high-ranking individuals, “threatening them terribly” if they gave aid or comfort to the Lollards. He seems to have made an example of Richard Sturry, who was one of his chamber knights—at least, Walsingham singles Sturry out as having received a severe dressing-down from the king himself. On this occasion Sturry was ordered to renounce his heterodox views, and threatened with “a most horrible death” if he ever violated this judgment. It seems reasonable to suppose that Chaucer’s friends among the Lollard Knights (perhaps even Sturry himself )131 would have told him something about this traumatic event—which may have come as quite a shock to the old retainer, particularly if Wilks is right in supposing that hitherto royal servants had got the message that protecting Wycliffites and expressing sympathy with Wycliffite views (perhaps even holding them) was what their lords and masters expected.132 Long before Archbishop Arundel published his infamous Constitutions, Lollards and their supporters could feel— with good reason—in grave danger.133
Sturry’s indictment is dated 1395 by Walsingham. That was also the year in which, on a much happier occasion, Froissart presented the king with a luxuriously bound volume “about love.”134 Sturry had played a major role in organizing this audience, as the Frenchman gratefully acknowledges.135 But Froissart is silent on the subject of his patron’s supposed heresy, and of the specific views Sturry actually held, or is supposed to have held, we know nothing. We do know something about the (alleged) Lollard views of another chamber knight, Lewis Clifford, although the record is deeply frustrating because it leaves so much unexplained. When Clifford (again, according to Walsingham) recanted in 1402, he sent Archbishop Arundel a list of conclusions which, he claimed, were held by the Lollards.136 They include the propositions that the seven sacraments are only “dead signs” (the sacrament of the altar being a mere “morsel of dead bread”), that purgatory does not exist, that clerical celibacy was not ordained by God and hence all in religion can marry, and that consent alone is required for marriage (without any role being played by the church). K. B. McFarlane found this account slightly “fishy,” feeling that “the views Clifford is made to ascribe to the Lollards are wilder than usual.”137 Could it be, then, that, under duress, Clifford exaggerated such Lollard views as he knew of, in an attempt to distance himself far from them and impress upon Arundel the strength of his repudiation? Perhaps, but it should be noted that all the Clifford conclusions may be paralleled (in some shape or form) in other records of Lollard belief (and indeed can be traced back, however circuitously, to the thought of the arch-heresiarch himself ).138 For example, those relating to marriage find clear and substantial parallels in the Norwich heresy trials of 1428–31, and in the few surviving testimonies to the views of William White, a Lollard evangelist in that region who had practiced what he preached by taking a wife—quite illegally, since he was an ordained priest. Such beliefs will be discussed in Chapter 4 below, as part of a review of the (actually quite tenuous) Lollard theology of marriage, which was undertaken to ascertain whether or not any analogies may be found with Chaucer’s own treatment of the subject. Clifford’s conclusions indeed seem “wild,” but they may be deemed as being, in large measure, representative of certain strands of Wycliffite thought, and it is quite possible that Clifford himself once held views like that. Or something like that.
Clifford brought from France to England a copy of Deschamps’ poem in praise of Chaucer, wherein Clifford himself is named. Elsewhere Deschamps calls Clifford “amorous,” which presumably means that the Englishman is being complimented on his knowledge of the then-fashionable doctrine of fin amor.139 This seems very far from Lollard attacks on the use of “fables of the poets” in sermons,140 or the complaint of “William Thorpe” against those pilgrims who, en route to Canterbury, listen to pipes and bagpipes, sing loudly, ring their bells, and generally make more noise than if the king himself were passing through with his trumpeters and “manye oþer mynystrals.”141 Give them a month “oute in her pilgrimage,” complains Thorpe, and for as long as half a year afterward many of them will be “greete iangelers, tale tellers and lyeris.” Thorpe’s interlocutor in this self-aggrandizing account, Thomas Arundel himself, promptly accuses the Lollard of being a “lewid losel” who has not considered the matter sufficiently. It is a good thing that pilgrims should have with them both singers and pipers. If one of them should hurt his toe and make it bleed, why should he or his companion not begin a song or produce a bagpipe to drive away “þe hurt of his sore” with such “myrþe”? “Wiþ siche solace þe traueile and werinesse of pilgrymes is li
In the light of all this, several general caveats may be offered. The first concerns the danger of making totalizing statements about Lollardy, particularly Ricardian Lollardy, given the range of beliefs which were tarred with that same brush. A movement or sect which could include Lewis Clifford and William Thorpe had to be capacious indeed. Second, demotic Wycliffism—to coin a phrase—was alive and well in Chaucer’s day; we do not have to await the early fifteenth century to see its emergence.144 Wyclif and his most ardent academic supporters had addressed themselves ad populum, preaching in vulgari far beyond Oxford (London, Leicester, Bristol, Northampton, etc.),145 and the populus made of this doctrine what they would, accommodating it to their specific and sometimes conflicting interests, material as well as religious. Hence it is misleading to view William Swinderby as an individual “portent” of a future dumbing-down of Lollardy—little else being expected of “half-educated and usually unbeneficed mass-priests,” the unprepossessing “channel by which Lollardy was to be transmitted to future generations.”146 Such condescension obscures the point that “watery and simplified version[s]” of Wyclif’s “novel doctrines”147— a quite inadequate way to characterize views which often have their own robust logic—are to be found in such Lollard testimonies as the Twelve Conclusions, Walter Brut’s cedulae and The Examination of Sir William of Thorpe, in chroniclers’ reports of views (supposedly) held by the Lollard Knights, in developments of Wyclif’s thought (insofar as they can be constructed) by close associates like Nicholas Hereford, Philip Repingdon, John Aston, and John Purvey, and indeed in the lists of condemned propositions extracted from the teaching of Wyclif himself. For Wyclif’s opponents, as much as his followers, sometimes made blunt instruments out of the theologian’s subtle and shifting speculations. The range and variety of views possible within Lollardy, and/or the range of views which could pass as Lollard,148 must be recognized and respected, for example, when we seek to discover Lollard sympathy, or the lack thereof, in the work of those most elusive and tantalizing of thinkers, Chaucer and Langland.
By the same token, in the house of orthodoxy there were many mansions. It is all too easy to discover heresy, heterodoxy, subversion, and so forth if one is unaware of the intellectual leeway which was possible within orthodoxy, or fails to recognize the range of disagreement which orthodoxy could accommodate, even in the time of Wyclif. Those trends have been all too common in criticism of Middle English literature. That is why much space has been devoted in the present book to developments in theology which pre-date Wyclif and which continued to inform English Catholicism during, and long after, his controversial career. My critical judgments remain my own, of course, and there is no necessary causal link between an abundance of information and an appropriate interpretation. Suffice it to hope that even those who disagree with
