put to their defence. The University respected Wyclif, and was jealous of its right to search for truth by letting different opinions face each other in free and open en counter. Proceedings at Blackfriars. The Archbishop at once summoned Dr. Rigge, the Chancellor, and two other men, before an assembly in London at the house of the Black Friars. Then they were driven to assent to the censure of the twenty-four sentences, and to make their peace with offended authority. It was now to be the Chancellor in his own person—not Dr. Stokes-who was to proclaim the censure. He was to interdict from preaching, John Wyclif, Nicholas Hereford, Philip Repington, John Aston, and Laurence Bedeman, and suspend them from all academical functions until they were clear of the suspicion of heresy. Dr. Rigge went back to Oxford and told Hereford and Repington that he was obliged to suspend them from their functions in the University. Against Wyclif, who was at Lutterworth, he took no action. But when a Cistercian, Dr. Henry Cromp, violently attacked Wyclif and his followers, and for the first time in public speech at the University applied to them the new name of Lollard, the Chancellor cited him to answer for himself as a disturber of the peace of the University. As Dr. Cromp did not obey the summons, the Chancellor declared him contumacious, and, in St. Mary's church, suspended the Cistercian also from his functions in the University. Hereford Meanwhile Hereford, Repington, and Aston were cited before a council at Blackfriars held on the 18th and 20th of June. The didy not satisfy the Council, and, after other procedures, they were publicly excommunicated. A patent was also obtained from the king for a general inquisition into the orthodoxy of all graduate theologians and jurists in the University of Oxford. In such ways Archbishop Courtenay proceeded and others excommunicated. eagerly with his attack upon the followers of Wyclif, but he did not venture to strike at Wyclif himself, who had withdrawn to Lutterworth, and still was preaching, writing, fearlessly delivering his soul, none venturing to call him. personally to account. With unabated force Wyclif attacked, in the summer of 1383, the levying of a Crusade by Urban VI. against his rival, Clement VII. entered upon by the The Crusade was actually Bishop of Norwich, who, with a force that he raised, took ship for Calais Wyclif himself not touched. in May. His adventure was brought, in October, to a miserable end. Then there is said to have been a' citation of Wyclif to Rome by Urban VI. Of this there is no evidence in extant documents or in allusions of contemporaries. Had there been such a citation there must have been many references to it. Belief in it rests only upon the authority of a letter wrongly supposed to have been addressed by Wyclif to the Pope. It is a writing which has not the form of a letter, and in which the Pope is not once addressed, but he is mentioned nine times in the third person, spoken of also as 66 our Pope." Dr. Lechler believes that this writing of Wyclif's is concerned only with the journey of his friend Nicholas of Hereford to Rome, and was addressed to his own friends. Wyclif's If the citation to Rome be set aside, there remains only the fact that, in his last days, John Wyclif, surrounded with many perils, remained at his post in Lutterworth, his friends and his work attacked, but himself untouched even by slander of his character. He had suffered in health for two years after a stroke of palsy, when the end came. On Innocents' Day-the 28th of December-in the year 1384, while he was hearing mass in his church at Lutterworth, Wyclif fell to the ground with "another palsy stroke that left him speechless G-VOL. V. until his death. He died on Silvester's Day, the 31st of December.* Forty-one years after Wyclif's death, his bones were taken from his grave at Lutterworth, in obedience to a decree of the Synod of Constance, to be scattered far away from holy ground. They were burnt, and their ashes were thrown into the little river of Lutterworth, the Swift. So speeds the Plough. * This was recorded in 1441 on oath by John Horn, a priest, eighty years old, who was at the time of Wyclif's death a young man of threeand-twenty, had worked for two years with Wyclif in his parish, and was present at the church service in which he fell. He gave his information to Dr. Thomas Gascoigne, who was Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1443 to 1445, and died in 1457. Dr. Gascoigne set the record down with his own hand, because he saw a judgment on a heretic opposed to the doctrine of Transubstantiation in Wyclif's being struck speechless about the time of the elevation of the host. Immediately after a recital of Wyclif's post-mortem excommunication by Archbishop Thomas Arundel, and of the digging up of his bones by order of Richard Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, that they might be burnt and their ashes thrown into the stream, according to the command of Pope Martin V., Dr. Gascoigne wrote of Wyclif's having been palsied, "per duos annos ante mortem suam, et anno Domini 1384, obiit in die Sabbati in die Sancti Sylvestris, in vigilia Circumcisionis Domini et in eodem anno sc. in die Sanctorum Innocentium, audiens missam in ecclesia sua de Lytterwyrt, circa elevationem sacramenti altaris decidit percussus magna paralysi et specialiter in linguâ,” &c. CHAPTER VI.. CHAUCER'S EARLIER YEARS. The spirit of THE genius of Geoffrey Chaucer is not to be likened to a lone star glittering down on us through a rift in surrounding darkness, or to a spring-day in the midst of winter, that blossoms and fades, leaving us to wait long for its next fellow. He had in his own time for brother writers Wyclif, Langland, Gower, some of the worthiest men of our race, and the light of the English mind was not quenched when he died. Nor is it natural in any way whatever to think of Chaucer as an isolated man. No English poet equal to him had preceded him, or lived in his own day. Only one writer since his time has risen to his level, and he rose yet higher. But much of Chaucer's strength came of a genial spirit of companionship. It was his good-will to humanity, and his true sense of his own part in it, that gave him his clear insight into life. In him the simple sturdiness of the dutiful God-seeking Anglo-Saxon is blended intimately with the social joyousness of wit. Chaucer worked to the same end as Langland and Gower; not less religiously, though with much less despair over the evils that he saw. He does not see far who despairs of any part of God's creation. Having the sympathetic insight that is inseparable from genius at its best, and entering more deeply than his neighbour poets into characters of men, Chaucer could deal with them all goodhumouredly; for he had the tolerance that must needs come of a large view of life, exact in its simplicity. Of Chaucer's there is not a thought coloured by prejudice or passion. He paints, in his chief work, character in all its variety, without once giving us, under some other name, a covert reproduction of himself. When he attacks hypocrisy that trades upon religion, and in so doing strips vice of its cloak, the sharpest note of his scorn has in it a rich quality of human kindliness. In perception of the ridiculous, he is beforehand with the most fastidious of his countrymen, and with his own native instinct he knows where an Englishman would turn with laughter or displeasure from words or thoughts that might seem good to any other people. Earnest as he was disposed at times even to direct religious teaching --Chaucer was quick to see the brighter side of life, and ready to enjoy it in the flesh. When he was rich he seems to have delighted freely and naturally in whatever good things wealth would bring him; and when stripped of substance he set up no mean wailing of distress, but quietly consoling himself with a keener relish of the wealth that was within him, he dined worse and wrote his "Canterbury Tales." Parentage. What do we know about Chaucer himself? First, of his name. If the name Chaucer be derived from Chaucier or Chaussier, shoemaker, some of the poet's ancestors must have been men who lived by useful labour. But there is a Chaucer on the Roll of Battle Abbey, and a mention of le Chausir in King John's reign among the Tower records suggested to Thomas Speght that "shoemaker" was the name of a Court office. Chausir as a Court office might be not Chaussier, shoemaker, but Chauffecire-Chaffwax--the official warmer of the wax that was to take impressions of the royal seal. No doubt that is in truth meaner work than shoemaking. Leland, who was commissioned by Henry VIII. to search all libraries in England for matters of antiquity, writing |