The Lollards

JupiterKid

I have been reading about a pre-Reformation group of religious dissenters called the Lollards. The Lollard movement started in the hallowed halls of Oxford, England in the 1370s and soon spread to many parts of England in the 1380s and 1390s.

The academic scholar John Wycliff, who was educated and taught in Oxford University, is believed to have been the founder of the Lollard movement. Wycliff and some of his followers criticised the established Roman Catholic church as out of touch, arrogant, corrupt and unwilling to preach in the common language of the common man, English.

Remember that this was the 14th century when only the rich and privileged were able to read and write. Wycliff and his followers questioned the need for the Church to amass huge amounts of wealth and build opulent cathederals and instead believed that the word of God could be preached direct from the Bible and to this end, they began a painstaking task in translating the Bible into English so that it could be read by a wider audience and not just clergy.

Initially, the Lollards were treated in a relatively benign way by the Church authorities and King Richard II's court, but as the movement spread, so too did repression and persecution of Lollards, as the Church considered them to be heretics and a threat to its power.

In a way, the Lollards were Protestants 140 years before the beginning of the Reformation by Martin Luther in 1517. Their belief in the word of God direct from the scriptures, their criticism of the wealth and opulence of the Church and their attempts to translate the bible into English have all the hallmarks of Protestantism. Lollards also had the (then) radical notion that women were equal to men and that women could also preach the word of God.

By the 1390s, Lollardy had spread to many parts of England, and was believed to have been popular among the educated class and many landlord knights.

However, although the authorities persecuted the Lollard movement (Wycliff himself died in 1384 before the movement really spread) it is is believed that what made Luther successful where the Lollards failed was technology - namely the printing press.

With Guttenberg's invention, Luther's beliefs could be mass produced and spread rapidly and cheaply. The Lollards did not have the technology of the printing press and this made communication and the spread of the movement very difficult. If the Lollards did have access to the printing press - who knows? Perhaps the Reformation would have begun, not in Germany in 1517, but in England in circa 1372.

By the 1420s, religious and Royal persecution of the Lollards meant that the movement largely died out, with only a scattering of hardcore supporters remaining. Many of these were declared heretics and burnt at the stake.

Has anyone else heard of the Lollards? They seem to have been airbrushed from history.

Peregrinus

I don't think they've been "airbrushed from history"; if they don't impinge very much on the popular consciousness, it's because most of us are generally pretty ignorant about the fourteenth century. History in schools, and in popular culture, is basically ancient/classical history, and modern history; the middle ages receive comparatively little attention.

In many ways they did prefigure some of the ideas that developed independently in Germany and France, and gave rise to the Protestant Reformation. As you rightly say, they fact that they came along before the invention of printing partly accounts for why they are not credited with starting the Reformation. That, plus the fact that they were in England which, at the time, was a fairly marginal backwater in European terms, lacking wealth, political power or cultural signficance. England didn't become culturally signficant until it built up its trading empire, and that wasn't to happen for another two hundred years.

philologos

OP: I've found it quite interesting to look to Foxe's Book of Martyrs recently to see the amount of reforming movements there were prior to the 1500's right across Europe not just in England.