The Reformation

by Will Durant

  The power of the priest lay in his right to administer the sacraments. Wyclif turned to these with a full anticipation of Luther and Calvin. He denied the necessity of auricular confession, and advocated a return to the voluntary public confession favored by the early Christians. ‘Privy confession made to priests... is not needful, but brought in late by the Fiend; for Christ used it not, nor any of His Apostles after Him.’38 It now makes men thralls to the clergy, and is sometimes abused for economic or political ends; and ‘by this privy shriving a friar and a nun may sin together.’39 Good laymen may absolve a sinner more effectively than wicked priests; but in truth only God can absolve. In general we should doubt the validity of a sacrament administered by a sinful or heretical priest. Nor can a priest, good or bad, change the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the physical body and blood of Christ. Nothing seemed to Wyclif more abominable than the thought that some of the priests whom he knew could perform such a Godcreating miracle.40 Like Luther, Wyclif denied transubstantiation, but not the Real Presence; by a mystery that neither pretended to explain, Christ was made ‘spiritually, truly, really, effectively’ present, but along with the bread and wine, which did not (as the Church taught) cease to exist.41

  Wyclif would not admit that these ideas were heretical, but this theory of ‘consubstantiality’ alarmed some of his supporters. John of Gaunt hurried over to Oxford, and urged his friend to say no more about the Eucharist (1381). Wyclif rejected the advice, and reaffirmed his views in a Confessio dated May 10, 1381. A month later social revolution flared out in England, and frightened all property owners into discountenancing any doctrine that threatened any form of property, lay or ecclesiastical. Wyclif now lost most of his backing in the government, and the assassination of Archbishop Sudbury by the rebels promoted his most resolute enemy, Bishop Courtenay, to the primacy of England. Courtenay felt that if Wyclif’s conception of the Eucharist were allowed to spread, it would undermine the prestige of the clergy, and therefore also the foundation of the Church’s moral authority. In May 1382, he summoned a council of clergy to meet at the Blackfriars’ Convent in London. Having persuaded this assembly to condemn twenty-four propositions which he read from Wyclif’s works, he sent a peremptory command to the chancellor of Oxford to restrain the author from any further teaching or preaching until his orthodoxy should be proved. King Richard II, as part of his reaction to the uprising that had almost deposed him, ordered the chancellor to expel Wyclif and all his adherents. Wyclif retired to his living at Lutterworth, apparently still protected by John of Gaunt.

  Embarrassed by the admiration expressed for him by the priest John Ball, a chief protagonist of the revolt, Wyclif issued several tracts dissociating himself from the rebels; he disclaimed any socialist views, and urged his followers to submit patiently to their terrestrial lords in the firm hope of recompense after death.42 Nevertheless he continued his pamphleteering against the Church, and organized a body of ‘Poor Preaching Priests’ to spread his Reformation among the people. Some of these ‘Lollards’* were men of meager schooling, some were Oxford dons. All went robed in black wool and barefoot, like the early friars; all were warmed with the ardor of men who had rediscovered Christ. Theirs was already the Protestant emphasis on an infallible Bible as against the fallible traditions and dogmas of the Church, and on the sermon in the vernacular as against a mystic ritual in a foreign tongue.43 For these lay priests, and for their literate hearers, Wyclif wrote in rough and vigorous English some 300 sermons and many religious tracts. And since he urged a return to the Christianity of the New Testament, he set himself and his aides to translate the Bible as the sole and unerring guide to true religion. Till that time (1381) only small portions of Scripture had been rendered into English; a French translation was known to the educated classes, and an Anglo-Saxon version, unintelligible to Wyclif’s England, had come down from King Alfred’s time. The Church, finding that heretics like the Waldensians made much use of the Bible, had discouraged the people from reading unauthorized translations,44 and had deprecated the creedal chaos that she expected when every party should make and color its own translation, and every reader be free to make his own interpretation, of the Scriptural text. But Wyclif was resolved that the Bible should be available to any Englishman who could read. He appears to have translated the New Testament himself, leaving the Old Testament to Nicholas Hereford and John Purvey. The whole was finished some ten years after Wyclif’s death.

  The translation was made from Jerome’s Latin version, not from the Hebrew of the Old Testament or the Greek of the New. It was not a model of English prose, but it was a vital event in English history.

  In 1384 Pope Urban VI summoned Wyclif to appear before him in Rome. A different summons exceeded it in authority. On December 28, 1384, the ailing reformer suffered a paralytic stroke as he was attending Mass, and three days later he died. He was buried in Lutterworth, but by a decree of the Council of Constance (May 4, 1415) his bones were dug up and cast into a near-by stream.45 Search was made for his writings, and as many as were found were destroyed.

  All the major elements of the Reformation were in Wyclif: the revolt against the worldliness of the clergy, and the call for a sterner morality; the return from the Church to the Bible, from Aquinas to Augustine, from free will to predestination, from salvation by works to election by divine grace; the rejection of indulgences, auricular confession, and transubstantiation; the deposition of the priest as an intermediary between God and man; the protest against the alienation of national wealth to Rome; the invitation to the state to end its subordination to the papacy; the attack (preparing for Henry VIII) on the temporal possessions of the clergy. If the Great Revolt had not ended the government’s protection of Wyclif’s efforts, the Reformation might have taken form and root in England 130 years before it broke out in Germany.

  III. THE GREAT REVOLT: 1381

  England and Wales had in 1307 a population precariously estimated at 3,000,000—a slow increase from a supposed 2,500,000 in 1066.46 The figures suggest a sluggish advance of agricultural and industrial techniques—and an effective control of human multiplication by famine, disease, and war—in a fertile but narrow island never meant to sustain with its own resources any great multitude of men. Probably three fourths of the people were peasants, and half of these were serfs; in this regard England lagged a century behind France.

  Class distinctions were sharper than on the Continent. Life seemed to revolve about two foci: gracious or arrogant lordship at one end, hopeful or resentful service at the other. The barons, aside from their limited duties to the king, were masters of all they surveyed, and of much beyond. The dukes of Lancaster, Norfolk, and Buckingham had estates rivaling those of the Crown, and the Nevilles and Percys had hardly less. The feudal lord bound his vassal knights and their squires to serve and defend him and wear his “livery.”* Nevertheless one might rise from class to class; a rich merchant’s daughter could catch a noble and a title, and Chaucer, reborn, would have been startled to find his granddaughter a duchess. The middle classes assumed such manners of the aristocracy as they could manage; they began to address one another as Master in England, Mon seigneur in France; soon every man was a Mister or Monsieur, and every woman a Mistress or Madame.†

  Industry progressed faster than agriculture. By 1300 almost all the coalfields of Britain were being worked; silver, iron, lead, and tin were mined, and the export of metals ranked high in the nation’s foreign trade; it was a common remark that “the kingdom is of greater value under the land than above.” 47 The woolen industry began in this century to make England rich. The lords withdrew more and more lands from the common uses formerly allowed to their serfs and tenants, and turned large tracts into sheep enclosures; more money could be made by selling wool than by tilling the land. The wool merchants were for a time the wealthiest traders in England, able to yield great sums in loans and taxes to Edward III, who ruined them. Tired of seeing raw wool go from England to feed the clothing industry
of Flanders, Edward (1331 f.) lured Flemish weavers to Britain, and through their instruction established a textile industry there. Then he forbade the export of wool and the import of most foreign cloth. By the end of the fourteenth century the manufacture of clothing had replaced the trade in wool as the main source of England’s liquid wealth and had reached a semi-capitalistic stage.

  The new industry required the close co-operation of many crafts—weaving, fulling, carding, dyeing, finishing; the old craft guilds could not arrange the disciplined collaboration needed for economical production; enterprising masters—entrepreneurs—gathered diverse specializations of labor into one organization, which they financed and controlled. However, no such factory system arose here as in Florence and Flanders; most of the work was still done in small shops by a master, his apprentices, and a few journeymen, or in little rural mills using water power, or in country homes where patient fingers plied the loom when household chores allowed. The craft guilds fought the new system with strikes, but its superior productivity overrode all opposition; and the workers who competed to sell their toil and skill were increasingly at the mercy of men who furnished capital and management. Town proletarians “lived from hand to mouth .... indifferently clad and housed, in good times well fed, but in bad times not fed at all.” 48 All male inhabitants of English cities were subject to conscription of their labor for public works, but rich men could pay for substitutes.49 Poverty was bitter, though probably less extreme than in the early nineteenth century. Beggars abounded, and organized to protect and govern their profession. Churches, monasteries, and guilds provided a limping charity.

  Upon this scene the Black Death burst as not only a catastrophic visitation but almost as an economic revolution. The English people lived in a climate more favorable to vegetation than to health; the fields were green the year round, but the population suffered from gout, rheumatism, asthma, sciatica, tuberculosis, dropsy, and diseases of eyes and skin.50 All classes ate a heavy diet and kept warm with alcoholic drinks. “Few men now reach the age of forty,” said Richard Rolle about 1340, “and fewer still the age of fifty.”51 Public sanitation was primitive; the stench of tanneries, pigsties, and latrines sullied the air; only the well-to-do had running water piped into their homes; the majority fetched it from conduits or wells and could not waste it on weekly baths.52 The lower classes offered ready victims for the pestilences that periodically decimated the population. In 1349 the bubonic plague crossed from Normandy to England and Wales, and thence a year later into Scotland and Ireland; it returned to England in 1361, 1368, 1375, 1382, 1390, 1438, 1464; all in all it carried away one Englishman out of every three.53 Nearly half the clergy died; perhaps some of the abuses later complained of in the English Church were due to the necessity of hastily impressing into her service men lacking the proper qualifications of training and character. Art suffered; ecclesiastical building almost stopped for a generation. Morals suffered; family ties were loosed, sexual relations overflowed the banks within which the institution of marriage sought to confine them for social order’s sake. The laws lacked officers to enforce them, and were frequently ignored.

  The plague collaborated with war to quicken the decline of the manorial system. Many peasants, having lost their children or other aides, deserted their tenancies for the towns; landowners were obliged to hire free workers at twice the former wage, to attract new tenants with easier terms than before, and to commute feudal services into money payments. Themselves forced to pay rising prices for everything that they bought, the landlords appealed to the government to stabilize wages. The Royal Council responded (June 18, 1349) with an ordinance substantially as follows:

  Because a great part of the People, and especially of Workers and Servants, late died of the pestilence, and many... will not serve unless they receive excessive wages, and some rather willing to beg in idleness than by Labour to get their Living; We, considering the grievous Discommodity which, of the lack especially of Plowmen and such Labourers, may hereafter come, have upon deliberation and treaty with the Prelates and the Nobles, and Learned Men assisting us, of their mutual Counsel ordained:

  1. Every person able in Body and under the Age of sixty Years, not having [wherewith] to live, being required, shall be bound to serve him that doth require him, or else [be] committed to the Gaol, until he find Surety to serve.

  2. If a Workman or Servant depart from Service before the time agreed upon, he shall be imprisoned.

  3. The old Wages, and no more, shall be given to Servants.....

  5. If any Artificer or Workman take more wages than were wont to be paid, he shall be committed to the Gaol.....

  6. Victuals shall be sold at reasonable prices.

  7. No person shall give anything to a Beggar that is able to labour.54

  This ordinance was so widely disregarded by employers and employees that Parliament issued (February 9,1351) a Statute of Labourers, specifying that no wages should be paid above the 1346 rate, fixing definite prices for a large number of services and commodities, and establishing enforcement machinery. A further act of 1360 decreed that peasants who left their lands before the term of their contract or tenancy expired might be brought back by force, and, at the discretion of the justices of the peace, might be branded on the brow.55 Similar measures, of increasing severity, were enacted between 1377 and 1381. Wages rose despite them, but the strife so engendered between laborers and government inflamed the conflict of classes, and lent new weapons to the preachers of revolt.

  The rebellion that ensued had a dozen sources. Those peasants who were still serfs demanded freedom; those who were free called for an end to feudal dues still required of them; and tenants urged that the rent of land should be lowered to four pence ($1.67?) per acre per year. Some towns were still subject to feudal overlords, and longed for self-government. In the liberated communities the workingmen hated the mercantile oligarchy, and journeymen protested against their insecurity and poverty. All alike—peasants, proletarians, even parish priests—denounced the governmental mismanagement of Edward Ill’s last years, of Richard II’s earliest; they asked why English arms had so regularly been beaten after 1369, and why such heavy taxes had been raised to finance such defeats. They particularly abominated Archbishop Sudbury and Robert Hales, the chief ministers of the young king, and John of Gaunt as the front and protector of governmental corruption and incompetence.

  The Lollard preachers had little connection with the movement, but they had shared in preparing minds for the revolt. John Ball, the intellectual of the rebellion, quoted Wyclif approvingly, and Wat Tyler followed Wyclif in demanding disendowment of the Church. Ball was the “mad priest of Kent” (as Froissart called him) who taught communism to his congregation, and was excommunicated in 1306.56 He became an itinerant preacher, denouncing the wicked wealth of prelates and lords, calling for a return of the clergy to evangelical poverty, and making fun of the rival popes who, in the Schism, were dividing the garments of Christ.57 Tradition ascribed to him a famous couplet:

  When Adam delved and Eve span

  Who was then the gentleman? 58

  —i.e., when Adam dug in the earth and Eve plied the loom, were there any class divisions in Eden? Froissart, though so fond of the English aristocracy, quoted Ball’s alleged views at sympathetic length:

  My good friends, matters cannot go on well in England until all things shall be in common; when there shall be neither vassals nor lords, when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill they behave to us! For what reason do they thus hold us in bondage? Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve? And what can they show why they should be more masters than ourselves?... We are called slaves, and if we do not perform our service we are beaten.... . Let us go to the King and remonstrate with him; he is young, and from him we may obtain a favorable answer; and if not we must ourselves seek to amend our condition.59

  Ball was thrice arrested, and when the revolt broke out he was in jail.

&n
bsp; The poll tax of 1380 capped the discontent. The government was nearing bankruptcy, the pledged jewels of the king were about to be forfeited, the war in France was crying out for new funds. A tax of £ 100,000 ($10,000,000?) was laid upon the people, to be collected from every inhabitant above the age of fifteen. All the diverse elements of revolt were united by this fresh imposition. Thousands of persons evaded the collectors, and the total receipts fell far short of the goal. When the government sent new commissioners to ferret out the evaders, the populace gathered in force and defied them; at Brentwood the royal agents were stoned out of the town (1381), and like scenes occurred at Fobbing, Corringham, and St. Albans. Mass meetings of protest against the tax were held in London; they sent encouragement to the rural rebels, and invited them to march upon the capital, to join the insurgents there, and “so press the King that there should no longer be a serf in England.”60

  A group of collectors entering Kent met a riotous repulse. On June 6, 1381, a mob broke open the dungeons at Rochester, freed the prisoners, and plundered the castle. On the following day the rebels chose as their chief Wat Tegheler, or Tyler. Nothing is known of his antecedents; apparently he was an ex-soldier, for he disciplined the disorderly horde into united action, and won its quick obedience to his commands. On June 8 this swelling multitude, armed with bows and arrows, cudgels, axes, and swords, and receiving recruits from almost every village in Kent, attacked the homes of unpopular landlords, lawyers, and governmental officials. On June 10 it was welcomed into Canterbury, sacked the palace of the absent Archbishop Sudbury, opened the jail, and plundered the mansions of the rich. All eastern Kent now joined in the revolt; town after town rose, and local officials ran before the storm. Rich men fled to other parts of England, or concealed themselves in out-of-the-way places, or escaped further damage by making a contribution to the rebel cause. On June 11 Tyler turned his army toward London. At Maidstone it delivered John Ball from jail; he joined the cavalcade, and preached to it every day. Now, he said, would begin that reign of Christian democracy which he had so long dreamed of and pled for; all social inequalities would be leveled; there would no longer be rich and poor, lords and serfs; every man would be a king.61