John Wyclif

Corrupt State of the Church

of English prose as well as of English poetry. The title, however, belongs more properly to John Wyclif, who gave added permanency to the new tongue by translating into it the entire Bible.

1. John Wyclif (c. 1324–1384)

Life by Lewis Sergeant, Heroes of the Nations; Poole, Wyclif and Movements for Reform; Morley, Vol. v.; Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe.

The low ebb to which the Church had fallen has been already noted. Langland had written with fierce pen of the tendencies of the time, of pilgrims and palmers who went to Rome

And hadden leave to lien all hir life after;

of the great crowds of hermits,

Great loobies and long, that loath were to swink,

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that had entered orders their ease for to have"; of friars and pardoners

Preaching the people for profit of hem selve:
Glosed the gospel as hem good liked ;

For covetise of copes1 construed it as they would.

Gower in his aristocratic Latin had declaimed earnestly against Church abuses. Chaucer, under the guise of playful satire, had touched the evils. He had laughed heartily at the worldly monk, the wanton friar, and the mercenary pardoner; but even as he laughed he had left upon his page, etched sharp and deep, a burning sense

1 Rich clothes.

Wyclif's Connection with Oxford

His Reforms

of the utter mockery of it all, of the awful deadness of the spiritual life. If his picture be true, as it assuredly is," says Browne," who can wonder that Wyclif arose in England, and that the echo of his footsteps did not die out till Luther arose in Germany?"

Despite the narrowness and the utter unprogressiveness of the universities that were filling Europe with such a clattering of flails upon century-old straw, it was from out of them, after all, that nearly all the real reformers of the age were to come. Oxford had already produced a Roger Bacon, and now she was to send forth a still greater character. Until middle life John Wyclif was a schoolman of the ordinary type. He became early noted for his profound scholarship; he was made master of Balliol College, and later he became the leading figure in the English Church. The details of his career need not be given. Suffice it to say that he set himself vigorously against the tide of corruption that was fast destroying the Church; that he even denied the papal supremacy and questioned the fundamental doctrine of transubstantiation. As a result he found himself at war with the entire ecclesiastical body. The Pope launched five bulls against him; and his own college, after carefully examining his writings and finding two hundred and sixty-seven opinions worthy of fire," turned him out of its halls. Wyclif defended himself with a vigorous fusillade of pamphlets, a method of warfare of his own invention, but he undoubtedly would have suffered violence but for his powerful friend, John of Gaunt.

The greater part of Wyclif's writings are in Latin. It was only during the last six or eight years of his life that he devoted himself to the vernacular. To combat the

His Poor Priests

His Translation of the Bible

evils which the wandering friars and other ecclesiastics were bringing upon England, he had sent out from his little parish at Lutterworth, where he passed his last years, wandering preachers, who were known as Wyclif's poor priests, or as Lollards. The parish priest of Chaucer's Prologue, who was poor in purse

But riche he was of hooly thoght and werk,

is a perfect likeness of one of these holy men. They worked among the common people and gave, by their self-sacrificing and earnest preaching, a new ideal of the spiritual life. Within a few years they had well-nigh revolutionized England. For his band of workers Wyclif furnished sermons and tracts, written of necessity in English, for use among the masses; and to facilitate the work he began the translation of the Bible into the vernacular tongue. The great reformer did not attempt the work single-handed. Nicholas Hereford, his disciple, translated the greater part of the Old Testament, and his assistant at Lutterworth, Thomas Purvey, thoroughly revised the entire work, but the impress of the master mind is upon every page. The poor priests distributed the book widely, often dealing out pages or chapters to those too poor to afford more. Its popularity was marvelous. Despite the active efforts of its enemies during a long period to root it utterly out of England, no less than one hundred and fifty manuscripts in whole or in part still remain. "The Bible," says Sergeant," which had hitherto been jealously and mysteriously withheld, sank during these generations so deeply into the popular mind that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries found all England saturated with Biblical knowledge,'

Influence of Wyclif's Bible

Sir John Mandeville

Made as it was for the evangelization of the poor, Wyclif's Bible is written in the simple language of the common people. Its influence during the critical period of the English language was very great. Scattered thickly over all England, it became a model for later writers, and it did much to bring uniformity to the new tongue and to establish its vocabulary.

REQUIRED READING. The Books of Job, Psalms, etc., Clarendon Press Series, selections.

2. Sir John Mandeville (1300?-1371?)

Ac

Of Sir John Mandeville we know little save what comes from the pages of the book that bears his name. cording to the opening chapter of this work, he was born in St. Albans. Desiring to see the Holy Land he left England in 1322, and the spirit of wandering being upon him he continued to drift from land to land during the next thirty years.

He "passed thorghout Turkye, Ermonye the litylle and the grete, Tartarye, Percye, Surrye, Arabye, Egypt the high and the lowe; through Lybye, Culdee, and a gret partie of Ethiope; thorgh Amazoyne, Inde the lasse and the more, a gret partie; and thorought many other iles, that ben abouten Inde; where dwellen many dyverse folk, and of dyverse maneres and lawes, and of dyverse schappes of men."

The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Mandeville, which purports to be the record of this journey, is a strange mixture. Its descriptions of the Holy Land bear the marks of genuineness, they are evidently the work of an eye-witness; but when the narrative leaves the beaten path and wanders into regions vaguely known in the fifteenth century, it becomes correspondingly vague and increasingly marvelous. It tells with all seriousness of

His Voiage and Travaile

Its Simple Prose Style

a race of men having but one foot which they used as a sunshade, and of islands of adamant that draw irresistibly to themselves all ships having iron in their construction.

But the work is no longer taken seriously as the record of an actual traveler. It is rather an encyclopædia of travel, bringing under one cover all that was known or imagined during the Middle Ages concerning the world outside of Europe. It was translated from the French by an unknown author near the close of the century, and so skilfully was the work done that not until our own day was the hoax revealed.

But whoever its author, he was the master of a simple, straightforward prose style. It is the prose of a man who, like Wyclif, is writing for the common people, who has a story to tell, and who tells it in a terse, unlabored way. It can even now be read with interest. During the century after its publication, it was, with the single exception of Wyclif's Bible, the most popular book in England.

SUGGESTED READING. Mandeville in Early Travels in Palestine, Bohn; Morris and Skeat's Specimens, Part ii. For a complete analysis of the Mandeville question, see Encyclopædia Britannica.