CHAPTER II.

WYCLIF'S EARLIER YEARS.

JOHN WYCLIF✶ was born in Yorkshire not later than the year 1324, perhaps a few years earlier.

Birth and

Birthplace.

the place

There is

John Leland in his "Itinerary," written in the reign of Henry VIII., tells us they "say that John Wiclif, Hereticus, was borne at Spreswell, a poore village, a good myle from Richemont ;" and when he speaks of Wycliffe in his "Collectanea " he notes that it is from which Wigclif, the heretic, derived his origin. no existing village of Spreswell. Dr. Thomas Dunham. Whitaker, in his "History of Richmondshire in the North Riding of the County of York," published in 1823, suggested that Spreswell was a misprint for Hipswell, which is a village rather more than a mile from Richmond. In an old MS. of extracts from Leland † the name is written Ypres well. Dr.

* Long after the fourteenth century men spelt even their own names variously. Thomas Walsingham, who has much to say of Wyclif in his Chronicle, spells his name in eight different ways. The whole number of different spellings found is twenty-eight, including those used by the followers of Hus, who turned the W. to V. The earliest official record of the name is in the decree of Edward III., dated July 26, 1374, naming among his commissioners to meet delegates from the Pope at Bruges, "Magister Johannes de Wiclif." For that reason Gotthard Lechler and other good scholars have adopted Wiclif as their spelling of the name. The "y" of Wyclif disappears in Latin like the "k" of Ockham. As the name in English was more commonly written with a "y," Canon Walter W. Shirley, Mr. Thomas Arnold, and others, have written Wyclif.

† Harleian, 842, leaf 76; first pointed out by Mr. J. R. Walbran.

Robert Vaughan, who published a Life of Wyclif in 1828, upon which he continued afterwards to work, recorded in 1861 * the evidence of a gentleman, who said that his greatgrandfather had been married in the chapel of a village of Spreswell, or Speswell-on-the-Tees, half a mile from Wycliffe, and on the same side of the river. This informant said that the chapel fell down soon after his great-grandfather's marriage. There is absolutely nothing but this family tradition to show that a village of Spreswell ever existed, and the Spreswell here indicated, about half-way between Darlington and Barnard Castle, would have been ten miles from Richmond, much too far for "a good mile." But Dr. Vaughan pointed out that, three miles below the village of Wycliffe there was a spot marked as F Old Richmond " on the local maps. Mr. Frederic D. Matthew † has observed upon this, that the existence of a Richmond older than that which takes its name from the Castle founded by Alan of Brittany is impossible, and that the name of "Old Richmond" was probably an antiquary's guess as to the ruined village of Barford. Mr. Matthew could not find the

name on any map earlier than 1770.

That this long-deserted village by the Tees, in which the line of the main street-stretching north and south-and the ruins of an early English chapel are still to be traced, was really Barford, is shown by the fact that its mediaval manor-house is still known by that name, the name it had in Leland's time. The finding of coins of Elizabeth's reign among the ruins is evidence that the place had not then been abandoned. It is clear, therefore, that Leland knew only of one Richmond, and that in some village “a good mile" from it Wyclif was said to have been born. Leland's

*In the Athena um of April 20, 1861, on the authority of John Chapman, a gentleman of respectable position in Gainsford.

Introduction to "The English Works of John Wyclif, hitherto Unprinted." Early English Text Society, 1880,

authority is local tradition-what "they say "-in the time of Henry VIII.; and Whitaker's suggestion, that Spreswell was a misreading of Hipswell, is no more than a reasonable guess.

That the Yorkshire village of Wycliffe-on-the-Tees * was the home of the Reformer's family—the place, as Leland said unde Wigclif, hereticus, originem duxit-there is not much reason to doubt, though there is no conclusive evidence. The old church at Wycliffe is on a grassy hillock above the river, with some wood about, and Wycliffe Hall, on the site of the old house of the Wycliffe family, is on a rise lower down, with a Roman Catholic chapel close to it. Wyclifs of this family held by the old forms of faith, together with half the people of the village, even after the days of the Tudor Reformation. There was a Robert Wyclif who had the living of Wycliffe in 1361, but exchanged out of it in 1362; and there was another Robert Wyclif in the next century who held the living of Rudby in the diocese of York. This Wiclif, when he made his will in 1423, commended his soul to the Virgin and All Saints, left money for prayers for his own soul and the souls of his parents, and forty shillings towards repairs, as well as forty shillings towards the poor's fund of each of four churches, one of them being that of Wycliffe-on-the-Tees. But we are most concerned with the fact that there was living in the Reformer's time another John Wyclif.†

The other John Wyclif is probably the Wyclif who in June, 1356, was seneschal of the week at Merton College, and therefore a Fellow of Merton. The other John The other Wyclif was certainly nominated by Simon Islip, John Wyclif. Archbishop of Canterbury, in July, 1361, to the vicarage of

* The local pronunciation is with a long first syllable.

Attention was first drawn to him by Mr. Courthope of the College of Arms, in the Gentleman's Magazine for August, 1841.

C-VOL. V.

Mayfield in Sussex. At Mayfield the Archbishops of Canterbury had a famous manor. Its great hall, seventy feet long and about fifty feet high, with a timber roof, was built by Simon Islip, who cut down much wood in the Weald of Sussex for this hall and other buildings of the manor of Mayfield. He died in his Mayfield palace on the 26th of April, 1366, of illness established in January, 1363, when, after a fall from his horse into a wet and miry place, he got back to Mayfield very tired, and fell asleep in his wet clothes while he sat in a stone chamber. The country people said that his greed of pomp had thus brought down on him a signal judgment.

Simon Islip succeeded in the see of Canterbury "the Profound Doctor," Thomas Bradwardine,* who died of the plague in 1349. Islip-if his bones were those found about a hundred years ago at Canterbury in the coffin supposed to be his—was a large man, more than six feet high. Merton had been his college at Oxford, and he was one of the king's clerks when he was made by Edward III. Archbishop of Canterbury. If the other John Wyclif, and not ours, was the Fellow of Merton, we see at once how Islip, at Merton, had come to know him, and to hold him in such high regard as to place him in the pulpit at Mayfield, next door to himself. John Wyclif of Mayfield was unquestionably the other Wyclif; and his later history is known.

1380, fourteen years after Islip's death, he left his living of Mayfield for that of Horsted-Keynes, a Sussex village in a pleasant hollow by the river Ouse; and he was presented at the same time—when the Bishop of Chichester was William Reade, a Merton man-to a prebend in Chichester Cathedral. This other John Wyclif died in 1383, only a year before John Wyclif the Reformer.

John Wyclif, the Reformer, died on the 28th of December, 1384, and the year of his death, with the * "E. W." iv., 61-65.

probable date of his becoming Doctor of Divinity, are the only guides to a guess at the year of his birth. He did not die young. If we suppose him to have died at sixty, he was born in 1324. In those days of plague, pestilence, and famine, the average expectation of life was much lower than it now is, and unhealthy surroundings must have caused in many men a sapping of bodily strength that made them feel old and look old before they were sixty. But Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon lived to be nearly eighty; Adam of Murimuth lived to be more than eighty. Old age, as we understand it now, was attainable by men who had good constitutions, lived reasonably, and escaped the plague. There was no difference in the construction of the body; or in climate, save by clearing of the woods and drainage of the fens.

Earlier years at Oxford.

A guess at Wyclif's birth-year would be possible if there were any distinct record of dates or facts in his student life at Oxford. We may infer dates theoretically from the inferred date of his Doctorate; but we know nothing positively about John Wyclif the Reformer before the year 1361, in April and July of which year he is found acting as Master or Warden of Balliol College, Oxford; we know also that on the 16th of May in the same year, 1361, he was initiated, on the presentation of Balliol College, to the rectory of Fillingham in Lincolnshire.

Since in formal documents relating to his office as Master of Balliol Wyclif was not described as Doctor of Divinity, it may be inferred that in 1361 he had not yet taken that degree. In October, 1363, having resigned the Mastership of Balliol when he went into residence at Fillingham, Wyclif was renting rooms at Queen's College for residence in Oxford. Of three tracts against Wyclif, written by John Cunningham, a Carmelite friar, within a few weeks of one

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