Chapter VII - The Latter Years

Summary

Lollardy was perhaps the chief problem with which the Church in England had to deal in the fifteenth century. Up till then England had been practically free from heresy. When the returning Crusaders brought back with them from the East ideas which were not in line with the orthodox teaching of the Church, or when social unrest gave birth to bitter criticism of the clergy and the demand for a religion without priest or sacrament, England seems to have been strangely unaffected. Consequently the movement initiated by John Wyclif towards the end of the fourteenth century put both Church and State very much on their guard. In 1401 Parliament passed the savage statute De haeretico comburendo, and in the same year that ‘malleus haereticorum’, Archbishop Arundel, visited the University of Cambridge and demanded ‘whether any were suspected of Lollardism or any other heretical pravity’. The answer must have been a negative one, for Cambridge at this time appears to have preserved a blameless orthodoxy, so that in later years the poet Lydgate could write:

‘By recorde all clarkes seyne the same

Of heresie Cambridge bare never blame’.

In this ‘blameless’ atmosphere the school of the Franciscans at Cambridge continued to produce able men who could take their part in the religious controversies of the time.