y leader to rally them. Thorpe was accused of holding all the chief
tenets of Wyclif's which were condemned as contrary to the Church's
order and teaching, and his answers, according to the account he gives
of them, were at once bold and prudent. He seems, moreover, to have had
a real gift as a reporter, and to have exercised it impartially enough,
for not every Lollard would have put into his examiner's mouth that
remarkably happy defence of taking a bagpipe on pilgrimage, which will
be found on page 141. Thorpe, though he was sent back to prison, lived
to write this account of his trial three-and-fifty years after it took
place, but Sir John Oldcastle was burnt alive, despite all Prince Hal's
efforts to win him to recant and save himself, and the short account of
his trial, which follows that of Thorpe, has thus a more tragic
interest.

The persecution of the Lollards was but an incident in the fifteenth
century, little affecting its literature, though the burning of
Oldcastle called forth a bad poem by Hoccleve. The wasteful wars in
France, and the turmoil of the Roses, on the other hand, had a great and
most disastrous influence. After Lydgate's death about 1447, Capgrave
was our leading man of letters, and on his death in 1464 the post was
left vacant, unless Master Bennet Burgh can be considered as having held
it. The Paston Letters, which begin in 1422 and cover the rest of the
century (till 1507), offer some consolation for the lack of more formal
literature, but the lack is undeniable. Moreover, not only literature,
but the bookish arts suffered terribly from this depression. The fine
English illuminated manuscripts which at the beginning of the century
had vied with those of France, ceased to be produced after about 1430
(the siege of Orleans was raised by Jeanne Darc in 1429, and the
synchronism may be significant), and with the illuminations, the simpler
art of penmanship declined also. It was thus small wonder that the art
of printing was introduced but tardily to our country, more than twenty
years after the first printed Bible had appeared at Mainz, and that,
typographically, William Caxton, with no fine models in contemporary
English manuscripts to guide him, produced no single book that can stand
comparison with the best work of foreign printers. But if he was a poor
printer, he was a most enterprising and skilful publisher, and in his
homely way a genuine and most prolific journeyman of letters. As the