RICHARD II AND JOHN WYCLIFFE
Opposite John Wycliffe, England’s first European mind, stands Richard II, the other presiding genius of this history. On an impulse he commanded Gower to write in English. He was king when modern (though we call it Middle) English poetry decisively came of age; after his reign darkness again began to fall on poetry.
But first to Wycliffe. Our poetry starts when God and King David, the poet of Ecclesiastes and Job, Jesus and St. Paul speak English with resounding confidence. Rolle and the early Bible translators must take some credit: they first tutored the divine. Reformers and prophets helped locate our distinctive voice. It was Wycliffe who laid the foundation for the English radical traditions, both the liberal and the revolutionary. The light and shadow of his thought play over the work of Gower and Chaucer, of Langland most of all. He is still spiritually and intellectually alive in the age of Milton, still just audible in Shelley. He is not forgotten until our radicalisms become secular and Marx displaces a long Christian socialist and utopian tradition with his materialist literalism.
Like Rolle, Wycliffe was born in Yorkshire, in 1320. Little is known of his career until 1360, when he is described as “master of Balliol” at Oxford. He received ecclesiastical preferments and in 1374 accepted the living of Lutterworth and held it until his death in 1384. His spiritual disciple Jan Hus and Arundel, an archbishop of Canterbury, affirm from different perspectives that Wycliffe translated the Bible himself. Arundel writes to the Pope: “The son of the Old Serpent filled up the cup of his malice against Holy Church by the device of a new translation of the Scripture into his native tongue.” In justifying the translation Wycliffe refers to the York mystery plays, which he may have seen in his youth: there the Lord’s Prayer and other biblical matter were rendered in English. In De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae he argues that scripture is the crucial fact, against which tradition has no weight. His sobriquet was Doctor Evangelicus: why no English Bible when other languages had the Book already? His desire to see it translated was consistent with his desire to spread poor priests throughout England: they should preach from a Bible in their congregation’s idiom.
With the passage of time Wycliffe grew combative: frustrated in religious preferment say his detractors, righteous in civic and spiritual wrath say his advocates. “False peace is grounded in rest with our enemies, when we assent to them without withstanding; and sword against such peace came Christ to send.” Whether he had a direct hand in it or not, he certainly encouraged work on the Bible and inspired its completion. The institutions of the Church needed to be tested regularly against the word of scripture; laymen had a right to read it in their own language. “It seemeth first that the wit of God’s law should be taught in that tongue that is more known, for this wit is God’s word. When Christ saith in the Gospel that both heaven and earth shall pass, but His words shall not pass, he understandeth by His words His wit. And thus God’s wit is Holy Writ, that may on no manner be false. Also the Holy Ghost gave to apostles wit at Wit Sunday for to know all manner languages, to teach the people God’s law thereby; and so God would that the people were taught God’s law in diverse tongues. But what man, on God’s behalf, should reverse God’s ordinance and His will?”
He was patronized by John of Gaunt, the king’s uncle, and became deeply involved in political controversies. Employed to negotiate with Pope Gregory XI in 1374, he witnessed a corrupt papacy at first hand. Why should a Pope have the right to make levies in an England already crippled by taxation to finance wars? Why should a Pope appoint foreigners to English benefices? His stance was popular. By means of teaching, sermons and writings, and through his connections and travels, he developed influence at home and abroad. Early on he wrote about “dominion,” following Richard FitzRalph, Archbishop of Armagh: the world belongs to God, our “capital lord”: only righteousness can justify property; if the church abuses its property or its power, the state must take away its endowments.
And if the state commits abuses? The answer is not far to seek. All secular and ecclesiastical authority derives from God and is forfeit if it is wrongly used. Pope, king, priest, feudal lord: each is subject to this precept. Wycliffe’s expression is coarser than FitzRalph’s; it is that of a man who accepts rather than teases out a doctrine. His writings escaped from the lecture room and were put to use. He vehemently attacks worldliness and venality, in court and Church. In 1377, when he was summoned before the Bishop of London to answer charges, street riots on his behalf ended the court session. The Pope charged him with heresy, a heresy compounded in 1380 by his work on the Bible. We have to accept, scholars say, that no English writings can authoritatively be attributed to Wycliffe. But no one can say authoritatively that he didn’t write them. No doubt parts were added, as they were to Rolle; bits were faked. But his spirit informs all but the most extreme distortions of the work.
In 1381, with riots against a poll tax, and tax collectors set upon in many English towns, radicals were not popular with the authorities. The Peasants’ Revolt against the 1351 statute of labourers and the new tax frightened court and Church alike. Resistance to popular demands (which were not outlandish except in being popular) hardened. The Kentish rebels chose Wat Tyler as their leader—and there’s more than one perspective on him. Essex and Kentish rebels entered London. There was the “Letter to the Peasants of Essex.” John Ball combines prose and rough verse in an English remote from that of the court, but not from the alliterative traditions of Old English. It is touched with the radical fraternity implied in some readings—or misreadings—of Wycliffe:
Iohon Schep, som tyme Seynte Marie prest of York, and now of Colchestre, greteth wel Iohan Nameles, and Iohan the Mullere, and Iohon Cartere, and biddeth hem that thei bee war of gyle in borugh, and stondeth togidre in Godes name, and biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his werk, and chastise wel Hobbe the Robbere, and taketh with yow Iohan Trewman, and alle hiis felawes, and no mo, and loke schappe you to on head, and no mo.
Read aloud, the oddnesses of spelling and word order evaporate. It looks very old. But it dates from 1381, more than a decade after Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess with its classical allusions, conventionalized landscape and remoteness from the England of miller, carter and plowman. And here is Piers the Plowman, a character out of Langland, or plucked by Langland from popular legend.
Wat Tyler arrived in a London poorly defended. Richard II was holed up in the Tower. On 14 June Simon of Sudbury, chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, was beheaded by the crowd. The next day the king summoned Tyler and his Kentishmen to Smithfield to parley. There Tyler was stabbed by William Walworth, mayor of London, in the king’s presence. Leaderless, the rabble dispersed. It was only a matter of time before the king repealed the concessions he’d made under duress. But radical seeds were sown. Wycliffe, discredited at court after the revolt, was already anathema to the Church. He wouldn’t shut up. In that fateful year he publicly denied transsubstantiation. In 1382 the secular party in Oxford was compelled (though it resisted) to expel their favorite teacher and his followers. He withdrew to Lutterworth, where, in 1384, he suffered a stroke during mass and died. After Wycliffe’s death his “poor preachers”—who founded the Lollard sect—survived, eventually to join the Lutherans in the sixteenth century. His writings establish one of the bases of Puritanism.
The conflict of faith and reason, the hunger for a reasonable faith, or for a reasonable institution to transmit the unreasonable core of faith, was not new. Nor did Wycliffe invent controversy. The England he was born into was already awake to religious argument: Occam and Scotus with their inherent mysticism, the reaffirmation of St. Augustine’s laws of grace, and other debates were conducted, but generally in the Church. Wycliffe’s first controversies were confined to scholastic philosophy: he followed Plato not Aristotle, Augustine not Occam, Bradwardine and not free will. Always an intellectual and not an evangelist, he never became a Protestant who believed in individual grace and revelation. Yet he took hard ideas into the pulpit and shared them with the laity. Proto-Puritans tuned in to him, men who said bad priests should not administer sacraments, men opposed to hierarchy; there was debate over trans- or consubstantiation. More individual faith was developing. Wycliffe did not invent doubts. He organized them into a coherent body of criticism. Wycliffe’s spirit touched English writers. It inspired John Purvey to complete the English Bible in 1388. After Purvey, there appear to be no new Latin manuscript versions of the Bible. English was official. The Word was out.
Wycliffe’s Promethean treachery in aspiring to give people direct access to the Word of God was punished beyond the grave. Over twenty years later, in 1409, the Pope ordered all books by him or attributed to him to be burned. A famous bonfire of his work was built and lit in 1411 at Carfax, Oxford. In Prague, the Wycliffite Jan Hus was excommunicated but continued to preach and defend Wycliffe. In 1415 at the Council of Constance Wycliffe’s writings were unanimously condemned and Hus was ordered to recant his heresies, as if on the dead Wycliffe’s behalf. He refused and was burned at the stake. Thirteen years later, the Council of Constance ordered that Wycliffe’s bones be dug up, burned, and chucked into the river Swift.
Everyone had a right to the Bible; only a trained few knew what the theologian was up to. Wycliffe was for everyone, not the trained few. He interrogated Church government because it was closed and corrupt. He advocated disendowment, rejected much of the Pope’s authority and of papal authority, already weakened by rivalry between Urban VI and Clement VII; he attacked the privileges of bishops and religious orders, the abuse of indulgences, pardons and sanctuaries. His adoption of English rather than Latin is a radical but not a surprising step. A scholar, he regarded Latin as proper for deep thought; as a priest, he believed each soul should have access to the Word. The medieval world in which the educated were connected by Latin and the people divided by dialect was loosening. Nations with distinct priorities, languages, literatures were emerging. Wycliffe used Latin as a scholar of the old order, English as a prophet of the new. The use of English was political. It pointed in the direction of democracy, not of nationalism. He did not choose English because it was singularly beautiful or expressive (on the contrary), but because it was the language people used.
We can set aside images of ivory towers. Wycliffe’s university was democratic, including people from all places and walks of life. Knowledge spilled out, the knowledgeable (like Rolle) spilled out into each corner of the land. Latin came to seem a great barrier to be cast down.
The north of England is more durably Wycliffe’s country than the south ever was, and not only because he was a Yorkshireman. The north is where English poetry in its first years remained defiantly English. A native tradition dominated for two centuries. In French there was the vigorous lang d’oc which did not prevail against the courtly, smooth tones of the lang d’oeil; so the English court, and the city where it lived, in the end provided the orthography, the literary conventions, and to some extent the accent of an English suitable for a verse that aspired to travel beyond its region. The north’s scharp, slyttyng and frotyng energies remained a resource, and the language of “myddel Engelond” occupied a middle ground. The south imposed conformity and eventually decorum so that Sir Philip Sidney shamefacedly declares in 1581, “I must confess my own barbarousness, I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas”—the “Ballad of Chevy Chace”—“that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung out by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than a rude style; which, being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it work trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?” The version of this trumpet call of a poem retrieved in the indispensable Percy Reliques of 1765 may have been close to the one Sidney knew. It is certainly in a “Northeron” language whose rusticity appealed to Sidney’s taste even as it repelled his refined judgment, and is attributed to a blind fiddler:
It’s hard to see that a Pindar, or a Sidney, could improve on the vigorous idiom. It was the vulgar tongue, but it became the common poetic idiom.
Polite society north and south, from the end of the fourteenth century until well into the eighteenth, shunned once-popular ballads, as the Normans had shunned native English. It was a snobbery, a distrust of the Borders and the Scots, unease at the localizing vigor of dialect and a distrust of violent feeling and passion. To begin with, tastemakers (in the monasteries and feudal houses) preferred (if they lacked both French and Latin) translations of French romances, domesticated in idiom and occasional imagery, which remained alien to the native tradition. There should have been nothing wrong with local tradition: it had served barons and village folk who wanted music and entertainment well enough. But such verse existed for a locality, and as England was knitted more tightly together and to other countries by trade, taxation and war, the privileged and entrepreneurial classes were exposed to “superior” foreign customs. A gap grew between what the common people of a locality liked and what their masters affected. The masters’ culture became a national culture. They were keen to belong to a wider world, to Europe; to be accepted on the terms that wider world proposed. Serious poets of every land wrote in French or Latin to be understood by the educated in every land.
So in the fourteenth century begins the redskin v. paleface conflict that pervades English poetry up to our own day and has less to do with education than with social attitudes. It is north versus south, folk versus court, Anglo-Saxon versus Norman or Latin, native legend versus classical myth, plain style versus Petrarchan or aureate style. The Bible is on the redskin side, not because it is crude but because its subtleties touch the common nerve, while the decorous courtesies of the classics belong to the paleface. Yet the scholarship and care that went into the Authorized Version are probably more austere than the scholarship of the classical humanists, disporting themselves assiduously among Greek and Latin texts.
The dual tension was there even as the language bunched itself into regional dialects and was subjected to rules made from the center, in books, in debate and government: an English spoken in London, Southwark, Westminster, and by extension in Canterbury, Oxford and Cambridge. It was there that the scriptoria prospered and the first rules of writing and copying were agreed upon.
At the center men were educated, and were then exported to the rest of the country as judges, priests and administrators, along with manuscripts and decrees; lords came to the London court and took home London manners and affectations. The south triumphed, with its Norman and Latinate courtly tradition, its classical proprieties a condition for social success. The suppressed tradition simmered, rather as, in the Highlands, the Scots Gaelic tradition survived, or Irish and Welsh. They survived despite repression; the manuscripts were not collected, hand-me-downs of oral tradition wore thin or were forgotten—although so slowly that in the eighteenth century versions of songs five or six hundred years old could still be gathered. The success of southern English was, on a small scale, a foretaste of the success of English in the Empire, a success which retarded native traditions.