A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [189]
In the year of Coucy’s visit Wyclif metaphorically nailed his thesis to the door in the form of a treatise, De Civili Dominio (On Civil Authority), which proposed nothing less than the disendowment of the temporal property of the Church and the exclusion of the clergy from temporal government. All authority, he argued, derived from God, and in earthly matters belonged to the civil powers alone. By logical progression and in harsh polemic filled with references to the “stinking orders” of the friars and “horned fiends” of the hierarchy, his theories were soon to lead him to the radical proposition that the priesthood should be disestablished as the necessary mediator between man and God.
Wyclif’s peculiar achievement was to express both national interest and popular feeling. For decades Parliament had complained bitterly of the income withdrawn from England by foreign holders of rich benefices like the haughty Cardinal Talleyrand de Périgord. The amount was said to be twice the revenues of the crown, and Church property in England was estimated at a third of the land of the realm. The selling of papal letters of authority by impostors was a wide abuse extended by a regular business in forged papal seals. Immunity of the clergy from civil justice, leaving a lay complainant without redress, was another cause of resentment. Most of all, people minded the unfitness of priests. When a priest could purchase from diocesan authority a license to keep a concubine, how should he have better access to God than the ordinary sinner? Priestly susceptibility was such that when a man confessed adultery, the confessor was not allowed to ask the name of the partner lest he be inclined to take personal advantage of her frailty.
The venality if not lechery of the parish priest was usually a result of his being underpaid, which led to the necessity of selling his services; even the Eucharist might be withheld unless the communicant produced an offering, which made a mockery of the ritual. Judas, it was said, sold the body of Christ for thirty pieces of silver; now priests did it daily for a penny. Frivolity was another complaint: vicars were scolded by their bishops for throwing candle drippings from the upper choir stalls on the heads of those below, or conducting “detestable” parodies of the Divine service “for the purpose of exciting laughter and perhaps of generating discord.” Worldly clerics were censured in 1367 for wearing short tight doublets with long fur- or silk-lined sleeves, costly rings and girdles, embroidered purses, knives resembling swords, colored boots, and even that mark of the Devil, slashed and curling pointed shoes.
Great prelates of noble family were as lordly as their lay peers, dressing their retinues in uniform and traveling with squires, clerks, falconers, grooms, messengers, pages, kitchen servants, carters, and porters. Charity was gone from them, wrote Langland; bishops of the Holy Church once apportioned Christ’s patrimony among the poor and needy “but now Avarice keeps the key”; Charity was once found “in a friar’s frock, but that was afar back in St. Francis’s lifetime.” His fellow poet John Gower, speaking “for all Christian folk,” denounced absentee priests, and bishops who added to their great incomes by taking bribes from rich adulterers, and arrogant cardinals in their red hats “like a crimson rose opening to the sun; but that red is the color of guilty pride.”
When, from denouncing such priests, Wyclif reached the point of denying the validity of the priesthood itself as necessary to salvation, he was to strike at the foundation of the Church and its interpretation of Christ’s role. From that point he moved ineluctably to the heresy of denying transubstantiation, for without miraculous power the priest could not transform the bread and wine into the true body and blood of Christ. From there the rest followed—the non-necessity of the Pope, rejection of excommunication, confession, pilgrimages, worship of relics and saints, indulgences, treasury of merit. All were to be swept