Note 415 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

There flourished, further, a remarkable amount of heresy of the species seen in Provence and Northern Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such sectaries being known in England under the generic name of “Lollards,” derived from the Flemish, in which it seems to have signified singers of hymns.415 Lollards or “Beghards,” starting from the southern point of propagation, spread all over civilized Northern Europe, meeting everywhere persecution alike from the parish priests and the mendicant monks; and in England as elsewhere their anti-clericalism and their heresy were correlative. In the formal Lollard petition to Parliament in 1395, however, there is evident an amount of innovating opinion which implies more than the mere stimulus of financial pressure. Not only the papal authority, monasteries, clerical celibacy, nuns’ vows, transubstantiation, exorcisms, bought blessings, pilgrimages, prayers for the dead, offerings to images, confessions and absolutions, but war and capital punishment and “unnecessary trades,” such as those of goldsmiths and armourers, are condemned by those early Utopists.416 In what proportion they really thought out the issues they dealt with we can hardly ascertain; but a chronicler of Wiclif’s time, living at Leicester, testifies that you could not meet two men in the street but one was a Lollard.417 The movement substantially came to nothing, suffering murderous persecution in the person of Oldcastle (Lord Cobham) and others, and disappearing in the fifteenth century in the demoralization of conquest and the ruin of the civil wars; but apart from Chaucer’s poetry it is more significant of foreign influences in England than almost any other phenomenon down to the reign of Henry VIII.