The dispute between the Durham Benedictine Uthred of Boldon and members of the mendicant orders on the issue of ecclesiastical possessions was only one in a series of intra-clerical controversies in England during the later fourteenth century. Spanning a decade from the early 1360s to the early 1370s, it occupies a crucial area between the attack on mendicant privileges by Richard FitzRalph, the archbishop of Armagh, and Wyclif's denunciation of the endowed church. C. H. Thompson first pointed to the importance of this period between the activities of FitzRalph and those of Wyclif for the development of political thought. The issue has recently become more pressing with Wendy Scase's identification of the development of a “new anticlericalism” in the later fourteenth century. Older traditions of anticlericalism, she claims, had as their targets specific classes of cleric. These traditions, however, were established during this period on a new basis that allowed them to become anticlerical in the fullest sense of the word. “The old traditions of opposition to clerics were developed and unified in a new polemic which opposed all clerics. This was the essential strength and danger of the new anticlericalism.” The present study concentrates on one central aspect of this extension of the anticlerical polemic: the attack on ecclesiastical endowment.
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