being archbishop, Reginald Pococke, Bishop of Chichester, was brought to trial for heresy. It is curious that Pococke differed greatly in opinion from the Lollards, but he reasoned with them instead of persecuting and burning them; and this was such a reproof to the persecuting section of the clergy, that he was brought to the bar of the church. The bishop did not believe that the church was infallible, or that it was necessary even to salvation to believe in the Catholic Church; broad and unpardonable heresies! These, however, he renounced, and yet was deprived of his bishopric, and shut up in a cell in Thorney Abbey, in the Isle of Ely, without pen, ink, or paper, but was permitted to have a Bible, a mass-book, a psalter, and the legends of the saints. He died after a confinement of three years.
Spite of the danger with which the church was menaced, and the growth of knowledge amongst the people, as is the case with all old and corrupt institutions, it made no efforts to reform itself and thus to avoid its fate. On the contrary, Archbishop Bouchier, while putting the reformers to the most horrible of deaths, complained that members of "the clergy, both regular and secular, were ignorant and illiterate blockheads, or rather idiots; and that they were as profligate as they were ignorant, neglecting their cures, strolling about the country with bad women, and spending the revenues of their benefices in feasting, drinking, and adultery."
Pilgrim buying a Glass Mirror. From a MS. of Lydgate's Poem of "The Pilgrim."
Whilst the clergy were exhibiting this disgusting character, in the very spirit of obstinate dogmatism, all the outward rites and ceremonies of the church were more than ever insisted upon. The cup in the sacrament was taken from the laity. They were told that the wine in the cup was not the sacrament, but only given to enable them to swallow the bread more easily. The clergy were ordered to begin in small, obscure churches, to withdraw the cup, and to tell the people to swallow the bread whole, that it might not stick in their teeth. Several new saints were introduced—St. Osimund and the two virgins, St. Fridiswida and St. Ethelrida. The churches were crowded with images of the Virgin and other saints. The festivals of St. George, St. Edmund, and the Virgin, were made double festivals. Pilgrimages, processions, indulgences, and confessions to the priests, were more zealously enjoined than ever. Every effort was in the wrong direction, showing that the days of the Catholic Church in this country were numbered as the state church. Instead of endeavouring to infuse new intellectual life, the clergy were trying to make a dead body stand erect, and when they could not succeed, they as vainly endeavoured to prop it up with gorgeous habiliments and empty forms.
To make the matter worse, there arose a terrible dispute betwixt the secular clergy and the begging friars, in which they said many plain truths of each other, which were remembered to their common detriment. The begging friars claimed Christ as belonging to their class while on earth, which the seculars rejected as a horrible and blasphemous doctrine. The Pope was obliged to publish a bull denouncing the doctrine of the friars.
Of the amount of instruction by preaching given to the people, a convocation, held at York in 1466, gives us a striking idea. By its first canon, every parish priest is commanded to preach four times in the year! either personally or by another. The convocation omitted the second commandment of the Decalogue, and made the number up by dividing the tenth into two. The learning of the higher clergy is curiously shown in a little bit of attempted reform of Sunday trading, which was directed against the barbers, who are said, by Archbishop Chicheley, to keep open their shops on the Lord's-day, "namely," he says, "the seventh day of the week, which the Lord blessed and made holy, and on which he rested after his six days' work"—a singular confirmation of the Jewish Sabbath. In a word, it would be difficult to say whether ignorance or vice was more prevalent at this period; it was the dark hour before the dawn.
Parish Priest in Ordinary Costume, and Attired for the Altar. Fifteenth century.
In the church of Scotland during this century, the chief events were the breaking out of the persecution against the Lollards and the erection of St. Andrew into an archbishopric. John Resby, an English priest, who had fled from persecution at home, was arrested and burnt at Perth, in 1408. In 1433 was also burnt, at St. Andrew's, Paul Crawar, a Bohemian physician, who had
