Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/374

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John Wyclif.
[1381

which began in the schools and the Latin treatise, and ended in revolt against the government and the assassination of the chief ministers of the Crown.

However this may have been, Courtenay lost no time in proceeding once more against the redoubtable Oxford professor, and with a better assurance of success than on either of the former occasions when he had set the machinery of the Church in motion. He had no longer much to fear, if anything, from John of Gaunt, who had cooled very considerably towards Wyclif and his friends, even before the terrible scare which the peasants had given him a year ago. Poor Sudbury, too, the mild and irresolute, had gone to his account, and there was no power in the land which was able, or disposed, to interfere with the exercise of his authority.

As soon as the session was over he summoned a Synod of the English Church to meet him, on the 21st of May, in the priory of the Dominicans in Holborn ("apud Prcedicatores ". There were present in this assembly ten bishops, including Courtenay himself, Robert of London, William of Winchester, John of Lincoln, Thomas of Exeter, John of Durham, John of Hereford, Ralph of Salisbury, Thomas of Rochester, and William Botellesham of Nantes—the latter being an old friar. The doctors of theology in addition to these were four Carmelites—Glamvile and Dysse of Cambridge, Lovey and Kynyngham of Oxford; three Dominicans—Sywarde and Langeley of Oxford, and Parys of Cambridge; four Augustinians—Ascheburn and Bankin of Oxford, Hormenton of Cambridge, and