A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [190]
In replacement he offered the Bible in English, translated by his disciples, that it might bring religion to the people in a form they could understand without need of the priest and his meaningless Latin doggerel. No other act of a religious reformer would cut more sharply into the thousand-year establishment of the Christian Church, but this was still some years ahead. In the seventies the movement of dissent called Lollardy, from a word applied to Flemish mystics meaning “mumbler,” was preparing the way. While Lollardy was greatest among the common people and lower clergy, it spread, too, among knights and some great nobles who resented the clergy’s hold on political power. The Earl of Salisbury removed all statues of saints from his chapel, earning the title of “derider of images, scoffer at sacraments,” and there were others called “hatted knights” who refused to uncover when the host was carried through the streets.
Wyclif’s ideas and the crown’s needs fitted together like sword and sheath, accounting for the strange alliance that made him a protégé of John of Gaunt. His theory of disendowment, which maintained that nobles could repossess the lands their ancestors had bequeathed to the Church, put a doctrinal floor under Gaunt’s desire to plunder the rich ecclesiastical establishment. What Henry VIII succeeded in doing a century and a half later, John of Gaunt already had in mind in 1376. Meanwhile the losses of territory in France, for which the clerical Chancellor, William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, and his fellow ecclesiastics in office were held responsible, served to oust them from government. The Lords in Parliament resolved in 1371 that none but laymen “who could answer for their misdeeds in the King’s courts” could henceforth hold the offices of Chancellor, Treasurer, Barons of the Exchequer, and Clerks of the Privy Council.
The adverse tide in France was not stemmed by the change. Merchants and landed gentry were not happy to see the money squeezed from them in taxes dissipated in the horribles expenses et incredibiles of the Duke of Lancaster and his suite at Bruges. The envoys spent their time—according to the censorious monk of St. Albans, Thomas Walsingham, who hated Lancaster because of his anti-clerical policy—in “rioting … revelling and dancing” at a cost of £20,000. If Walsingham’s Chronicon Angliae is suspect for its animus, it is also invaluable for vivid information about a hectic time.
The people’s loyalty was severely tried, too, by purveyance—that is, the King’s right when traveling to commandeer supplies for a number of miles on either side of the road, and also for the provisioning of the army. Purveyors “seize on men and horses in the midst of their field work … on the very bullocks at the plough” so that “men make dole and murmur” at the King’s approach. What had been a nuisance was raised in wartime to economic tyranny. Nobles in charge of military organization profiteered on war contracts, as did royal purveyors and the clerks who made payments from Exchequer funds. Coastal towns suffered from the billeting of troops while they awaited transportation overseas. Trade declined owing to the disruption of shipping, ransoms no longer flowed in a golden stream to nourish the economy, and such ransoms as did come in were kept by the crown to pay English troops and release English prisoners. Installments on King Jean’s ransom had reached only three fifths of the total when King Charles stopped payment on the renewal of war and, indeed, demanded return of the money as reparations. By now England was growing poorer, not richer, from the war.
When Parliament met in 1376, the Commons, which existed only as an ad hoc body for purposes of consenting to taxes, gathered itself for political action. First it sought strength by association with the Lords, who represented the permanent Parliament and contained a strong anti-Lancaster faction prepared to challenge the Duke. A council of twelve, consisting of four bishops, four earls, and four barons, was drawn from the