The Late Medieval Era · c. 1380-1520 · England
Lollardy
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About This Movement
Lollardy grew out of the teaching of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe — who attacked church wealth and papal authority, denied transubstantiation, and argued that scripture should be available in English. But it quickly became something much wider than him. Its adherents were mostly ordinary people: weavers, smiths, tailors, wives and widows who owned or shared vernacular scripture, met in one another's houses to read it aloud, and doubted images, pilgrimage and the priest's power over the sacrament. The response was severe. Burning for heresy was made law in England in 1401, Archbishop Arundel's constitutions of 1409 forbade unlicensed translation of scripture into English, and Sir John Oldcastle's failed rising in 1414 made Lollardy treason as well as heresy. After that the movement went underground and survived as scattered household networks into the 1520s. Almost everything we know about those households comes from the records their prosecutors kept — because to convict someone you first had to write down what they said.
Sources
- John Wyclif's own corpus: Trialogus (trans. Stephen E. Lahey, CUP, 2013), with the Latin works in the Wyclif Society editions (primary) — The academic source the movement outgrew — kept distinct here from the movement's own later texts, since Lollardy demonstrably became more than Wyclif's own teaching.
- Anne Hudson (ed.), Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (CUP, 1978; repr. Toronto MART, 1997) (primary) — Twenty-seven texts of 1385-1425 by the movement itself - Twelve Conclusions, Bible tracts, polemic, doctrine.
- English Wycliffite Sermons (ed. Hudson & Gradon, 5 vols, Oxford, 1983-96) (primary) — The movement's formation machinery: a complete vernacular preaching corpus for the liturgical year.
- Norman Tanner (ed.), Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428-31 (Camden 4th ser. 20, 1977) (primary) — These are the persecutors' own records, including abjurations extracted under coercion — hostile evidence, but evidence that still preserves ordinary artisans' and women's stated beliefs (Hawisia Moone's recorded confession is a digest of lay Lollard belief). Foxe's later martyrology is a partisan, later account.
- Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation (Oxford, 1988), with Shannon McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy (1995) (secondary) — The field's standard, plus the contested question of women's actual place in Lollard communities.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 28 'Wycliffism and Lollardy' (Ghosh) (reference) — A dedicated chapter, a direct fit for the 1380-1520 period covered here. The contested question of Lollardy's influence on the English Reformation belongs to the Reformation period itself.