The followers of Wycliffe were nicknamed Lollards, a word of uncertain
meaning but apparantly used as an expression of contempt. From having
been religious reformers denouncing the wealth and greed of a corrupt
Church, they seem, in some cases, to have degenerated into socialists
or communists. This latter class demanded, like John Ball (S250),
--who may have been one of their number,--that all property should be
equally divided, and that all rank should be abolished.
This fact should be borne in mind with reference to the subsequent
efforts made by the government to suppress the movement. In the eyes
of the Church, the Lollards were heretics; in the judgment of many
moderate men, they were destructionists and anarchists, as
unreasonable and as dangerous as the "dynamiters" of to-day.
More than forty years after Wycliffe's death (1384), a decree of the
Church council of Constance[1] ordered the reformer's body to be dug
up and burned (1428). But his influence had not only permeated
England, but had passed to the Continent, and was preparing the way
for that greater movement which Luther was to inaugurate in the
sixteenth century.
[1] Constance, in southern Germany. This council (1415) sentenced
John Huss and Jerome of Prague, both of whom may be considered
Wycliffites, to the stake.
Tradition says that the ashes of his corpse were thrown into the brook
flowing near the parsonage of Lutterworth, the object being to utterly
destroy and obliterate the remains of the arch-heretic. Fuller says:
"This brook did conveeey his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn
into the narrow sea, and that into the wide ocean. And so the ashes
of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which is now dispersed all
the world over."[2]
[2] Thomas Fuller's "Church History of Britain." Compare also
Wordsworth's "Sonnet to Wycliffe," and the lines, attributed to an
unknown writer of Wycliffe's time:
"The Avon to the Severn runs,
The Severn to the sea;
And Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad,
Wide as the waters be."