en the poorest, casting from Him all worldly authority. I
deduce from these premisses as a simple counsel of my own that the Pope
should surrender all temporal authority to the civil power and advise his
clergy to do the same." The boldness of his words sprang perhaps from a
knowledge that his end was near. The terrible strain on energies enfeebled
by age and study had at last brought its inevitable result, and a stroke
of paralysis while Wyclif was hearing mass in his parish church of
Lutterworth was followed on the next day by his death.

[Sidenote: The Lollard movement]

The persecution of Courtenay deprived the religious reform of its more
learned adherents and of the support of the Universities. Wyclif's death
robbed it of its head at a moment when little had been done save a work of
destruction. From that moment Lollardism ceased to be in any sense an
organized movement and crumbled into a general spirit of revolt. All the
religious and social discontent of the times floated instinctively to this
new centre. The socialist dreams of the peasantry, the new and keener
spirit of personal morality, the hatred of the friars, the jealousy of the
great lords towards the prelacy, the fanaticism of the reforming zealot
were blended together in a common hostility to the Church and a common
resolve to substitute personal religion for its dogmatic and ecclesiastical
system. But it was this want of organization, this looseness and fluidity
of the new movement, that made it penetrate through every class of society.
Women as well as men became the preachers of the new sect. Lollardry had
its own schools, its own books; its pamphlets were passed everywhere from
hand to hand; scurrilous ballads which revived the old attacks of "Golias"
in the Angevin times upon the wealth and luxury of the clergy were sung at
every corner. Nobles like the Earl of Salisbury and at a later time Sir
John Oldcastle placed themselves openly at the head of the cause and threw
open their gates as a refuge for its missionaries. London in its hatred of
the clergy became fiercely Lollard, and defended a Lollard preacher who
ventured to advocate the new doctrines from the pulpit of St. Paul's. One
of its mayors, John of Northampton, showed the influence of the new
morality by the Puritan spirit in which he dealt with the morals of the
city. Compelled to act, as he said, by the remissness of the clergy who
connived for money at every kind of debauchery, he ar