the payment of the annual sum
of a thousand marks promised by King John in acknowledgement of the
suzerainty of the See of Rome. The insult roused the temper of the realm.
The king laid the demand before Parliament, and both houses replied that
"neither King John nor any king could put himself, his kingdom, nor his
people under subjection save with their accord or assent." John's
submission had been made "without their assent and against his coronation
oath" and they pledged themselves, should the Pope attempt to enforce his
claim, to resist him with all their power. Even Urban shrank from
imperilling the Papacy by any further demands, and the claim to a Papal
lordship over England was never again heard of. But the struggle had
brought to the front a man who was destined to give a far wider scope and
significance to this resistance to Rome than any as yet dreamed of. Nothing
is more remarkable than the contrast between the obscurity of John Wyclif's
earlier life and the fulness and vividness of our knowledge of him during
the twenty years which preceded its close. Born in the earlier part of the
fourteenth century, he had already passed middle age when he was appointed
to the mastership of Balliol College in the University of Oxford and
recognized as first among the schoolmen of his day. Of all the scholastic
doctors those of England had been throughout the keenest and most daring in
philosophical speculation. A reckless audacity and love of novelty was the
common note of Bacon, Duns Scotus, and Ockham, as against the sober and
more disciplined learning of the Parisian schoolmen, Albert and Thomas
Aquinas. The decay of the University of Paris during the English wars was
transferring her intellectual supremacy to Oxford, and in Oxford Wyclif
stood without a rival. From his predecessor, Bradwardine, whose work as a
scholastic teacher he carried on in the speculative treatises he published
during this period, he inherited the tendency to a predestinarian
Augustinianism which formed the groundwork of his later theological revolt.
His debt to Ockham revealed itself in his earliest efforts at Church
reform. Undismayed by the thunder and excommunications of the Church,
Ockham had supported the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria in his recent struggle,
and he had not shrunk in his enthusiasm for the Empire from attacking the
foundations of the Papal supremacy or from asserting the rights of the
civil power. The spare, emaciated frame of Wy