. c. Excerpt from K. B.McFarlane's ":John Wycliff and English Non-Conformity", English Universities Press LTD, 1952. Ch. 2 "The Government and the Church.
The Government and the Church
Wycliffe's political adventure owed much to those under whose patronage he was now in the early 1370s called upon to speak and act. The last years of Edward III's reign form on of the most confused periods in fourteenth-century history. If we ask in whose employment the Oxford master was earning his promotion, the reply that it was the king's, though formally correct, is practically inadequate. For a group, and a far from coherent group, of lay politicians was at this time disposing of the royal power. Much of the significance of Wycliffe's exploits is lost if one does not realize the abnormal conditions under which the government of England was being carried on during he decade of his political activity. It was a period of royal minority, in which the childhood of Ricahrd of Bordeaux immediately followed the second childhhod of his grandfather, Edward III. In the only sense that mattered, the country was without a head.
Now, in medieval England the form of government was monarchical and the very first conditio nof its political health was that the king should rule; rule, of course, according to law and custom and with due regard for the opinion of those whose birth or office entitled them to counsel him, but, above all, rule. His personal initiative and supervision were essential. That being so, a minority offered an insoluble problem. There could be no one with a clear title to exercise the royal authority on behalf of an infant king. Even when there was someone with prestige and experience, and uncle or an elder statesman, it was generally unwise to entrust him with much power. And similar trouble might arise in the case of a king who became a dotard or an invalid, unless his heir was fit for the task. Usually the monarchy was put into commission and a council of the great empowered to act as trustees. But it was an artificial arrangement and rarely worked well for long. Miinorities could, in fact, only cease to put an intolerable strain upon the machinery of government when monarchy had become so limited as to be no longer personal.
When a young man Edward III had been as active, if not as assiduous in business, as his grandfather Edward I, but unlike him he wore badly. Soon after his fiftieth birthday (he was born in 1312), he began to lose interest in his work. Although his physical vigour was not so impaired as to prevent him from spending much of his time hunting, his metal grasp and attention to duty gradually slackened. This became more marked after the death of his queen in 1369, and thenceforward he passed much of his time as a recluse in his country manor-houses and hunting-boxes; even his rare visits to the capital were often secret and unconnected with official business. Nor was he satisfied with the pleasure of the chase and of the cellar. As his health declined, he fell more and more under the influence of Alice Perrers, a grasping an unscrupulous woman who had became his mistress by December 1364 and was to stay with him long enough to rob his corpse.
One of the troubles of Edward's dotage was that it was neither sudden nor complete. Had it been so, definite steps to deal with the situation might have been forced upon the baronage. As it was, the king was lazy rather than imbecile. Ther4 could be no formal regency; he was still nominally fit to rule, and a crisis might rouse him to brief activity or to a display of that affability which still disarmed criticism. But the necessary driving-force behind government was lacking and confusion was the inevitable result.
The king's withdrawal found the greater offices of state in the control of a group of clerical ministers headed by William Wickham, an able civil servant of humble family who had in 1367 been advanced by royal patronage to the rich see of Winchester. From 1363, if not before, until his dismissal in 1371, Wickham enjoyed a position of rare influence. As the chronicler Froissart put it with little exaggeration, 'everything was done by him and without him nothing was done'. That this could be said of any subject was a measure of the decline of the royal authority since Edward's middle years. It is possible that this state of affairs might have lasted until the end of the reign had England remained at peace. But at the beginning of 1369 the French declared war. A series of English reverses and the prospect of high taxation led to a demand, in which lords and commons joined in the parliament of February 1371, for the removal of the clerical administration and its replacement by laymen more in touch with the country's military needs. The king made no obvious attempt to retain his former servants in office. For the rest of the reignΓÇöand Edward survived until 21 June 1377ΓÇöthe direction of affairs, with intermittent and increasingly rare participation by the king, rested in the hands of a council in which lay interests predominated.
In the absence of most of the councilor records for this period, it is difficult to pin responsibility for decisions taken upon individuals or groups of councilors. According to hostile chroniclers the ringleader of the opposition to Wickham in 1371 had been the twenty-four-year-old John Hastings, earl of Pembroke, already a soldier of renown, a notorious evil-liver and credited with greedy designs upon the liberties of the church. That his quarrel with Wickham was merely political was shown next year when he appointed the bishop one of his executors. It was more to the point that he was closely associated with Edward, prince of Wales, under whose command he had recently served.
The Black Prince, after a military career which, empty of achievement as it may appear to us, had put him in the forefront of European commanders, was a mortally sick man when after eight years' absence he returned to England in January 1371. His ill-health prevented him from playing for long the role in government to which he was entitled by inheritance and personal prestige. But at first, at least, he showed some activity, and right down to his death on 8 June 1376 he was, or was thought to be, a powerful influence behind the scenes. Like most heirs to the throne, he was willing for it to be believed that he shared the country's mistrust of his father's intimates. In fact, he seems to have been on good terms with most of them and must bear considerable responsibility for what was done in 1371 and after. His only living child, the future Richard II, born at Bordeaux in 1367, was not yet out of the nursery. As the prince's health gave way, his place as the old king's deputy was taken by his next surviving brother, John, duke of Lancaster, a rather ambiguous figure who was to hold the stage in a variety of parts for more than another quarter of a century.
Contemporaries differed widely in their estimates of John's character. but at least agreed that it was not colorless. It is significant that foreign observers, untouched by the fractiousness of English politics, lean to the more favorable view. This was perhaps because, like his father and brothers, he accepted without question the chivalrous traditions of his order. He was conventional in everything, in his devoutness as much as in his courtoisie. Restless, proud and somewhat incautious in his arrogance, enormously wealthy, open-handed and personally maganificent, he was boudn to inspire both admiratin and mistrust. But if he made enemies, he was successful in drawing withing his orbit most of the ablest careerists of his day. Though his achievements as a solider were more showy than lasting, he had his victories in diplomacy. He preferred an advantageous peace to the chances of war and it would have been better for his father's empire had the English barons shared his insight. Well served he certainly was, and within the limitations of his class and training not without a political dexterity of his own. As a none-too-friendly observer tell su, 'the temporal lords always feared John the Gaunt because of his might, his prudence and his extraordinary ability'. In appearance he was a 'tall spare man, well-nit and erect, as soldier should be, a man whose conversation was reserved, having something which with an enemy would pass for haughtiness and with a friend for dignity'. His loyalty to his father, his elder brother and afterwards to the young king his nephew was unshakable. Even John Wycliffe, the persecuted heretic, never had any reason to doubt Lancaster's constancy as a friend.
The Black Prince and his brother were the natural leaders of the council during their father's incapacity. But they did not enjoy an unlimited use of the executive power and they wer often absent by reason of illness or of business elsewhere. Responsibility was shared with those earls, barons and knights who, along with a few bishops and clerks, made up the body of active councillors. Their main concer was naturally with the conduct of the war, to success in which all else (save private advantage) was vainly subordinated. Its mounting cost-and from the first operatiions went bgadlyΓÇödrove them to plunge blindly into a hear-on quarrel with the church. This was no more successful thatn the French war. When the sound and the fury died down in the inevitable compromise, it was seen that the only lasting sufferers were th eheavily taxed clergy and th egoverment's academic champtions; it utterly destroyed the ecclesiastical prospects of one rising Oxford theoligian. Its repsonsibility for Whcliffe's worldly ruin makes a brief account of its origins necessary here.
By the reign of Edward II centuries of mutual accommodation had greatly reduced the area of possible dispute between the claims of church and state. There was, for example, little disposition any longer to question the working agreement which had defined the frontiers between the two systems of law. What was called benefit of clergy' exempted a clerk from punishment for felony in the royal courts, but for all other purposes he was subject to the law of the land. The layman I his turn was liable to trial in the courts Christian by a bishop or some other judge for a variety of misdeeds (many of them serious) and was obliged to have resort therefor the hearing of all matrimonial and testamentary causes. What was more, the royal power was at their disposal of the ecclesiastical judges to enforce their sentences on clerk and layman alike. The church, on its side, was willing to tolerate the right of a lay patron to dispose of the livings in his gift and made no attempt to burden the laity with taxation other than the customary tithes and dues. But althoughthe gap had been partly closed, there was still some room for idsagreement. The two great issues over which the battle in Wycliffe's day was fought were the taxation of the clergy and the pope's claim to appoint to the higher offices of the church of England. These defied a peaceful solution precisely because they were of vital stratetic importance to both parties. Both were of long standing, but time had done little to weaken their urgency.
Although all Englishmen served two masters, the ones who were most often made aware of their dual dependence were those subjects of the king who were 'the men of Holy Church' par excellence, the English clergy; and never more painfully aware than by taxation. They probably numbered rather more than 2 per cent. Of the total population; that is to say, from fifty to sixty thousand souls. Between them they possessed huge endowments which they owed to the past generosity of pious laymen and which had been increased in value by the good management of successions of clerical landlords. Their property, which may have yielded an income three times that of the king, was not at all evenly divided among them. While the majority of churchmen were little better off than the peasants they lived among, a few, known opprobriously to their critics as 'possessioners'ΓÇöor, as we might say, capitalistsΓÇöenjoyed large revenues and kept great state. They, very naturally, were those from whom the taxes were demanded: the bishops and abbots, whose revenues equaled those of the wealthiest laymen' the scores of deans, archdeacons, and prebendaries, holding three, four or even more stalls in cathedral collegiate churches together with at least one well-paid living, who enjoyed stipends that a rich knight might envy.
That these 'possessioners', themselves so much a part of the fabric of contemporary landed society, should have been required to subscribe their quota towards the expenses of government, especially in time of war, was only reasonable. No one likes paying taxes, however convinced he may be that they are needed. What hardened reluctance to meet the king's demands into indignant opposition was that the clergy were exposed to similar pressure from a financially embarrassed pope. The latter, by the exercise of an absolute authority which ecclesiastical law and practice acknowledged to be his, could dispose freely of the property of all churchmen without even needing to obtain their consent. The right to tax belonged to what was called 'the fullness of his power' (plenitudo potestatis.) Direct papal taxation began in 1199 with a special levy to pay for the Fourth Crusade, but it was not long before this was converted into a series of regular and frequent imposts for the general purpose of the Roman see. The English clergy might, and did, protest that they were being ruined in the interests of a policy that did not concern them; they could not deny the papal right to tax. But if they were powerless, their lay masters were not prepared to allow them to be exploited for the benefit of others. The king could make himself thoroughly unpleasant about the steady flow of English gold overseas; and he could at a pinch stop its export altogether. Nothing but a share of the proceeds could secure his connivance at papal taxation. What that share was to be was matter for constant negotiation. By the reign of Edward II it amounted to 92 per cent of the total yield, or three times the sum that the clergy voted that king direct.
The pope, therefore, was virtually taxing the English clergy for the king's benefit; his own advantage scarcely justified the trouble of collection. It is hardly surprising that with the outbreak of Edward III's war with France the papacy, quite out of sympathy with the objects of royal expenditure, discontinued its taxation. There was no papal tax between the beginning of the war in 1337 and the peace of 1360. That which immediately followed the treaty of Calais was paid to Edward III as a contribution towards the ransom of King John of France; the English clergy, that is to say, were mulcted o relieve the French treasury. When, however, Gregory XI in 1372 decided to revive the practice he did not intend Edward III to benefit at all; it was because he badly needed money himself.
That the English clergy had had no papal tax to pay during the first part of the Hundred Years War did not mean that they had enjoyed a period of unusual immunity. Like their lay brethren, they had been most heavily taxed by the king. The taxation had been screwed out of them in the teeth of rising opposition. The two convocations of Canterbury and York had even offered successful resistance to the king's demands for money. In 1356, for example, a deputation of lay councilors sent to that of the southern province was obliged to content itself with a sixth of what was asked, even though the bishops at least affected to be in favour of something more generous. A crisis might have arisen earlier but for the interval of peace; it was precipitated by the renewal of the war.
In the parliament of June 1369 the commons agreed to an increased duty on exported wool for three years. The prelates, asked to arrange for the grant of an annual tenth from the clergy for the same period, demurred until they had had a chance to consult their inferior brethren who were not in parliament. For some reason, perhaps on account of the plague which raged that summer, it was decided to take sounding sin diocesan synods instead of the usual provincial convocations. For the clergy this cumbrous procedure had the advantage of making agreement slow. No grant had been made by the autumn when the king ordered both convocations to be assembled. In that of Canterbury, which met at St. Paul's in London in January and February 1370, no amount of haranguing by the councilors, including John of Gaunt and Archbishop Wittlesey himself, would induce the lesser clergy to agree to the whole of the king's demands. Their offer of two-thirds was rejected by the council. It was only after a fresh appeal that their obstinacy seems at last to have been overcome. This concession, made in response to the rising temper of the laity, came too late to prevent indignation from boiling over int he parliament of the following year. The clerical ministers were its first victims.
At least part of the trouble in 1369-70 had been due to an attempt to commit the church to taxation in advance of, even possibly altogether without, the consent of its traditional representative in convocation ; to assert the supremacy of parliament. The prelates had successfully resisted this attack, but it was repeated once more in 1371 by the new government which had driven Wickham and his episcopal colleagues from office. To meet the needs of the army it was thought necessary to raise pounds 100,000 by direct taxation. The commons agreed to make provision for half this amount on the understanding that the church was answerable for the remainder. The bishops and abbots who sat in parliament insisted on referring the matter to the two convocations. This time their reply was unacceptable to the laymen in control and a critical debate followed, It was characteristic of the divisions within the church's own ranks that the ensuing offensive against the 'possessioners', though undoubtedly inspired and throughout maintained by such anti-clerical hotheads as the earl of Pembroke, was noisilky supported by ecclesiastics. Those lesser loyalties that bred strife between monks, friars and secular priests at Oxford so far trimphed in 1371 that the laity's spokesmen before parliament were two Austin friars. Like the other mendicant orders, the Austins had long entertained opinions in favour of a return to the simple poverty of the Apostles, which made them feared critics of the 'possessioners', and defied every official attempt to stamp them out.
The record only establishes the identity of one of the two friars; John Bankin, a D.D. from the Oxford house of his order, where Wycliffe was accustomed to lecture. This makes Wycliffe's own presence in the parliament of 1371 the more significant; it may be supposed that he was there to encourage his friends. Though, as far as we know, he remained silent, the views they expressed were at least afterwards his own. Bankin and his unnamed brother put in a brief treatise in which they argued with the usual profuse citation of authorities dear to scholastic disputanst that it was justifiable to seize the property of the church for the common good. What pious laymen had given could lawfully be resumed by their heirs in the interests of self-preservation. The prelates were rebuked for having set a bad example of selfishness in a national emergency. It is not surprising that an abbot present took careful note of these hostile propositions. The vigilance of the ecclesiastical authorities had been aroused and henceforward they would be quick to track down and expose these and similar errors. The point of Bankin's argument was equally quickly grasped by his lay audience. For Wycliffe reports having heard one lord declare, 'when war breaks out we must take from the endowed clergy a position of their temporal possessions as property that belongs to us and in common to the whole kingdom'. Nevertheless, the spiritual peers braved it out; they would only consent to the grant of pounds 50,000demanded of them if it received the approval of convocation. They did not decline to recommend their inferiors to acquiesce, and with the parliament decided to be content.
The middling clergy, on whom the burden fell most heavily, showed their normal reluctance to vote the desired tax. The convocatio of Canterbury province assembled at St. Paul's on 24 April 1371 and held out for a fortnight. It was not until it had met in special session in the presence of the Black Prince and other magnates at the duke of Lancaster's Savoy Palace that on 3 May it yielded tothe remaining 10,000 pounds was to be found by the poorer province of York. Such a heavy impost was unprecedented and provoked more than one monastic chronicler to angry lamentation. The hoped-for total was only obtained by squeezing those clerty whl were traditionally exempt. Even so, the bishop collectors were still some thousands of pounds in arrears in the autumn of 1372.
Hardly had this enormous sum been granted, and while it was still in process of extraction, when the harassed clergy in April 1372 learnt that they were about to be asked to find another 20.000 pounds to help pay for the wars of Gregory XI in Italy. Their groans achieved some slight alleviation when on 1 July the pope agreed to be content with 100,000 crowns (15,800 pounds) instead, provided that this sum was remitted punctually in two instalments at Easter and Michaelmas 1373. The bishops, had they been left to themselves, would scarcely have ventured to disobey this unwelcome order; but they were spared a painful compliance by the swift intervention of the laity. The government forbade them to levy the subsidy demanded, replied in kind to Gregory's indignant remonstrances and even went so far as to arrest and imprison one of his agents. The clergy were not slow to withhold their contributions once it was clear that responsibility for their inaction had been shouldered by the council. Not a penny reached the papal coffers at Avignon by the dates appointed.
Heartened by this easy victory and evidently believing that Gregory's lack of money would make him amenable to pressure, the councillors were tempted to drive their advantage home on a wider front. They had other grievances which the renewal of the war sharpened. If papal taxation at such a moment seemed intolerable, hardly less so did the pope's claim to fill certain benefices in England, especially when those he nominated were the king's enemies. It has already been noted that the Roman see had consistently refrained from any attempt to impede the lay owner of an advowson in the free exercise of his right of presentation. Since a more aggressive policy here would have achieved nothing but vexation, this restraint was wise. No such self-denial, on the other hand, was necessary in the case of those numberous benefices, including the most valuable, which were in the figt, either by presentation or election, of ecclesiastics.
The medieval bishop possessed, when he was allowed to enjoy it in peace, an extensive patronage. Not only did he present to the many livings with which his see had usually been endowed, but he had as a rule the right to fill the stalls in his cathedral (if it were not a monastery) and often in several other collegiate churches as well. The bishop of Exeter, for example, appointed the canons of Bosham in Sussex and of Glasney in Cornwall in addition to those of Exeter itself; and the four archdeaconries of Exeter, Barnstaple, Totnes and Cornwall could be used by him to advance his kinsmen or his servants to places of rank and wealth. Elsewhere, the bishop of Lincoln had eight archdeaconries at his disposal and the arch
