rested the loose
women, cut off their hair, and carted them through the streets as objects
of public scorn. But the moral spirit of the new movement, though
infinitely its grander side, was less dangerous to the Church than its open
repudiation of the older doctrines and systems of Christendom. Out of the
floating mass of opinion which bore the name of Lollardry one faith
gradually evolved itself, a faith in the sole authority of the Bible as a
source of religious truth. The translation of Wyclif did its work.
Scripture, complains a canon of Leicester, "became a vulgar thing, and more
open to lay folk and women that knew how to read than it is wont to be to
clerks themselves." Consequences which Wyclif had perhaps shrunk from
drawing were boldly drawn by his disciples. The Church was declared to have
become apostate, its priesthood was denounced as no priesthood, its
sacraments as idolatry.

[Sidenote: Lollardry and the Church]

It was in vain that the clergy attempted to stifle the new movement by
their old weapon of persecution. The jealousy entertained by the baronage
and gentry of every pretension of the Church to secular power foiled its
efforts to make persecution effective. At the moment of the Peasant Revolt
Courtenay procured the enactment of a statute which commissioned the
sheriffs to seize all persons convicted before the bishops of preaching
heresy. But the statute was repealed in the next session, and the Commons
added to the bitterness of the blow by their protest that they considered
it "in nowise their interest to be more under the jurisdiction of the
prelates or more bound by them than their ancestors had been in times
past." Heresy indeed was still a felony by the common law, and if as yet we
meet with no instances of the punishment of heretics by the fire it was
because the threat of such a death was commonly followed by the recantation
of the Lollard. But the restriction of each bishop's jurisdiction within
the limits of his own diocese made it impossible to arrest the wandering
preachers of the new doctrine, and the civil punishment--even if it had
been sanctioned by public opinion--seems to have long fallen into
desuetude. Experience proved to the prelates that few sheriffs would arrest
on the mere warrant of an ecclesiastical officer, and that no royal court
would issue the writ "for the burning of a heretic" on a bishop's
requisition. But powerless as the efforts of the Church were for purpose