Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [388]
“England is ours now,” Edward Wilson told his children. It was a confident boast, but not an idle one. Few men understood the world better than Edward Wilson.
But if he thought he understood the world so well that he could no longer be surprised, he was wrong.
The events of 1381 amazed him. And when he thought about the unlikely person who had set the drama in motion and the strange part which he personally had played, he used to grin with amusement.
It was Stephen Shockley’s son Martin who caused the uproar.
It had been a point of special pride with the burgess that his son, though not a priest, should be a scholar. This was not unusual: for though the landed gentry and the magnates usually did not trouble much with education, there were many sons of merchants, or even poor men if they could find a patron, to be found in the colleges of England. Stephen had been so determined to do the thing well that, seeing how the colleges in Salisbury had fallen into decline he had sent his son to the University of Oxford itself.
“But damn it, Wilson,” he moaned afterwards, “I wish I hadn’t.”
For at Oxford, Martin Shockley heard the lectures of John Wyclif.
The great forerunner of the Protestant Reformation was not a heroic figure. He was a timid, ill-tempered academic who, as a priest, himself derived income from several benefices which he seldom visited. But when challenged, he became obstinate, and this was his strength.
From the philosophical notion that a man may know God directly, rather than blindly follow the logic-chopping dogma of the Church, he was soon preaching doctrines that were utterly subversive.
He developed what he called his theory of lordship – that only the good, not the wicked, should govern, or even own the land. The authorities protested. He promptly went further and announced that if the pope showed himself to be too worldly, he should be deposed. By 1379 he had denied publicly that the bread and wine in the mass were transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ and, even worse, declared that the Bible should be translated into English so that ordinary men could receive the word of God direct.
It was this denial by his followers, known as Lollards, of the power of the priest to make God, that was so particularly objectionable, and their reading of translations of the Bible that proved them to be subversive.
Yet, even in high places, they were not without friends.
There were magnates and gentlemen who would be glad to weaken the power of the Church. There were taxes being paid to Rome which both the king and his parliament would rather have seen go to the exchequer. This Wyclif with his denial of the pope’s power could be a useful weapon. It was for this reason that the great John of Gaunt, brother to the Black Prince and uncle of the new King Richard II, supported and protected the obstreperous academic.
Meanwhile in Oxford, the debate raged. And to an idealistic young man like Martin Shockley, Wyclif’s lectures were not just heady stuff, but the beginning of a new world.
On an unusually chill day in May, the entire Shockley family went to the cathedral to celebrate the return of their son Martin from Oxford.
It was a pleasant domestic scene – Stephen, a well-to-do merchant in sprightly middle age, his pleasant, comfortable-looking wife Cecilia, and their five children of whom Martin, at twenty, was the eldest. Stephen was proud, glad that his son was home at last.
“It’s time he took a hand in the business,” he said to his wife.
The family sat quietly in the nave, wrapped in heavy cloaks as the priests came by to say their morning mass. Because of the cold, the canons were dressed in their heavy