A Neglected Wycliffite Text

Abstract

Modern accounts of the Wycliffite movement and of the beliefs of its adherents have been based for the most part upon records compiled by opponents. Most obviously hostile are the episcopal registers and documents, though these have the advantage of being relatively prolific and almost always dated and localised; inevitably, secular records about the movement become more ample as Lollardy was identified with sedition. The surviving chronicles, such as those of Knighton or Walsingham, were largely written by members of those orders that Wyclif castigated throughout his teaching. The picture constructed from these records has sometimes been filled out with details from overtly hostile and polemical texts such as Netter's Doctrinale. Given such sources, it is hardly surprising that the accounts appear incomplete, even at times incoherent and contradictory. Episcopal registers, as has been suggested elsewhere, present only fragmentary records of the views they condemned; polemical authors, and even chroniclers, often wrote with hindsight, an advantage to their own argument, but a disqualification to their usefulness as historical sources. Particularly in the case of Lollardy, where increasing opposition from the ecclesiastical hierarchy was reinforced after about 1400 by suspicion of treason so amply confirmed in the Oldcastle revolt, late texts are peculiarly unreliable. McFarlane, in his posthumously published lectures, suggested that many aspects of the movement ‘are irremediably hidden from us’, unless ‘new material is found of a kind and quantity so far unsuspected’.

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