Part II - The Fifteenth Century

Summary

Visitation of archbishop Arundel at Cambridge, 1401

He aims at the suppression of Lollardism

It was on the sixteenth of September, 1401, that Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, arrived in ‘a stately equipage’ at Cambridge, upon his visitation as metropolitan. The chancellor, doctors, and masters, whom he had already cited, appeared before him the following day in the Congregation House, and rendered their canonical obedience. Commissioners were appointed by the archbishop, who visited Trinity Hall, Clare, Gonville, Michaelhouse, Peterhouse, Pembroke, St. John's Hospital, St. Rhadegund's Nunnery, and the House of the White Canons, and on the nineteenth his grace departed for Ely. Before his departure, however, he had privately put to the chancellor and the doctors, successively and individually, ten questions, having reference to the discipline and general state of the university. Among them was one which, at that juncture, possessed no ordinary significance;—‘were there any,’ the archbishop asked, ‘suspected of Lollardism?’ The ashes of Wyclif had not yet been cast into the Swift, and his memory was still cherished at Oxford, but the preceding year had seen the appearance of the writ De Hœretico Comburendo, and, but a few months before, the first victim of that enactment, William Sautree, had perished at the stake. Such an inquiry, therefore, from a man of Arundel's determined character and known views, could scarcely fail to strike ominous forebodings into the minds of those students who favoured the doctrines of the great reformer.