ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY clergy, following the example of Wolsey, ' waxed so proud, that they wore velvet and silk . . . kept open lechery, and so highly bare themselves . . . that no man durst once reprove anything in them for fear to be called heretic, and then they would make him smoke or bear a faggot.' '* If the speech and the letter of Bishop Fitz James given in the pamphlet (apparently written several years later) ^^ about Hun's case are genuine, or even based on genuine documents, he believed the City at that time (15 14) to be full of ' heretical pravity.' These may have been the ' perilous and heinous words . . . surmised by him to be spoken of the whole body of the City touching heresy specified in a copy of a letter supposed to be written ' by him, of which the Court of Aldermen complained in 1517.'" Heresy, however, was a vague term ; Dr. Standish, rigidly orthodox as he was in creed,'^ was charged with heresy when he defended the Act limiting the privileges of the Church courts,^^ and examples of its use to describe various kinds of misconduct connected with religion are to be found in the records of the Commissary Court of London. ^^ What the bishop probably meant was that the City was full of ill-feeling against the clergy ; that he did not mean that it was full of people who believed Lollard doctrine is clear from the pains he took to convince the citizens that Hun really held heretical opinions in matters of faith.-" On the other hand there is no doubt that Lollardy still existed in London, and that a part was played in the coming revolution by the obscure 'sect' whose members lived chiefly in the streets to the north of Cheapside.^^ Their influence was from below, and its working can be but dimly traced ; from above the influence of Colet and his friends must have been great among the more educated. The number of entries concerning ecclesiastical matters in Arnold's Customs of London shows that laymen unconnected with Lollardy were much exercised by the state of religion in the City. Specially signifi- cant is a statement, supported by quotations from the Fathers, of ' The office that belongeth to a bishop or a priest.' ^^ It seems probable that Colet, appealing for reform as one ' sorrowing the decay of the Church,' ^^ was repre- sentative of the citizens to whom by birth he belonged, men whose generous devotion was beyond question, but who held to an ideal sadly far from realization in the character and work of the London clergy of their day. Much of the above description of the state of affairs on the eve of the Reformation would apply to other parts of south-eastern England as well as to London ; but there was a local complication of great importance — the relations between the London parochial clergy and their people were embit- tered by a long-standing dispute about the payment of tithes. One character- istic of the ecclesiastical history of the City is the recurrence of such disputes '* Chronicle, lo Hen. VIII ; cf. 22 Hen. VIII. The pride of the clergy is one of the four chief evils denounced by Colet in his Convocation sermon of i 5 1 2 (Lupton, Life of Colet, App.) . It can be shown that almost every statement he then made applied to London clergymen of this period. For the ' great pensions assigned of many benefices resigned' (op. cit. 296), cf. Lond. Epis. Reg. Fitz James, fol. 61, with Arnold, Custom! of Lond. 228. " The B.M. ed. (Pressmark 64.95, '» ^7) ™"st be later than the death of Tyndale (1536) ; but there may have been an earlier one. "^ Rec. Corp. Repert. iii, fol. 17^. " Diet. Nat. Biog. " I'ide supra, p. 238. " Hale, op. ch. passim. '" More, Dialogue, bk. iii, cap. 15 ; Foxe, op. cit. iv, 185 et seq. " Vide supra, pp. 234-8. " Op. cit. 207. Cf. the anecdote about confession on p. 223, and other entries passim, and the poem on the Duty of Prelates in the commonplace book of another citizen ; Songs, Carols, &c. (Early Engl. Text Soc), 81. ■ Convocation Sermon, ut sup. 303. 247
