Chapter 63. Morning Stars of Dissent: Wycliffe, the Lollards, Hus and the Council of Constance

Between the Black Death and the printing press, two university reformers raised most of the objections that Martin Luther would bring against Rome a century later. John Wycliffe of Oxford and Jan Hus of Prague attacked clerical wealth, the claims of the papacy and the priesthood’s monopoly on scripture. The Council of Constance (1414-1418) ended the Western Schism and in the same years condemned both men. The library’s sources read this episode in several ways: as a chapter in the history of censorship (Fellion and Inglis), as a consequence of the plague (Kennedy, Byrne), as the start of the intellectual revival of the West (Freeman), as a political miscalculation (Kerrigan), as a step in the making of representative institutions (Grzymała-Busse), and as a providential prologue to the Protestant Reformation (Ellen G. White). This chapter follows all of these readings.

The plague and the crisis of clerical authority

Jonathan Kennedy places Wycliffe directly in the aftermath of the Black Death. “When more than half of your friends, family and neighbors die suddenly and painfully in quick succession”, he writes, people naturally ask how best to secure salvation. In his account the Church “failed to satisfy the spiritual needs of the population” but “succeeded in making a profit off believers’ existential angst”, promoting the sale of indulgences “from the 1350s, on papal orders” [Kennedy, Pathogenesis, #62044, ch. 4 “Medieval Plagues”]. J. Byrne describes the first official responses: civic Masses, processions, relics and images “thought to be useful in quelling the divine rage”. He also describes a rupture of clerical mediation. The bishop of Bath and Wells “famously allowed those in his diocese to confess their sins ‘to any lay person, even to a woman if a man'” could not be found. Byrne treats the flight of clergy, some “out of greed”, as a recurring theme of the plague sources and cites William Dene of Rochester [Byrne, Daily Life during the Black Death, #37134, “Religious Responses and Clergy Roles During the Plague”]. The reference shelf records that the plague, which reached England in 1348, made “a deep and abiding impression” on Wycliffe. He saw it as “an indictment of an unworthy clergy”, whose replacements were in his view “uneducated or generally disreputable” [Wikipedia: John Wycliffe].

Wycliffe’s programme

The reference shelf summarises Wycliffe’s theory of dominion: “the church was not allowed to own property or have ecclesiastic courts, and men in mortal sin were not entitled to exercise authority in the church or state, nor to own property”; he “insisted on the radical poverty of all clergy” [Wikipedia: John Wycliffe]. Kennedy gives the programme in pastoral terms. Wycliffe attacked parish priests “who had no time for preaching the gospel” and popes who claimed to be God’s representatives. He found “no justification in the scriptures” for Mass attendance, penance, prayer to saints or indulgences, and held that “the clergy were not required to mediate laypeople’s relationship with God”, the Bible being “the only reliable guide” and to be read “in the vernacular” [Kennedy, #62044, ch. 4]. Fellion and Inglis add his denial of transubstantiation, which made his teaching “still more dangerous”. They record the 1381 Oxford ban on two of his theses, his withdrawal to Lutterworth, and his escape from personal condemnation “until his death in 1384” [Fellion & Inglis, Censored, #63326, “Wycliffite Bible” chapter]. Kennedy points to the political protection he received: “the English political elite… saw him as a useful tool in their struggle with the Roman Church over power and money” [Kennedy, #62044, ch. 4].

Charles Freeman describes the programme Hus inherited from Wycliffe as “a purer church, centred on direct devotion to Christ and free of the corruptions of wealth and lax morality” [Freeman, The Reopening of the Western Mind, #64786, Hus passage]. He places it in a longer quarrel over church property going back to the Gregorian reform and the Donation of Constantine, in which “the clergy had emerged as a celibate caste who had access to immense wealth” [Freeman, #64786].

The English Bible and the Lollard networks

Fellion and Inglis present Lollardy as a case of censorship centred on a book. They describe the English translation of the Vulgate as “a team effort, probably involving Wyclif himself and some of his Oxford associates”. It had a literal Early Version from the early 1380s and a more natural Later Version copied from about 1390, and “the translations themselves were orthodox and true to the Vulgate text”. The Later Version’s Genesis opens: “In the bigynnyng God made of nouȝt heuene and erthe” [Fellion & Inglis, #63326, “Wycliffite Bible” chapter]. The reference shelf notes that recent scholarship has “minimised the extent” of Wycliffe’s personal involvement [Wikipedia: John Wycliffe]. Kennedy dates the first Middle English translation to 1382 and gives Wycliffe “a prominent role” in it [Kennedy, #62044, ch. 4].

The movement spread below the universities. “Networks of Wycliffites (or ‘Lollards’) formed, in households and villages, around those who could read portions of the Bible aloud or who had learned passages by rote.” They met for preaching and, “in the scholar Margaret Aston’s words, ‘underground reading parties’—outdoors, in churches where priests were sympathetic, in taverns, and in private houses. There were wandering preachers, books and editions, and schools” [Fellion & Inglis, #63326, “Wycliffite Bible” chapter]. Women read and preached as well, and the Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards, nailed to the door of Westminster Hall in 1395, claimed that “every true man and woman in God’s law [may] make the sacrament of the bread without any such miracle”. The opposition was openly elitist. The chronicler Henry Knighton complained that “the pearl of the gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine”, and Thomas Hoccleve told women to spin yarn, “for your wit | Is al to feeble to despute of it!” [Fellion & Inglis, #63326, “Wycliffite Bible” chapter]. The authors also record that one leader of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, John Ball, “was described as a follower of Wyclif”. Some contemporaries therefore read Lollardy as a political as well as a religious threat [Fellion & Inglis, #63326, “Wycliffite Bible” chapter].

Kennedy adds a literary witness. Chaucer’s Parson “is the only religious figure in The Canterbury Tales who is portrayed in a positive light, and he appears to be a Lollard”, described as “poor in wealth, perhaps, but rich in thought and holy works”. Chaucer’s venal Pardoner, by contrast, sells absolution with fake relics, among them “a sheep’s shoulder bone” [Kennedy, #62044, ch. 4].

The machinery of suppression

Fellion and Inglis set out the escalation in stages. The Blackfriars Council of 1382, called by Archbishop William Courtenay, condemned Wycliffite propositions, and suspensions, imprisonments and excommunications followed at Oxford. Boniface IX’s mandate of 1395 called for action against the sect. The statute De heretico comburendo of 1401 prescribed burning for heretics who refused to abjure or who relapsed. Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409 followed, which Nicholas Watson calls “one of the most draconian pieces of censorship in English history”. They banned unlicensed preaching, required monthly orthodoxy checks at Oxford, and “prohibited all translations of scripture from Wyclif’s time or later, except those that were allowed by special permission”. By 1411 an Oxford committee had found “267 heresies and errors” and Wycliffe’s works were burned at Carfax. After a 1412 prohibition by the antipope John XXIII they were burned again at St Paul’s in 1413 [Fellion & Inglis, #63326, “Wycliffite Bible” chapter]. Executions continued long after Constance. John Claydon, an illiterate skinner who had Lollard books read to him, was condemned in 1415. Joan Boughton, over eighty, was burned in 1494 saying “all the fyre in London shuld not hurt hyr”; her followers gathered her ashes [Fellion & Inglis, #63326, “Wycliffite Bible” chapter].

Jan Hus in Prague

Freeman writes that Hus “was dean of the faculty of philosophy at the new Prague university and later, 1412, its rector”. He describes him as “energetic and deeply committed to his cause” and “set on church reform”, with “Wyclif’s works” providing “the inspiration for his own programme” [Freeman, #64786]. The reference shelf gives an earlier chronology: dean in 1401, rector “a year later”, preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel from 1402. It also records that Hus translated Wycliffe’s Trialogus into Czech after the 1403 ban, attacked the antipope John XXIII’s sale of indulgences, and was excommunicated and exiled [Wikipedia: Jan Hus]. Ellen G. White’s Adventist history opens its chapter “Huss and Jerome” by noting that the Gospel had been planted in Bohemia in the ninth century, “the Bible had been translated and divine services were held in the language of the people”. In her account Hus travelled to Constance amid crowds who “thronged to meet him”, trusting the emperor’s safe-conduct [White, Tragedia Veacurilor vol. 1, #13034, ch. 6 “Huss şi Ieronim”].

Constance: schism, conciliarism and the stake

The Council of Constance did several things at once. It deposed the antipope John XXIII; Kerrigan quotes Gibbon that “the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest”. It ended the Western Schism in 1417 by removing Benedict XIII, who refused to accept the verdict [Kerrigan, Dark History of the Catholic Church, #71131, ch. 4]. Anna Grzymała-Busse places its political meaning in the conciliar claim: “The Council of Constance (1414–8) affirmed conciliarism, or the primacy of councils over popes, even if at the Council of Basel (1431–49), the papacy defeated it” [Grzymała-Busse, Sacred Foundations, #62062]. Her broader argument is that church institutions supplied templates for representation and sovereignty that secular states later adopted.

The same council condemned the reformers. Fellion and Inglis: “he and the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus were formally declared heretics. Hus was burned alive and Wyclif’s bones were burned, as were, once more, his books” [Fellion & Inglis, #63326, “Wycliffite Bible” chapter]. Kennedy gives the sequence more exactly. “In 1415, three decades after Wycliffe’s death, the Council of Constance declared him a heretic”, ordering his writings destroyed and his remains removed from consecrated ground; “the latter order wasn’t carried out until 1428, when Wycliffe’s body was exhumed and burned” and the ashes cast into the river. He quotes a seventeenth-century writer: “This brook conveyed them into the Avon; Avon to the Severn; Severn to the narrow seas; they into the main Ocean. And thus the ashes of Wycliffe were the emblem of his doctrine” [Kennedy, #62044, ch. 4]. Hus was burned on 6 July 1415 [Wikipedia: Jan Hus]. White writes that his ashes and the earth beneath them were thrown into the Rhine, and that “the violation of the safe-conduct had raised a storm of indignation”. She says this was why the council at first tried to make Hus’s companion Jerome recant rather than burn him. Jerome later went to the same place “singing on the way, his face lit with joy and peace” [White, #13034, ch. 6]. The reference shelf dates Jerome’s death at Constance to 30 May 1416 [Wikipedia: Jerome of Prague].

From condemnation to revolt, and the confessional reading

Kerrigan judges the policy a failure: “The execution of Jan Hus in 1415 was intended to make an example of the Czech reformer. It did, but it was an example of the wrong kind.” Today, he writes, Hus’s teachings “are seen as paving the way for Luther and the Reformation” [Kerrigan, #71131, “Hussite Hostilities”]. The reference shelf records the result: the Hussites refused another Catholic king and “defeated five consecutive papal crusades between 1420 and 1431”. Bohemia and Moravia remained majority Hussite until the Battle of the White Mountain (1620) [Wikipedia: Jan Hus]. A theological verdict thus produced a national and military rising.

The “morning star” image has two sources. Kennedy asks why Wycliffe “is only known as the ‘Morning Star of the Reformation’, whereas Luther is portrayed as its father, mother and midwife”, since Luther’s key arguments “had been raised by Wycliffe 150 years earlier in the wake of the Black Death”. His answer is the printing press, itself in his view a labour-saving response to plague depopulation: 300,000 Luther pamphlets had been printed by 1521 [Kennedy, #62044, ch. 4]. White states the confessional version: “In the fourteenth century there arose in England the ‘morning star of the Reformation’, John Wycliffe, who was the herald of reform not only for England but for all Christendom” [White, #13034]. Freeman warns against the “persistent myth” that the Reformation was simply “a moment of liberation from superstition and the corruption of the Catholic Church” [Freeman, #64786].

Key points

• Kennedy and Byrne root late-medieval dissent in the Black Death: clerical deaths and flight, lay confession, and the indulgence trade.
• Wycliffe taught dominion by grace, clerical poverty, scripture as sole guide and the denial of transubstantiation. The English elite protected him (Kennedy), and he died uncondemned in 1384.
• Fellion and Inglis treat Lollardy as a censorship case: household “underground reading parties” (Aston), then Blackfriars (1382), De heretico comburendo (1401) and Arundel’s Constitutions (1409).
• Chaucer’s Parson appears to be a Lollard, the only positively drawn cleric in the Tales (Kennedy).
• The sources date Hus’s offices differently: Freeman has him rector in 1412, the reference shelf dean in 1401 and rector a year later. All agree that Wycliffe inspired his programme.
• Constance affirmed conciliarism (Grzymała-Busse), ended the Western Schism and burned Hus (1415) and Jerome (1416). Wycliffe’s remains were burned in 1428 (Kennedy).
• Kerrigan calls Hus’s execution “an example of the wrong kind” that led to the Hussite Wars and five defeated crusades.
• The “morning star” label is used historically by Kennedy and providentially by White’s Adventist narrative. Freeman cautions against the liberation myth of the Reformation.