Note 64 — II. The Necessity for Dissolution.

The town of St. Albans was apparently something of a Lollard centre. Sir John Oldcastle lay in hiding there, and when in 1414 William Murlee (one of his followers) was hanged and burnt, the convent firmly believed that he had planned to put them every one to death (Walsingham: Hist. Angl. II, 298–299). See, too, the account of the proceedings at the Synod held by Whethamstede in 1429 (Amundesham I, 222–3): for commission to put down heresy (Amundesham II, 23). The Abbot’s bitterness extended to any departure from orthodoxy, and Pecock was an object of his special dislike.