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First single biers, and then cart-loads of corpses hurried along to the grave-yards: no time was to be lost, for there would soon be too few left living to bury the dead.

It is said on contemporary authority-and the statement is confirmed by modern research-that no less than one-half of the population perished. The immediate consequence was an enormous increase in the value of labor, and a corresponding depreciation in the value of land. In the winter which followed the Plague "flocks and herds wandered about the fields and corn without any that could drive them." Landlords excused their tenants' rents for one, two, or three years, lest they should desert their holdings, and leave them uncultivated on their owners' hands. Wages were so high as to swallow up the farmer's profit, and it frequently became a question whether it would be more ruinous to leave the crops ungathered or to comply with the extravagant demands of the laborers.

XXIV.

JOHN WYCLIF.-SHIRLEY.

[The career of Wyclif, as a reformer, included the later years of Edward III., and the earlier years of his grandson and immediate successor, Richard II. He attacked both the discipline and doctrine of the Church of his time, and in many points anticipated the great Reformation of the sixteenth century. When he first rose into prominence the papal court was at Avignon, in France. A few years later occurred what is known as the Great Schism. Two popes were elected, one at Rome and the other at Avignon, and Europe was divided between them. The schism caused great scandal and corruption, and did much to destroy the influence of the рарасу. In England the French pope was regarded as an enemy; hence, to a large extent, the popular sympathy for Wyclif.]

OF all external events perhaps the great schism of the West exercised the most important influence on the career of the reformer; it strengthened his theological, but it under

mined his political, position. He may not have been aware, certainly John of Gaunt, if we may judge by his acts, was not aware, how large a portion of the antipathy of Englishmen to the papal court was due to its residence at Avignon. The pope was, to Englishmen of the time of Edward III., the obedient slave of France, through whose coffers the treasure of this country passed to feed the war against herself, whose partisans, especially among the mendicant friars, were perpetually engaged in fostering an unpatriotic, unnational feeling, and who appeared, an advocate in the garb of mediator, to throw the weight of his influence in every negotiation into the scale of the enemies of England.

With the great schism all this was changed. Not only did the common feeling of reverence for the head of the Church naturally return when the causes which had for a time destroyed it were removed, but the nation must have witnessed, with novel delight, the "king's adversary of France" falling under the ban of the papacy. The violence of the Lancastrian government, and its mad defiance of popular feeling, hastened the reaction, and thus before long Wyclif, sanguine as he was, had probably abandoned all serious hope of any practical reform of the Church.

From this time the theological element, in our modern and narrower sense of the word, becomes predominant in his works; he begins to write English tracts, to speak of the translation of the Bible, which was probably in progress at this time, and lastly, arriving at a conclusion to which he had long been tending, he put out, in the spring of 1381, a paper containing twelve propositions, in which he denied the doctrine of transubstantiation.

It was on these propositions that his prosecution by the archbishop was framed-a prosecution which, unlike that of four years before, was really theological, not political, in its object. Whatever share old party feeling may have had in stirring Courtney's theological zeal, no archbishop of Canterbury,

even if inclined, could safely have neglected to proceed against the author of opinions so profoundly at variance with the ecclesiastical, even more than with the theological, principles of the day.

Yet the first attack on the new doctrine was not made by him. Almost immediately after its appearance it was condemned by the chancellor of the university and a select meeting of doctors. Wyclif appealed to John of Gaunt, who came down to Oxford, and, caring little to be embroiled in a theological dispute, confirmed the sentence of the chancellor by an injunction to the reformer not to speak further on the subject of the eucharist. A political partisan would have been silenced: Wyclif replied by his memorable confession. Help came to him from a quarter whence, perhaps, it was little expected.

The popular cry of heresy, then as ever, was far less telling within the university than in the country at large. The theological alarms of John of Gaunt were little felt by the masters of arts. Their common enmity to the religious, and especially to the mendicant, orders, attached the secular clergy of Oxford, as a body, to the cause of Wyclif. They did not forget that three years before the monks, in gratifying their animosity against him, had sacrificed the independent pride of the university, and they could not but foresee, in the new prosecutions which were preparing, fresh sources of humiliation for her. This feeling, re-enforcing the strength of Wyclif's own party, told in the university elections. In the annual change of officers, the incoming chancellor and proctors were all more or less inclined to his cause, and the university troubled him no more

Thus checked, the leaders of the movement turned to the archbishop, and, in consequence of their representations, in May, 1382, a provincial council was assembled at the Black Friars, in London.

The form of the proceedings was remarkable. Wyclif

himself was never summoned before the council, but twentyfour conclusions, extracted from his writings, were condemned, search was ordered to be made in Oxford for copies of his works, and he himself was banished from the university. For his followers severer measures were in store. The Lollard chancellor, Rigge, after a bold but short resistance, was compelled to submit; the heads of the party were made to recant, and the whole party in Oxford received a blow from which it seems to have never thoroughly recovered.

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Wyclif's enemies, however, were not satisfied. From his retreat at Lutterworth they summoned him before the papal court. The citation did not reach him till 1384. But he was then dying of paralysis. His reply to the pope, excusing himself from attendance, is preserved to us. From its half-enigmatical language we could scarcely guess, what we know from another source, that his failing strength was un

equal to the journey. On the 29th of December, of the same year, as he was hearing mass in his parish church, a fatal stroke deprived him of speech, and on the 31st he breathed his last.

No friendly hand has left us any, even the slightest, me morial of the life and death of the great reformer. A spare, frail, emaciated frame, a quick temper, a conversation "most innocent," the charm of every rank; such are the scanty but significant fragments we glean of the personal portraiture of one who possessed, as few ever did, the qualities which give men power over their fellows. His enemies ascribed it to the magic of an ascetic habit; the fact remains engraven upon every line of his life.

To the memory of one of the greatest of Englishmen his country has been singularly and painfully ungrateful. On most of us the dim image looks down, like the portrait of the first of a long line of kings, without personality or expression -he is the first of the reformers. To some he is the watchword of a theological controversy, invoked most loudly by those whom he would most have condemned. Of his works, the greatest, "one of the most thoughtful of the Middle Ages," has twice been printed abroad, in England never. Of his original English works nothing beyond one or two short tracts has seen the light.* If considered only as the father of English prose, the great reformer might claim more reverential treatment at our hands. It is not by his translation of the Bible, remarkable as that work is, that Wyclif can be judged as a writer. It is in his original tracts that the exquisite pathos, the keen, delicate irony, the manly passion of his short, nervous sentences fairly overmasters the weakness of the unformed language, and gives us English which cannot be read without a feeling of its beauty to this hour.

* Since this was written (1858) the English works of Wyclif have been printed, with a very able and interesting introduction by F. D. Matthew (1880).

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