from pressing
disendowment that on the petition of the Commons it passed a savage act
against the heresies "commonly called Lollardry" which "aimed at the
destruction of the king and all temporal estates," making Lollards
felons and ordering every justice of the peace to hunt down their
schools, conventicles, congregations and confederacies.

In his capacity of archbishop, Chicheley remained what he had always
been chiefly, the lawyer and diplomatist. He was present at the siege of
Rouen, and the king committed to him personally the negotiations for the
surrender of the city in January 1419 and for the marriage of Katherine.
He crowned Katherine at Westminster (20th February 1421), and on the 6th
of December baptized her child Henry VI. He was of course a persecutor
of heretics. No one could have attained or kept the position of
archbishop at the time without being so. So he presided at the trial of
John Claydon, Skinner and citizen of London, who after five years'
imprisonment at various times had made public abjuration before the late
archbishop, Arundel, but now was found in possession of a book in
English called _The Lanterne of Light_, which contained the heinous
heresy that the principal cause of the persecution of Christians was the
illegal retention by priests of the goods of this world, and that
archbishops and bishops were the special seats of antichrist. As a
relapsed heretic, he was "left to the secular arm" by Chicheley. On the
1st of July 1416 Chicheley directed a half-yearly inquisition by
archdeacons to hunt out heretics. On the 12th of February 1420
proceedings were begun before him against William Taylor, priest, who
had been for fourteen years excommunicated for heresy, and was now
degraded and burnt for saying that prayers ought not to be addressed to
saints, but only to God. A striking contrast was exhibited in October
1424, when a Stamford friar, John Russell, who had preached that any
religious _potest concumbere cum muliere_ and not mortally sin, was
sentenced only to retract his doctrine. Further persecutions of a whole
batch of Lollards took place in 1428. The records of convocation in
Chicheley's time are a curious mixture of persecutions for heresy, which
largely consisted in attacks on clerical endowments, with negotiations
with the ministers of the crown for the object of cutting down to the
lowest level the clerical contributions to the public revenues in
respect of their endowments. Chich