of reaction against
all plans for religious reform. Wyclif had been supported by the
Lancastrian party till the very eve of the Peasant Revolt. But with the
rising his whole work seemed suddenly undone. The quarrel between the
baronage and the Church on which his political action had as yet been
grounded was hushed in the presence of a common danger. His "poor
preachers" were looked upon as missionaries of socialism. The friars
charged Wyclif with being a "sower of strife, who by his serpentlike
instigation had set the serf against his lord," and though he tossed back
the charge with disdain he had to bear a suspicion which was justified by
the conduct of some of his followers. John Ball, who had figured in the
front rank of the revolt, was falsely-named as one of his adherents, and
was alleged to have denounced in his last hour the conspiracy of the
"Wyclifites." Wyclif's most prominent scholar, Nicholas Herford, was said
to have openly approved the brutal murder of Archbishop Sudbury. Whatever
belief such charges might gain, it is certain that from this moment all
plans for the reorganization of the Church were confounded in the general
odium which attached to the projects of the peasant leaders, and that any
hope of ecclesiastical reform at the hands of the baronage and the
Parliament was at an end. But even if the Peasant Revolt had not deprived
Wyclif of the support of the aristocratic party with whom he had hitherto
cooperated, their alliance must have been dissolved by the new theological
position which he had already taken up. Some months before the outbreak of
the insurrection he had by one memorable step passed from the position of a
reformer of the discipline and political relations of the Church to that of
a protester against its cardinal beliefs. If there was one doctrine upon
which the supremacy of the Mediaeval Church rested, it was the doctrine of
Transubstantiation. It was by his exclusive right to the performance of the
miracle which was wrought in the mass that the lowliest priest was raised
high above princes. With the formal denial of the doctrine of
Transubstantiation which Wyclif issued in the spring of 1381 began that
great movement of religious revolt which ended more than a century after in
the establishment of religious freedom by severing the mass of the Teutonic
peoples from the general body of the Catholic Church. The act was the
bolder that he stood utterly alone. The University of Oxford, in