But it may be taken as proved that Wycliffe began and continued at Balliol, where he must have been a fellow, until
in or before the year 1360 he was elected master of the
college. Very shortly however he withdrew for a time
from the active work of the university to the seclusion
college living. In the spring of 1361 he was instituted to the rectory of Fillingham in Lincolnshire, and
not long afterwards gave up his office at Balliol.[1] He
is supposed to have e occupied rooms at Queen's at various
times between 1363 and 1380. It is natural to connect
his return to Oxford with his procedure to degrees in
divinity, in which he became doctor not long before December 1373;[2] and the renewed intercourse with the university,
the attraction of schools and disputations, may have made
it more difficult for him to feel at home in his country
parsonage. At all events in 1368 he obtained two years'
leave of absence, to the end that he might devote himself to the study of letters in the university. In November of that
year he quitted the rectory in exchange for the living of
Ludgarshall in Buckinghamshire, and nearly six years
later (to pass on for a momemt to the sequel of his preferments in the church) the crown presented him to the rectory of Lutterworth in Leicestershire. At Lutterworth he died on the 31st December 1384.
From this bare summary of his official career one might think that there was little room for Wycliffe's remarkable influence as a teacher at Oxford. Yet although his principle of clerical duty did not apparently allow him to hold more than one living at a time, he seems not to have scrupled to spend a great part of the year in the university; and he has even been supposed on no contemptible authority to have filled the post of warden of Canterbury-hall, а
- ↑ He first appears as master in 1360; see Lorimer, ubi supra, p. 133. The later dates are April and July 1361: Shirley, intr., p. xiv notes 4 and 5.
- ↑ [Calendar of Entries in the papal Registers relating to Great Britain and Ireland, 4. 193; 1902 Shirley, intr., p. xvii erroneously fixed the date between 1361 and 1366.]
translation of Dr. Lechler's Wicliff, ed. 1881. It seems indeed clear that Balliol and Merton in Wycliffe's time formed the opposite poles of the academical world.
