Heresy Medieval English Style: Lollardy

Lollardy is the only significant and native form of Christian heresy to emerge and find practice in Medieval England. The name of the movement (a pejorative one) comes from a very significant habit of its adherents, the Lollards: they lolled their tongues as they read aloud the holy scripture. The significance of their name lies not so much in how they moved their tongues, as in what they did with them: they read religious literature and the Bible in their native tongue of English. This was a highly significant act in and of itself in Medieval Christendom, whose authoritarian Church wanted to keep such things as liturgy, biblical texts and theological treatises in Latin or Greek, and thereby out of direct access to the masses. But the Lollards came onto the scene at a rather exciting time in European history in general and in England specifically. In the 14th century, CE, there was significant upward mobility for the common folk, who could now afford to have their children educated. The government of society itself by now required a larger secular clerical class to manage emerging and expanding bureaucracies, and common folk properly educated found professional positions en masse. This greater involvement of commoners in government and cultural affairs meant that the vernacular tongue (English) began to see more official use. Educated professionals, however lowly with respect to the nobility (who still ultimately controlled society), began to take pride in their abilities and their class for its increasingly important contributions in the legal, administrative and legislative (Parliamentary) spheres of the Kingdom. Many of them were also no longer willing to endure the abuses of churchmen, which by the Late Middle Ages had grown rampant. You need not look far for this general discontent: Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are replete with satirical attacks on the corrupt practices of the Church, William Langland's Piers Plowman is an allegorical (sometimes bitterly humorous, sometimes serenely beautiful) folk epic on how to liberate oneself from a world corrupted by a cynical Church. Then there is John Wycliffe. Wycliffe was an Oxford Don and a Doctor of Theology. He was most articulately fed up with the abuses of the Church. He began to engage in an act that anywhere else in Christendom would have gotten him burned at the stake: he began writing learned treatises attacking the Church and its dogma. Fortunately for him, there were powerful men, devout Christians among the nobility, who were equally fed up. One in particular became his champion: John of Gaunt, a royal prince of England and sovereign duke of the shire of Lancaster. Taking advantage of this political protection against even the highest clerics of the land, Wycliffe enlisted his learned followers to begin translating the Bible into English, a project he knew would bring the literate but unlearned into a shared conviction that the Church had not been representing Christianity to them as Christ had intended. Before Wycliffe had died of natural causes, he had indeed spawned a popular movement, which was to dominate religious affairs in England for the latter half of the 14th century, culminate in a rebellion against severe political repression during the 'Teens of the 15th century, and persist in underground cells among literate common folk right into the emergent years of the Reformation movements of the 16th century. When John of Gaunt's nephew became king, that is, Richard II of England, Lollardy saw its golden age. Though King Richard himself was a devout Catholic and lover of high church ceremony, he was also, in practice, a tolerant man of Lollards. His wife, Queen Anne of Bohemia was equally so. Queen Anne herself was a religious scholar in her own right, reading holy scripture in Latin, Czech and in English! She also publicized the fact of her reading the Bible in English to her subjects. The royal court was full of Lollard knights, and no one critical of the Church's abuses was censored, much less persecuted. But Lollardy was more than just a reformist movement. The Fourteenth Century would be wracked by several waves of the Bubonic Plague, the worst taking place in the middle of that century. The sheer number of deaths (anywhere from three quarters to two thirds of the population, depending on the region, in the first wave alone) caused many people to question the assumptions about God, justice and the order of the world that the Church had led them to make. With such an horrific death toll, and priests telling them they were being punished by God for their sins, many people all over Europe sought a closer connection with and more intimate understanding of God. Mystical movements sprang up everywhere, and largely derived from a new devotion to contemplative prayer among the laity. In England, we have several mystical texts still extant that came out of the Post-Plague era of spiritual reawakening, two of them definitely written by women and all of them in English: Pearl, an anonymous poem about the death of a loved one written by the same man who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Cloud of Unknowing (another mystical poem of anonymous authorship), Showings by Julian of Norwich (who was a woman and religious anchorite who experienced powerful and moving visions that ran contrary to Church dogma), and the Book of Margery Kempe (a common woman of the merchant class who wrote an emotive autobiography of her own spiritual awakening). Lollardy was part and parcel to all this, but it was also clearly heretical in two significant ways: (1) it took up Wycliffe's reasoned argument that transubstantiation did not occur with the bread and wine during Communion (that is, they did not turn into the Body and Blood of Christ, (2) it took up Wycliffe's reasoned call for the Church to divest itself of material property and secular power. Because of these two positions above all else, Lollardy came on hard times indeed when King Richard II was deposed and starved to death, and a far more conservative regime took over. Under the succeeding king, Henry IV, edicts were issued outlawing Lollardy. Under his chief ally, Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, the Inquisition of the Dominican Order was allowed to set foot on English soil for the first (and last) time during the whole of the Middle Ages. Lollards were hunted down, summarily tried in courts of canon law, tortured, and finally burned at the stake for heresy. Lollard texts had to go underground and be exchanged in secret, which they were for fully a century more. A minor Lollard nobleman, Sir John Oldcastle, even lead a rural rebellion between 1413 and 1417, before his execution, in resistance to the political persecution of his sect. After that, the Lollards dwindled and practiced in secret in private gatherings in each other's homes. Yet Lollardy did not have an entirely pathetic end in terms of its legacy. During its happier era under Richard II, an educational exchange program occurred under the sponsorship of King Richard and Queen Anne, wherein, bright native Czechs from Anne's maiden home of Bohemia, were awarded scholarships for advanced study at the University of Oxford in England. There, these exchange students found the writings of one scholar particularly attractive: those of John Wycliffe. When they returned to their native Bohemia after completion of their studies, they brought back translations of Wycliffe's treatises in Czech, and the Czech people answered Wycliffe's call in a far more successful way than the Lollards: they founded the Hussite movement, which after several wars against the militantly repressive Papacy, they won autonomy and political recognition for their religious sect, the only heresy to successfully do so within Catholic Christendom. Needless to say, the Czechs beat the German Lutherans by a century in having their liturgy, hymnody and holy scripture in their native tongue.