principles upon which all the religious orders were based—the theory that Christ's ‘counsels’ were only binding on the religious, while secular people—including the secular clergy—were only bound to the lower morality represented by the evangelical ‘precepts.’ He held that the obligation of poverty rested upon the whole of the clergy. The opposition which the ‘poor priests’ experienced at the hands of the friars, to which he is constantly alluding in his controversial tracts against them, had no doubt much to do with the intense bitterness against the mendicant orders which pervades Wycliffe's later writings. The poor priests began by preaching in churches, and, when excluded therefrom, preached in the open air and often without episcopal licence (Fasc. Ziz. p. 275).
The first measure of suppression directed against Wycliffism was, as we have seen, the work of the bishops acting on their own initiative. In the second case the prelates acted under papal authority. In the third the suppression was the work of the state, now more closely associated with the hierarchy through the reactionary impulse succeeding the peasants' war. Formerly secular magnates had been disposed to welcome Wycliffe's teaching as a weapon against the hierarchy; now temporal and ecclesiastical authority, temporal and ecclesiastical property alike, seemed threatened by the levelling doctrines which were in the air. The archbishop first issued mandates to the university of Oxford and to the bishops enjoining them to suppress the condemned doctrine under pain of excommunication, and then in parliament (May 1382) proposed that the sheriff should be authorised upon the significavit of the bishops to imprison the offending preachers and their adherents. An ordinance was issued in accordance with the archbishop's proposal (Rot. Parl. iii. 124), but it had never been passed by the commons, and in the next session of parliament (October 1382) the lower house petitioned for the cancelling of the pretended statute, which was accordingly repealed (ib. iii. 141). But on 26 June 1382 the king had already issued a patent authorising the bishops themselves to imprison defenders of the condemned doctrines until they recanted or other action should be taken by the king in council (Rot. Pat. 6 Richard II, pt. i. m. 35). It is a curious fact that the commons should have resented the former of these measures, which only reasserted the existing law, except in so far as it apparently authorised the imprisonment of heretics before, instead of after, excommunication, while the patent of June introduced a very serious legal innovation—the imprisonment of laymen by direct authority of the ecclesiastical judge without a royal writ. The facts only show the transitional stage through which the development of constitutional principles was passing, and the divided state of public opinion upon the question of Wycliffism.
Whatever were the views of the classes represented in parliament, at Oxford at all events the ‘evangelical doctor’ was still a power. There he was still the greatest living teacher of theology and philosophy, the representative of views shared by at least one half of the university, the ‘flower of Oxford’ (Eulog. Histor. iii. 345). His influence was especially paramount among the younger masters of arts, for whom he was identified with the cause of realism in its struggles with the Parisian nominalism, with the cause of the philosophical faculty in its jealousy of the superior faculties of theology and canon law, with the cause of the seculars in their conflicts with the mendicants, and of the university in itself in its jealous struggle against external ecclesiastical authority.
On Ascension day (15 May 1382) a violent discourse against the regulars was preached in the churchyard of St. Frideswyde's (now Christ Church) by Wycliffe's most prominent disciple, Nicholas Hereford (Bodleian MS. 240; Fasc. Ziz. p. 296; cf. Academy, 3 June 1882, and art. {{sc|Nicholas, fl. 1390). The archbishop's mandate for the condemnation of the prohibited tenets in the university was issued on 28 May, and its execution was entrusted to the Carmelite doctor, Peter Stokes, who had been the ringleader in the agitation against Wycliffe at Oxford, and had virtually conducted the prosecution (ib. p. 296). But Stokes found it impossible to get the chancellor, Robert Rygge, to act. Rygge was probably at heart a Wycliffite, though he had joined in the Oxford condemnation of his ecclesiastical doctrines, and Stokes was too much intimidated to publish the mandate himself. Two days later the archbishop sent a menacing letter to the chancellor, abusing him for having let Hereford preach (ib. p. 298), and requiring him to assist Stokes in the publication. The chancellor had already invited Philip Repington to preach before the university on Corpus Christi day in St. Frideswyde's cemetery. The archbishop's letter had been intended to prevent another Wycliffite sermon, but the chancellor denied the archbishop's jurisdiction within the university, pretended doubts as to authenticity, deliberated with the proctors and ‘other secular regents,’ expressed
