4 - The Contest over the Public Imagination of Inquisition, 1380–1430

Summary

Trawling through the questions and answers recorded as part of official records of medieval inquisitorial processes, which seem to end most often in convictions and abjurations, a reader might wonder what the point of it all was when apparently the crucial question was whether the suspect was willing to submit their opinions to the determinations of the church. As Paul Strohm puts it in his discussion of William Sawtre's 1401 trial, ‘If resignation to the authority of the Church is all that is actually sought, and if interrogation about eucharistic belief is only a pretext for demanding such a resignation, then can the question be said really to matter?’ But for those in England from 1380 to 1430, the question was not whether the questions mattered so much as how they mattered.

When in May 1382 Archbishop William Courtenay circulated a general mandate to the bishops reminding them that they held the office of inquisitors into heretical depravity and ordering them to proceed against anyone holding any of the twenty-four Wycliffite conclusions condemned at Blackfriars the week before, he inaugurated systematic heresy prosecutions in England. From then, until the centralisation and standardisation of anti-heresy measures were completed in 1428, clerics and laity, bishops and suspects were learning how to make inquisition as they went.