s
of repression, they were effective in rousing the temper of the Lollards
into a bitter fanaticism. The heretics delighted in outraging the religious
sense of their day. One Lollard gentleman took home the sacramental wafer
and lunched on it with wine and oysters. Another flung some images of the
saints into his cellar. The Lollard preachers stirred up riots by the
virulence of their preaching against the friars. But they directed even
fiercer invectives against the wealth and secularity of the great
Churchmen. In a formal petition which was laid before Parliament in 1395
they mingled denunciations of the riches of the clergy with an open
profession of disbelief in transubstantiation, priesthood, pilgrimages, and
image-worship, and a demand, which illustrates the strange medley of
opinions which jostled together in the new movement, that war might be
declared unchristian and that trades such as those of the goldsmith or the
armourer, which were contrary to apostolical poverty, might be banished
from the realm. They contended (and it is remarkable that a Parliament of
the next reign adopted the statement) that from the superfluous revenues of
the Church, if once they were applied to purposes of general utility, the
king might maintain fifteen earls, fifteen hundred knights, and six
thousand squires, besides endowing a hundred hospitals for the relief of
the poor.

[Sidenote: Disasters of the War]

The distress of the landowners, the general disorganization of the country,
in every part of which bands of marauders were openly defying the law, the
panic of the Church and of society at large as the projects of the Lollards
shaped themselves into more daring and revolutionary forms, added a fresh
keenness to the national discontent at the languid and inefficient
prosecution of the war. The junction of the French and Spanish fleets had
made them masters of the seas, and what fragments were left of Guienne lay
at their mercy. The royal Council strove to detach the House of Luxemburg
from, the French alliance by winning for Richard the hand of Anne, a
daughter of the late Emperor Charles the Fourth who had fled at Crecy, and
sister of King Wenzel of Bohemia who was now king of the Romans. But the
marriage remained without political result, save that the Lollard books
which were sent into their native country by the Bohemian servants of the
new queen stirred the preaching of John Huss and the Hussite wars. Nor was
English po