A HISTORY OF LONDON who, ' while men were at sermons the Sunday afternoon ' in Lent, was ' sore vexed and bound with the devil.' ^°* The Church history of London from 1440 to 1490 was uneventful. An elaborate plan was made in 1445 for securing a suitable rector for St. Peter's Cornhill. The mayor and aldermen were to appoint four of the secular clergy of London, men of high character and sound learning, who were to choose, ' according to their consciences,' four candidates for election by the Common Council, each of whom must be a secular clerk, a bachelor or doctor of divinity, and fit both in character and learning to undertake the cure.'"" The rectors were thus chosen till 1536.-°" The first of them was Thomas Gascoigne, Chancellor of the University of Oxford,^"* a strong opponent of the followers of Wycliffe, but also an advocate of much preach- ing, ready to denounce unsparingly the evils of the Church of his day.^°°^ Lollardry still had its martyrs. In 1448 a heretic was burnt on Tower Hill,^" and in 1462 another was condemned in the diocese of Lincoln who had formerly lived in London, where he had been imprisoned by the bishop and afterwards abjured.""* Reginald Pecock was master of Whittington College and rector of St. Michael Paternoster from 1431 to 1444.*'" In a sermon at Paul's Cross in 1447 he tried to show that the bishops might have good reasons for not preaching and for non-residence, and that the payments made to the pope after papal provisions were not simony. ^^^ The first of his three theses attracted most notice, for the Londoners of the 1 5th century attached great importance to preaching.-'^ About that time "' Henry VI was told that a number of famous London divines, among them the rectors of St. Andrew Holborn and All Hallows the Great, and Pecock's successor at Whittington College, were stirring the people to revolt by their sermons against the sins of the kingdom and its rulers. All of these boldly withstood Pecock, and Dr. Myllington of Cam- bridge denounced his sermon at Paul's Cross. "^^ But Pecock, now Bishop of Chichester,^'* continued his endeavours to convert the Lollards by arguing in favour of those practices of the Church which they chiefly attacked. It is evident from many local allusions that his Repressor was addressed mainly to Londoners.'" His abjuration at Paul's Cross on 4 December 1457, when his condemned works were burnt, was witnessed by a vast multi- '"* Hist. Coll. of a Lond. Citizen, 239. There are many later examples of sorcery and the popular belief in it during the 15th and 1 6th centuries ; fide the instances given by Hale, A Series of Precedents . . . from the Act Bks. of Eccl. Courts in the Dioc. of Lond. passim. '"' Sharpe, Cal. Letter Bk. /, 92 ; Rec. Corp. Joum. iv, fol. 102 ; Letter Bk. K, fol. 227^; Three l^th-Cent. Ckron. (Camd. Soc), 91. Cf. Rec. Corp. Repert. iii, fol. 195^ and later entries passim. The advovvson of St. Peter's had been in the hands of the Corporation since 141 1. ""^ It was decided in 1478 to appoint the rector of St. Margaret Pattens in a similar way ; but the plan was not carried out in that case, apparently because the mayor claimed the right to present ; Letter Bk. L, fol. 107^, 145^. "* Locie Libro Feritatum (ed. Rogers), 232. ""^ Diet. Nat. Biog. ; Loci e Libro Feritatum, 188-98, and passim.
- <" Chron. of Lond. (ed. Nicolas), 135 ; Three lth-Cent. Chron. (Camd. Soc), 66.
- Line. Epis. Reg. Chedworth Mem. fol. 5 7 d. "' Hennessy, Novum Repert.
"" Repressor (Rolls Ser.), ii, 615 et seq.; Gascoigne, Loci e Libro Feritatum (ed. Rogers), 44, 48, 208, &c. '^^ Fide supra, pp. 211, 223-4. F^r other bequests for sermons see Sharpe, Cal. of (Fills, ii, 589; Stow, Surv. (ed. Kingsford), i, 185. ■" Gascoigne (op. cit. 188) says in 1450, but two of those he names died in 1447 and 1448 respectively ; cf. Hennessy, op. cit. '" Gascoigne, op. cit. 44 ; cf. 40. '" Since 1450 ; Did. Nat. Biog.
- " See Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation, i, 203 et seq. for a discussion of Pecock's arguments and
an account of the circumstances of his fall. '" Repressor ofoi'ermuch blaming of the Clergy (Rolls Ser.), i, 28, 30, 90-1, 1 12-13, i9+> 215. 232
