in their quest of souls. He would bid them gain a footing amongst the clerks and students of the ancient universities, and direct their subtlety against the perilous inroads on the faith which had already been made by the Schoolmen. He would tell them to watch for the beginnings of relapse, to train themselves for the contest which was certain to be thrust upon them, and to keep the sword of their dialectic sharp and keen. They might find at Oxford or at Cambridge a new Abelard, a stiff-necked scholar, puffed up with pride, teaching the new-fangled learning, distilling the poison of pro fane knowledge and unchastened reason, spreading around him the miasma of heresy and rebellion. Let them scent such a man, mark him, track him down, wrestle with him for his own soul and the souls of his unhappy victims—and then? Well, the English were an obstinate race. The civil authorities might give them no aid against the most pestilent of heretics; even the bishops might remain indifferent to their faithful expostulations. It was for his devoted Preachers to meet such difficulties with sublimer faith, with subtler intellect, with blades from the armoury of their enemy; and the time might yet come, even in rebellious England, when the stern but loving discipline of Holy Church might contribute to the greater glory of God by its autos-da-fé.

So may we imagine this seer and zealot of the still undivided Church to have commissioned his English delegates, as he placed in their hands a letter of recommendation from Blanche of Castile to Isabel de Balbec, the pious wife of Robert de Vere, who was to give them the nest-egg of their future possessions both at Oxford and at Cambridge.

At any rate this was the policy which the English Dominicans more or less consciously pursued. They bided their time, and whenever a chance presented itself they were ardent defenders of the Roman tradition and the papal authority. It does not appear that their morals were ever so far relaxed as those of the Franciscans; and intellectually they remained more in harmony with and loyal to their superiors on the continent than the generality of the Orders in England. Whilst it is not unusual to find men of independent thought amongst the friars in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, like the Franciscan Roger Bacon (whose brother Robert was a staunch Dominican) and the Carmelite John Baconthorpe, we scarcely ever come across a Preaching Friar who was not imbued with the narrow and aggressive spirit of St. Dominic against the merest indication of heresy.

Wyclif may have had friends and sympathisers in every Order. He was certainly at one time on fairly good terms with many of the Franciscan Friars. But no tolerance for his bolder views and innovations could be expected from the Dominican obscurants. They were amongst the first to detect his heresy, to denounce him at home and at Rome, to reproach the bishops for their indifference to his false teaching, and to produce against him that keen-edged sword which their founder had entrusted to them. We may anticipate our story so far as to quote from a list of the more celebrated members of the Order (given by Stevens from the papers of Anthony à Wood, who was indebted to Bishop Bale) the names of certain Dominicans who particularly signalised themselves by their zeal in refuting the errors of Lollardy. Thus we read of William Jordan (1370) "who with much boldness excelled among the Oxford masters, carrying himself with much boasting ostentation, and like another Ismael (so says Bale) opposed all men, and was opposed by all. He writ pieces against Wickliff's positions";—Roger Dimock (1390), "a man of singular judgment, not only in philosophical matters . . . but also in the mysteries of divinity which relate to faith. He spent many years at Oxford with reputation; amongst which that was most remarkable in which he was appointed by the vote of the universities the invincible champion to conquer Wickliff's followers";—and Robert Humbleton, "who by several writings declared himself a professed enemy to Wickliff and his followers."

Humbleton was present as a bachelor of theology at the proceedings taken against Wyclif in 1382 and the various Orders were of course largely represented at all such proceedings. Kynyngham, a Carmelite Friar, was specially selected to argue against Wyclif, long before the Church authorities had begun to move. Of the twelve theologians who condemned Wyclif in 1381, at the instigation of Courtenay, six were friars and two were monks. This is by the way; but note how the long arm of the astute Dominic had reached through the centuries and across the northern seas, adapting means to surroundings, and preparing the very instrument which would be necessary to crush (if anything could crush) the English revolt against the Papacy. Let us recognise how marvellous a service albeit transitory and incomplete was rendered to the cause which had enlisted his transcendent abilities by the Inquisitor-General of France and Spain. In his native country, in Languedoc and the valleys of the Alps, by torture, death, and domestic crusade, he went far towards annihilating the nascent opposition to Rome, and helped to weld a France which to this day, in spite of republican institutions and widespread rationalism, is not so much the eldest son as the most jealous guardian of the Roman Church. And in England, though his Inquisition was powerless, and he had to wait nearly two hundred years for the attainment of his ambition, it was still St. Dominic and his Preaching Friars who turned the blade of Wyclif's logic, diverted the full flood of Lollardy until it was lost for a century in the sands, instigated a persecution almost as bitter as that which had been directed against the Waldenses, and for a time baulked and defeated the intellectual movement in the English Church.

The coming of the Franciscan (Grey) Friars, or Friars Minor, to Oxford took place in the year 1224. Their arrival in England was only a few years later than that of the Dominicans, as the institution of their Order was a few years subsequent to the establishment of the Preaching Friars. The quaint story of Ingeworth and Henry of Devon, as recorded in Stevens's transcript from the papers of Anthony a Wood, is well worth telling afresh.

These two forerunners of a famous brotherhood, "being not far from Oxford, and gone out of the way as not knowing the country," turned off to a grange or farm-house of the Benedictines of Abingdon, six miles from Oxford, because night was drawing on and the floods were out. Stevens suggests that the precise locality may have been Baldon, or Culham, for at both places the Abbey of Abingdon had property. "The friers came to it just at

FRANCISCAN (GREY) FRIAR.
(FROM MIGNE'S "ENCYCLOPÉDIE.")

nightfall; and, knocking gently at the door, humbly begged for God's sake to be admitted, otherwise they should perish through hunger and cold. It was the porter to whom they made their request, who, guessing these two friers by their patched habits, the meanness of their aspect, and their broken language, to be some mimics, or disguised persons, carried the message to the prior, who was not displeased with it. He, hastening to the door with the sacrist, the cellarer, and two younger monks, freely invited them in, expecting to be entertained with some sleight of hand or diverting pastime. But the friers, with a composed and sedate countenance, affirming that they were mistaken, that they were no such vile men, but that they had chosen an apostolical course of life to serve God, the Benedictines, displeased to be so defrauded of their expected diversion, turned out the friers, after misusing, kicking and buffeting them." So they went out into the cold and rain again; but one of the young monks took pity on them, and smuggled them into the hayloft. And afterwards, in a dream, he beheld Christ making inquisition into the conduct of the wicked Benedictines, and condemning them, after their repudiation by St. Benedict as subverters of his rule, to be hanged on a convenient elm tree.

It is added that Ingeworth and Henry of Devon proceeded next morning to Oxford, and went to the house of the Dominicans in the Jewry, where they were entertained for eight days. Evidently the story is of Franciscan origin, and it bears witness not only to the opinions entertained of Benedictine laxity by the new devotees, but also to the harmonious relations existing at the time between the followers of Dominic and those of Francis of Assisi.

It need hardly be said that the harmony and co-operation of the friars in matters of common interest was no sign of identity in their mandates, vows, or ultimate aims. Most of the brotherhoods originating in the thirteenth century seem to have owed their institution to the revival of religious fervour by the crusades or otherwise, and to a spirit of moral innovation due to the plethoric abuses of many Benedictine houses. It is not clear that any other Order had the subtlety of purpose which undoubtedly belonged to the Dominicans, though many of the Franciscans were evidently made of the same stuff, and were equally intellectual and highly-trained men. It is told of Francis—whose youth was dissolute and profligate—that when he elected to follow an ascetic life his father required him to make a formal renunciation of his inheritance, and that he thereupon stripped himself naked, in order that the symbol might be beyond dispute. And it is further stated that in the course of a few years he had as many as five thousand friars at his disposal, who had been moved by his example to similar acts of renunciation. In any case it is certain that the Dominicans and Franciscans were, and continued to be recruited by, picked men, socially and intellectually on a level with the men whom they would meet at Oxford and Cambridge. And of course they would not be long in England before the main body of their members were drawn from the university students, although the general direction of the Orders came from Rome.

The corruption of the new Orders from their preliminary professions of poverty, simplicity of life, and singleness of purpose was sooner or later inevitable. The originative influence of St. Dominic in regard to his own Order has been insisted on above. He is not likely to have had any influence in establishing the other Orders which arose in the thirteenth century. Yet there doubtless was a common origin for them all; and it is not far to seek. The Benedictines were so widely spread, so wealthy, and so powerful in the social relations which they maintained with the laity, that if they had continued to bring a balance of advantage to the Church and its rulers there would have been no need for the institution of new Orders. But the balance of advantage had virtually disappeared. The general contempt into which so many worldly, idle, and vicious monks had fallen in every country could not fail to weaken the hold of religion on the popular mind. Innocent III. and his successors appear to have been convinced that a crusade in Christendom was quite as necessary as a crusade against the avowed infidels, and that the most effective weapons for the new crusaders would be those of apostolic poverty and fervour. Nor was it only, or even mainly, as a corrective against the corruption of the monks that the Mendicant Friars were sent forth. Their object was also to supply the defects of the secular clergy, whose lack of energy, and often of practical piety, was gravely reflected on by their contemporaries.

The enthusiasm and success of the early friars have been compared with those of the English Methodists in the days of Wesley and Whitfield. They would be fresh in the memory of the nation when John Wyclif, a century and a half later, sent out his own Poor Priests to emulate their spirit and to achieve a very similar success. The friars of the thirteenth century found a church in every street and field; they carried with them not only the evidences of their personal poverty, but the fullest sacerdotal authority, and the very altars and sacraments of religion. In the course of a generation we find Matthew of Paris complaining that the churches were deserted, and that the people would confess to none but friars. It is not to be wondered at that the secular qlergy, the hierarchy, and even the universities remonstrated against the privileges and favours which Rome continued to shower upon her new missionaries.

The doctrine of poverty was an essential part of the constitution of St. Francis. When the Franciscans began to hold houses and lands of their own, to live like Benedictine monks in their convents, and to relax their apostolical fervour as well as their evangelical poverty, they ceased to fulfil the purposes for which they were founded. Even the brightest ornaments of the Order, such as Bishop Grosteste (who left them his library), Adam Marsh, Roger Bacon, the "Irrefragable" Alexander Hales, the learned and influential Haymo, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, were anything rather than the mendicant missioners whom St. Francis had pictured in his mind. Many of the friars nevertheless adhered to the original rule, taking the name of Spirituals or Observants. The dispute between the two sections of the Order soon waxed warm, and the popes of the thirteenth century had much difficulty in holding the balance between them. It was declared from Rome that whilst the Order were debarred from actual ownership, they were entitled to the usufruct of their acquisitions, the property itself being vested in the Supreme Pontiff. Pope Nicholas III. formulated a bull to this effect. The conscience of the Spirituals was not satisfied by this partial vindication, and the principle involved appeared to them so important that it became almost a new basis of religious faith. Christ and his disciples, they maintained, were voluntarily poor; the possession of wealth was incompatible with apostolic Christianity; poverty was an indispensable note of a true Church. As late as 1322 a general assembly of the Franciscans at Perugia, representing the branches of the Order in every country, adopted the doctrine of evangelical poverty in its fullest sense.

This was logical; but equally logical was the alarm of the Pope and his supporters. For the natural and necessary development of one of the chief factors of pure Christianity was seen to be in direct conflict with the teaching and practice of the Papacy. If the Spiritual Franciscans were right, the Pope, the superior clergy, the monks, the Dominicans themselves, were all unapostolic, not to say anti-Christian. Avignon fulminated at once against these new heretics, and John XXII. did not hesitate to cut out of the decretals the bull which Nicholas III. had promulgated at Rome. The Order as a whole gave way; but many an honest friar and clerk muttered in advance his "e pur si muove."

This was a turning-point of the early Reformation. If it had been humanly possible to crush the Papacy in the fourteenth century, or even to liberate the national Churches from papal control or interference, the task would have been accomplished. For the spiritual blow delivered by the Franciscans in 1322 was as staggering in its way as the political blow administered by Philip of France less than twenty years before. And in fact, both in the political and in the spiritual order, the work of those twenty years was substantially effectual. It was in the direct line of thought and action from Avignon and Perugia onwards, through the Schoolmen and the Lollards, through Marsiglio of the University of Paris and Wyclif of the University of Oxford, that the statesmen and clerics of the sixteenth century derived their power to strike and to conquer. With the Spiritual Franciscans Wyclif never ceased to be in full sympathy; but when he came to maturity they were comparatively few and insignificant.

Such, then, were the monks and the friars with whom Wyclif was brought into contact and conflict in the fourteenth century—distinct from each other and from the national Church, by no means always in harmony, yet all in a large measure subordinate to a foreign authority, and all virtually combined in common defence of their positions against the innovating spirit of the early Reformers.