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SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY AT CLAREMONT
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THE CLASSICS
OF WESTERN
SPIRITUALITY
a

THE CLASSICS OF WESTERN SPIRITUALITY
A Library of the Great Spiritual Masters
President and Publisher
Mark-David Janus, CSP
EDITORIAL BOARD
Editor-in-Chief
Bernard McGinn—Naomi Shenstone Donnelly Professor of Historical
Theology and the History of Christianity, Divinity School, University of
Chicago, Chicago, IL
Editorial Consultant
John E. Booty—Professor of Anglican Studies, School of Theology,
University of the South, Sewanee, TN
Joseph Dan—Professor of Kabbalah, Department of Jewish Thought,
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.
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University, New Haven, CT
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Kalamazoo, MI
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University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
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Church, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ
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Waltham, MA
Stanley S. Harakas—Archbishop Iakovos Professor of Orthodox
Theology, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Seminary, Brookline, MA
Moshe Idel—Professor of Jewish Thought, Department of Jewish Thought,
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.

Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia—Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford,
Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies, Oxford University, England.
Azim Nanji—Director, The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, England.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr—Professor of Islamic Studies, George Washington
University, Washington, DC
Sandra M. Schneiders—Professor of New Testament Studies and Spiri-
tuality, Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, CA
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of Comparative Religions, Haverford College, Haverford, PA
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cuse University, Syracuse, NY
John R. Sommerfeldt—Professor of History, University of Dallas, Irving, TX
David Steindl-Rast—Spiritual Author, Benedictine Grange, West
Redding, CT 3
David Tracy—Greeley Professor of Roman Catholic Studies, Divinity
School, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
The Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Rowan D. Williams— Archbishop of
Canterbury.

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490),
W938
2.072,
Wycliffite Spirituality
EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY
J. PATRICK HORNBECK II, STEPHEN E. LAHEY, AND FIONA SOMERSET
PAULIST PRESS
NEW YORK ¢ MAHWAH

Cover art: Figure from the Luther Memorial in Fulda (Germany) by Ernst Rietschel
(German sculptor, 1804-1861). Original woodcut, published in 1877. Courtesy of
iStockphoto.
tts Library
CLAREMONT
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Claremont, CA
Cover and caseside design by Cynthia Dunne, www.bluefarmdesign.com
Book design by Lynn Else
Copyright © 2013 by J. Patrick Hornbeck II, Stephen E. Lahey, and Fiona Somerset
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the
Publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wycliffite spirituality / edited and translated by J. Patrick Hornbeck II, Stephen E.
Lahey, Fiona Somerset.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8091-0605-9 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8091-4765-6 (alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-1-893757-84-4 1. Lollards. 2. Wycliffe, John, d. 1384. I. Hornbeck, J. Patrick,
1982- II. Lahey, Stephen E. III. Somerset, Fiona.
BX4901.3.W93 2013
284'.3—dc23
2012028137
Published by Paulist Press
997 Macarthur Boulevard
Mahwah, New Jersey 07430
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Printed and bound in the
United States of America

CONTENTS
BVel G50 e602. 1a a NO I Ne epee MGR Soe. ld SER eOE E xi
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Sis SAN a yale Ste aA chacdscasragsreal hot teeg sates? 7
§ no FEES Get OC kaeeaienlen aaa an enn ie ot a anne RS Ripe eat at Vane 30
PUES TE CATS ALONG S rack ps cad oo casei site opadade ol cassnti nents 52
UGS CER ET Cire a 67g (Raa ee ie eS ae Ie ee oe 56
De ss OT PUTT REA acces ec ere bases arse nsasess ater re eaeeoes 58
gd 6 Gp aS C5 1G 5 tearm attract tee ach patie atere teen OM RI CNET 61
EBT I Gia aN er a Res a 63
MATE MIN ICES orice aoe a ate Bode ly ED. sehen bnsaance 71
MIU IY ee ee eae cos ead sa de sats vhs ban a cand dunes 84
4. On the Divine Commandments (Selections) ..............:00000+ 87
Sob) OE ae BLE, FSS ATTA G ane Wea en aR ETO eT ne ree 146
PART II: ENGLISH WYCLIFFITE WRITINGS ................:..:000 157
OTE TES 8 L177 1 Eo ee ne ec ne ee eT 159
eT IN OA occ iosinssdsbisererncmmehaetieainniinsieeieeee 159
PEI CIICSIOTIS OF DIVE anon envenavscssinnsuinedsnoctstneasersessusspestoeese ax 162
Be spare esr carapnsoscsnvabe hieaspsapaviiavtasarscasotenbiansvagers 164
FI Pty i oie esnessoeing tains puasandaphonvanox ncn dea soaoate hacv 182
10. Of Wedded Men and Wives (Selections)........s:seseeeen 191
EXOCCSIS AIR CONMIMCMUALY vaccisscernesptectu crc iisctetnscessonsssivnvonezenciatons 196
Ga OT) all i013) Fs eee, Re ory | ee eer 196
12. The Ten Commandments (Selections)..........:.:sseesseceeeeeeees 201
Ts SCPINORIS 75a onctucasdcs cuss vopsnrteen Eero re ee sea iawn on aes 226
14, Commentary On Psalttt 87 sccccsoxccssssatesstncnactrenissnsossesrensasneses vhs,

CONTENTS
Wycliffite: Dewotion ts, .acienewl, weneiiiists pee ae aaadean tere 242
B52 The Sever Works Op WMCICy scree states eeernty ae ee 242
16: FOr Of COMJESSONE sc oscseroecsceaustosnced rien poten ae 244
17. A Dialogue between a Wise Man and @ Fo0.........10.s000000 247
18. A Commendation of- ony Witt oll p.prsccsascretereesseeovsicotsseoes 263
Eccleésial Spirittialitycg sox escoren eet oh soc Male se, oeoawcescsussuve sensntap oss 269
19: The Lantern of Light (Selec) Pr .sscacscccsscrcoacecenenceesteonse 269
20 Ue Ci Of SaUrtts ..cceaceteomearra terete tiene es ueepom ee 276
21. A Dialogue between Jon and Richard (Selections)............ 290
22. Sermons from Sidney Sussex 74 (Selections) ...........:.:s00+ 298
23. Ihe Sermon of Dead Men:(Selections) :i.5.5s0 tees 305
PAR DTT HERESY. PRUAUS -o.ccscccsctost sce sea cect gee te tame 319
24. Heresy Trials in Norwich Diocese, 1428-31 .........sssscesseseees 321
25. Heresy Trials in Winchester Diocese, 1511-13... 340
INOEES 20: ccacdcnereontectasateoaconaetaudtsudscesor sss pac caas <i ste ae ies tate ee 367
TAD OX foesisin anos ccdhantecier'cesiawe tin ieplesake cient Oluite ate ieea tester kala 405
Vili

Contributors to This Volume
J. PATRICK HORNBECK II is associate professor of theology at
Fordham University in New York. His studies focus on the interface
between the shifting categories of “heresy” and “orthodoxy” in
medieval and early modern Christianity, particularly regarding the
Lollards or Wycliffites. Dr. Hornbeck earned his PhD in
theology/ecclesiastical history from Oxford University.
STEPHEN E. LAHEY is assistant professor in the Department of
Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska. He has
published extensively in the field of medieval studies. A priest of the
Episcopal Church of the United States of America, Dr. Lahey earned
his PhD in medieval studies from the University of Connecticut.
FIONA SOMERSET is professor of English at the University of
Connecticut and has published extensively about literature and
movements in medieval England, especially about Chaucer and
about Lollardy. A coeditor of The Yearbook of Langland Studies, Dr.
Somerset earned her PhD from Cornell University.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank Bernard McGinn for having the idea for this
book in the first place, for his closely engaged readings of everything
we have produced, and for his and Nancy de Flon of Paulist Press’s
enthusiasm for the project as it has developed. We are all grateful to
William Revere, Jennifer Illig, and Jack Bell for assistance with
research and formatting and for closely attentive reading of the
translations. Fiona thanks the students in her heresy class for the
verve and insight with which they test drove a draft of the volume,
and Patrick likewise thanks the students in his dissenters and
heretics seminar for their generous feedback. We have depended
upon the helpfulness and hospitality of several libraries; we thank
the manuscript librarians, reference librarians, and staff of the
British Library, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Cambridge
University Library, Duke University Library, and the National
Humanities Center for their invaluable assistance. Fiona thanks the
National Humanities Center and Duke University for research leave
during her work on this book. Stephen thanks the University of
Nebraska Layman Grant for funds used to assist in translating
Wyclif’s Latin works. All three editors thank the Theology
Department of Fordham University for financial support that made
it possible to publish the full volume in print form.
It would not even have been possible to conceive of a volume
on Wycliffite spirituality without the sustained effort of generations
of scholars who have labored to make the dissenting views and reli-
gious aspirations of Wyclif and his followers better known. Even
where our motivations or conclusions may differ from theirs, we are
very conscious of our debts to them. These extend from the early
researches of scholars such as John Bale, William Crashaw, and
James Ussher, through the massive editorial labors of the Wyclif
Society, Thomas Arnold, Josiah Forshall, Frederick Madden, and

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
EF. D. Matthew, to the work of literary, social, and intellectual histori-
ans, including H. B. Workman, K. B. McFarlane, J. A. F. Thomson,
Howard Kaminsky, Henry Hargreaves, Anthony Kenny, J. A.
Robson, Jeremy Catto, Margaret Aston, and Anne Hudson, to the
producers of modern critical editions of Wyclif’s and Wycliffite writ-
ings and of trial documents: Johann Loserth, Anne Hudson, Pamela
Gradon, Christina Von Nolcken, Mary Dove, Shannon McSheffrey,
Norman Tanner. There are of course many others.
Among scholars currently active, we are grateful for the colle-
giality of Jennifer Arch, John Arnold, Mishtooni Bose, Andrew Cole,
Michael Cornett, the now late Mary Dove, Alan Fletcher, Ian Forrest,
Kantik Ghosh, Vincent Gillespie, Ralph Hanna, Jill Havens, Anne
Hudson, Judith Jefferson, Maureen Jurkowski, Henry Ansgar Kelly,
Maryanne Kowaleski, Michael Kuczynski, Ian Levy, Anna Lewis,
Rob Lutton, Shannon McSheffrey, Derrick Pitard, Helen Spencer,
Robert Swanson, Norman Tanner, Christina Von Nolcken, and
Nicholas Watson. Specific debts to some of them for kindly sharing
findings and resources are recorded in the Notes, while many of
them read and responded to drafts. Among so many generous inter-
locutors we have surely overlooked somebody, and we apologize in
advance.
The editors also wish to thank one another. Working together
on this volume has been a great pleasure. All three contributors par-
ticipated in the planning of the volume’s overall shape from the
beginning, and all read and critiqued one another’s work.
Finally, Steve thanks Julia and Thea, and Fiona thanks Tim,
Declan, Eoin, and Teagan, for tolerating their absorption in (and
even occasionally sharing their excitement over) the contents of this
volume.

INTRODUCTION
For more than six centuries, John Wyclif and his followers have
divided Christians. Wyclif himself, though never excommunicated,
was declared heretical by Gregory XI in 1377. Those who were con-
sidered Wycliffites or lollards were often treated more harshly, in a
long series of heresy investigations and trials beginning in Oxford in
the early 1380s, and continuing intermittently across England and
beyond up until the 1520s. Wyclif’s thought catalyzed Bohemians
and contributed to the revolution that followed the burning of Jan
Hus at Constance in July 1415, when the term Wycliffism became
formally associated with heresy. After the Reformation, Protestants
embraced the memory of Wycliffism, which led to a renewed antipa-
thy toward the movement by the Roman Catholic Church. Such was
the state of opinions about Wyclif and the theological movement
associated with his ideas until the middle decades of the twentieth
century.
More recently, thoughtful readers have been questioning many
aspects of the conventional account of Wyclif and his followers. In
part, this is because heresy is not understood the way it once was.
Early evangelicals condemned some types of theology as heretical,
but they admired many of those the medieval church had con-
demned as heretics, viewing them, instead, as their own precursors,
martyrs to the truth; this kind of glamor still hangs about the word.’
More recently, heresy has become a neutral descriptive term, even
while some have sought to reassert a more negative meaning and
discourage ordinary Christians from any possible attraction it might
hold.’ Behind all these usages often lies the assumption that one
decides to embrace a heresy, the way one might join a political party.
In the high and later Middle Ages, though, heresy was a crime in both
canon and secular law. Nobody wanted to be a heretic, and nobody
chose to be affiliated with what he or she thought was a heresy.

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
People were labeled heretics not merely if they believed in a heresy—
this is crucially important—but if when examined for heresy they
stubbornly refused to submit to correction and renounce that belief,
forever.’
Heresy, however, also had a somewhat looser sense, common in
polemical or controversial writings and originating in the early
church, where the Greek word hairesis, meaning “choice,” was widely
used to refer to a school of thought, at that point without any implied
condemnation.‘ Any given heresy—for example, Arian, Pelagian,
Waldensian, or Wycliffite—might designate a set of beliefs. But the
same adjective also described the group of people who were said to
hold them and their leader or founder. Those being examined for
heresy might vehemently deny being heretics, all the while retaining
a strong sense of identity with the group their examiners had singled
out for attention. They might still feel very strongly that they, their
associates, and others they admired were the most true and faithful
followers of Christ. In encouraging his followers to abandon their
previous lives and follow him instead, regardless of the persecution
they might encounter, Christ set a radical precedent whose implica-
tions have never been fully absent from Christianity. Nobody
“chose” to be a heretic, then—but it seems that a good number chose
to follow Christ, as they interpreted that injunction, by following
Wyclif. They did so even when they were well aware that their beliefs
and practices placed them at risk of prosecution for heresy.
Whether to call these people Wycliffite or lollard has been a
subject of much debate in recent years; in this volume we keep things
simple for newcomers to the field by using Wycliffite and lollard
more or less interchangeably throughout. More fundamentally, who
were these Wycliffites? What did they think made them the true fol-
lowers of Christ? All of the writings in this volume, many of them
appearing in print for the first time, can aid readers in considering
these questions anew.
Many standard accounts of Wyclif and his followers are based in
the late-fourteenth-century Chronicle of the Augustinian canon Henry
Knighton.’ Knighton’s Chronicle contains the closest thing to a first-
hand narrative of the development of lollardy that we have, written in
the form of a detailed account of current events by a well-informed
observer with access to a wide range of written sources. Knighton

INTRODUCTION
describes Wyclif as having translated the Bible into English: a contro-
versial act, since both the capacity of the English language to serve as
an appropriate vehicle for scriptural teaching, and the consequences of
making difficult texts broadly accessible to less-educated readers, were
much debated.° Next, Knighton describes Wyclif and his followers as
rejecting the sacraments of the Eucharist and of confession, as well as
the mass. He describes them as thinking that no bishop or priest in
mortal sin can perform the sacraments, refusing the authority of the
pope and excommunication. Instead, Knighton says, they insisted on
preaching, even without ecclesiastical license; they contended that no
ecclesiastical institution should have temporal goods, and indeed that
temporal lords should seize them. Yet, they also argued that not even
secular authorities might hold office if in mortal sin, and that the
people by their own judgment should correct temporal lords and
refuse tithes to sinful priests. They rejected intercessory prayer,
insisted that friars should engage in manual labor rather than begging,
and asserted that the religious orders should be abolished as a hin-
drance to holy living.’
Knighton notes that despite Wyclif’s death, his followers con-
tinued to travel far and wide spreading his false teachings, adding
others of their own (for example, rejection of images, pilgrimages,
crusades, the canonical hours, and worldly pleasures), but in
remarkable unanimity. They had support in high places; knights,
even dukes and earls, protected them and provided them with
opportunities to preach. Some of them held meetings, even what
could be called schools, through which their views were taught. This
teaching program, the pretended piety and virtue of these preachers,
and their fierce disparagement of the friars led to the dramatic
increase in the numbers of lollards, or Wycliffites. More and more
preachers were trained and recruited as the sect spread throughout
the country. The Wycliffites were persecuted as heretics in an
increasingly systematic way. According to later chroniclers, the
heresy persisted in various places across the country right up until
the Reformation, for which it may have prepared the ground.*
Just what about this story is so controversial? The account,
appealing as it may be, is too simplistic in its connection of Wyclif to
the movement that embraced him. What role Wyclif may have
played in the Bible translation associated with his name, and who

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
else may have participated, is unknown; while some have sought to
assert the involvement of one or more known writers, others have
contended that such assertions must remain purely speculative.’
Similarly, we remain unable to identify who produced the many ver-
nacular writings associated with lollardy—adaptations of previous
sources, translations from Wyclif’s works, scholarly tools, commen-
taries, sermons, pastoralia, and so on. Most scholars recognize that
the absence of definite evidence makes it impossible to assign anony-
mous works to one or another named individual, or for that matter
to Wyclif.'° Less agreement can be found on the issues of whether
Wyclif’s academic ideas match up closely with those of his followers,
of how far and how rapidly Wycliffite ideas spread, of how doctri-
nally consistent they remained over time, of how successfully and
how severely they were pursued and suppressed, and of what role
they may have played, if any, in the early years of the Reformation.
In general, positions have divided sharply between Protestants and
Catholics, with Catholics arguing for the insignificance and incon-
sistency of Wycliffism, and Protestants for its importance, persis-
tence, stability, and influence.”
Post-Reformation divides have influenced our understanding
of other aspects of this account, too. The precise details of what
Wyclif and his followers thought about the sacraments, the liturgy,
papal authority, clerical disendowment, and the literal sense of scrip-
ture have not always been closely examined. Nor has the equation of
the church with the predestined elect been analyzed with the care
with which Wyclif described it. The list of condemnations made of
Wyclif’s theology by Gregory XI in 1377, by the archbishop of
Canterbury in 1382, and by the assembled dignitaries at the Council
of Constance in 1415 is dizzying. In each of these instances, the stan-
dard approach was to draw up a “list of errors.’ By 1411, the lists con-
tained over two hundred distinct errors, and because in many cases
his adherents had been creative in interpreting Wyclif’s writings, the
bishops and theologians condemned positions foreign to Wyclif. By
1415, the list of errors had grown to 305. How many of these articles
accurately reflect Wyclif’s own thought, the beliefs of the majority of
Wycliffites, or the specters that their opponents feared might lurk
unrecognized within Wycliffism has been a matter of great disagree-
ment over the centuries.

INTRODUCTION
Since John Wyclif has traditionally been viewed as the
“Morning Star of the Reformation,’ his views and those of his follow-
ers have often been assumed to be identical with those of later
Protestants rather than examined closely in their own setting.” For
example, it has often been assumed that Wyclif must have asserted
that Christ’s body was not present in the Eucharist, that instead the
bread and wine remain merely bread and wine, and the sacrament’s
purposes are commemorative. This does seem to have been the posi-
tion of some later lollards, as the trial records included here show.”
But it was not Wyclif’s position, nor that of many of his earlier fol-
lowers." Similarly, it has been asserted that Wyclif and all his follow-
ers were strictly determinist predestinarians, firmly convinced that
some are chosen for salvation while most are irrevocably damned,
regardless of the choices they may make in this life. Yet Wyclif’s writ-
ings do not support this claim, and neither do Wycliffite writings."
More positions need to be reconsidered. For example, Wyclif and his
followers are thought to have rejected the sacrament of confession
outright, despite plentiful evidence that they did not.'* And while
Wyclif’s and Wycliffite reliance on church tradition has sometimes
been viewed as inconsistent or hypocritical, we might instead reex-
amine the assertion that they rejected church tradition, for their
writings do not sustain that claim. They may have derided some of
Aquinas's conclusions, for example, but others they embraced.”
So while some version of many of these articles can indeed be
found in Wyclif’s or Wycliffite polemical writings, it does not neces-
sarily follow that these articles form the core of lollard belief, let
alone provide insight into lollard practices. An account of lollardy
based exclusively on what it rejected and its most strenuously polem-
ical arguments will be only very partial. It would be accurate to label
such a version of lollardy “religiously [and] imaginatively...sterile,”
and it would be understandable to wonder what ever attracted any-
one to it, especially to the point of dying for it.* Yet, this would be to
ignore the untold riches at our fingertips. We have the opportunity
to ask the right people the right questions. In contrast to most het-
erodox medieval ideologies, where few original sources survive, we
have many manuscripts including lollard writings, and a large num-
ber of Wyclif’s works. Rather than relying on hostile accounts to set
our agenda, we ought to begin from a different ground, as we do in

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
this book. We can begin, in Parts I and II, with what Wyclif and what
lollards themselves have to say about the grounds of their belief—
what teaching is most central, how it should be taught, and to whom.
While the trial evidence in Part III needs to be weighed carefully, it
can then be reevaluated in light of what the study of Wyclif’s and lol-
lard writings on their own terms has conveyed. After careful study of
all three kinds of sources, we will be in a position to reevaluate where
they tell us the same things, and where they seem to diverge. We can
also reconsider what those similarities and differences might mean
for an account of Wycliffism’s development over time, one that no
longer reflexively attributes differences to inconsistency and decline,
and similarities to stability and persistence. These are the invitations
we offer to the readers of this volume.
It will be important to consider the limitations of each of the
kinds of evidence presented here, as well as the opportunities they
offer. Wyclif’s writings in Part I, for example, can offer us little direct
insight about the followers they inspired. They offer a full, system-
atic development of ideas often mentioned more allusively in later
writings, yet in a kind of academic prose that few outside the univer-
sity would have found it easy to understand. Despite their difficulty,
close comparison of Wyclif’s and Wycliffite writings reveals many
influences. Some of these influences were sought out in heresy inves-
tigations or by early Protestant historians and have received a great
deal of attention. Others have scarcely been noticed. Wycliffite writ-
ings in Part II, for their part, can tell us a great deal about how highly
educated followers of Wyclif sought to shape a wider religious move-
ment. We should be cautious, however, about assuming that the
norms they articulate for the group they seek to address—how they
wanted to be read, what they wanted their readers to believe, how
they wanted them to act—will match up perfectly with what readers
did. The records of heresy trials in Part III, on the other hand, can
tell us more about the reception of Wyclif’s and Wycliffite ideas
among a wider audience. Admittedly, these records were produced
not by anthropologists seeking to understand the culture of the indi-
viduals and groups they examine, but by inquisitors, in the course of
their efforts to discover and extirpate heresy. Still, these records give
us much valuable information about how individuals responded to
lists of questions, sometimes volunteering explanations of their own

INTRODUCTION
that may also be recorded; what books people owned and how those
volumes were loaned around and read; and other religious practices,
whether those of individuals or groups, that attracted attention.”
They also show us how defendants were related to one another—
though we should remember that in a case where heresy has come to
light, those relationships may have gone wrong somehow.
Our hope is that this volume will provide at once a useful intro-
ductory survey for readers with interests in many things and a start-
ing point for readers who find that they want to study Wyclif and
Wycliffism in more depth. In the rest of this Introduction we provide
first a brief, synthetic account of some key aspects of Wycliffite spir-
ituality, then a detailed introduction to each of the parts of the vol-
ume and each of the selections included.
WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
The following survey of Wycliffite spirituality’s most central
concerns and characteristics ranges through a series of topics that
appear frequently in Wycliffite writings. It cites examples chiefly
from the selections in this volume, but its observations draw as well
on the larger canon of writings associated with Wycliffism, polemi-
cal, pastoral, and devotional. As will be discussed in more detail
below, there has been considerable scholarly disagreement about
which writings belong in the Wycliffite canon—disagreement even
over some of the selections included here. Thus, a central criterion
for the characteristics described here is that they should appear in
the core writings of the movement whose canonical status is not dis-
puted. These core writings include various translations and adapta-
tions of Wyclif, the Testimony of William Thorpe, the Letter of
Richard Wyche, the Sermon of William Taylor, the two very long ser-
mons printed as the Works of a Lollard Preacher, the Four Wycliffite
Dialogues, prologues and glosses to the Wycliffite Bible, and the
poem Piers the Ploughmans Creed.” Books clearly produced by lol-
lards should also be accounted among their core writings, though
with some careful attention to their incorporation (and, often, mod-
ification) of pre-lollard sources. These books include the most obvi-
ously coherent of the early manuscript anthologies and early texts

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
rapidly produced in multiple, high-quality copies in the movement's
most organized phase, for example, the English Wycliffite Sermons,
the alphabetical encyclopedia of sources called the Floretum and its
shorter version the Rosarium, the Glossed Gospels, and the interpo-
lated commentaries on Rolle’s English psalter and the canticles.”
God’s Law
In Wycliffite writings, “God’s law” and “Christ’s law” are fre-
quently invoked. Most broadly, either of them refers to the moral
instruction contained in the Bible. But more narrowly, all that is
essential to this teaching may be found in the commandments: the
decalogue of Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21, Christ’s com-
mandments that we should love God above all things and our neigh-
bor as ourself in Matthew 22:37-39 (see also Mark 12:29-31; Luke
10:27), and Paul's exhortation to charity as the fulfillment of the law
in Romans 13:10 (cf. Gal 5:14). This is not to suggest that either
Wyclif or Wycliffites held the naive view that the words of the com-
mandments alone, or even of the Bible as a whole, express all legiti-
mate moral instruction in and of themselves, even if some scholars
have attributed to them this sort of reliance on scripture alone (scrip-
tura sola). Rather, while Wycliffites do dismiss some human laws
and doctrinal positions on the grounds that they have no scriptural
basis, their view is not so much that the scriptural words themselves
must stand alone, as that some conclusions may legitimately be
extrapolated from them through commentary, while others may not.
For Wycliffites, the words of the commandments, as
expounded through commentary, embody all necessary truth about
the moral life, that is, all that concerns our relationship with God,
and all that concerns our relations with one another. Wycliffite
emphasis on the commandments as the core of pastoral teaching
contrasts with a far more common medieval emphasis on the seven
deadly sins, often counterposed with the seven virtues that should
counteract them. John Bossy has influentially suggested that it was
only with Gerson and Luther that the commandments began to
replace the sins as the central theme of popular moral instruction, a
development that culminated after the Reformation.” Wycliffite pre-
occupation with the commandments, while their contemporaries

INTRODUCTION
among the Modern-Day Devout were centering their moral life
around the seven sins and virtues, suggests that this chronology is in
need of some revision.”
A scholar of late medieval England might object to Bossy that
interest in the commandments was not at all unusual in the
Wycliffites’ fourteenth- and fifteenth-century milieu. Certainly there
were plenty of mainstream vernacular commentaries on the com-
mandments in medieval England and catechetical writings in which
the commandments are among the items covered.” Still, even against
this backdrop, the intensity and depth of Wycliffite attention to the
commandments is striking. Not only are there several freestanding
Wycliffite commentaries on the commandments, some of them
related, some extraordinarily long. But nearly every Wycliffite text
with the aim of pastoral instruction contains an exposition of the
commandments; what is more, it is common, rather than a sign of
especially bad planning, for this section to bulge out of proportion
and distort the shape of the work as a whole, as in The Lantern of
Light (excerpted in item 19), where the treatment of the command-
ments in chapter 12 spans more than one-third of the work’s total
length.” Repetitious emphasis on the commandments or on God’s
law where another pastoral treatise might choose to develop more
varied themes can also be revealing. Consider, for example, the
attention given to the commandments in The Seven Works of Mercy
(item 15) in this volume, where the works of mercy are each in turn
interpreted spiritually as advising all Christians to know the com-
mandments, to keep them, and to teach others to do so through both
their words and their actions. A Form of Confession (item 16) not
only derives this same interpretation of the works of mercy from the
Seven Works, but recasts the sins it encourages its reader to confess
to God as a version of the Decalogue; each sin in turn breaks a com-
mandment, and each commandment is interpreted spiritually as a
violation of the sinner’s proper love for God.
Creative reworking and novel spiritual interpretations are com-
mon more generally as Wycliffites engage the commandments.
Another example appears in the sermon cycle in Sidney Sussex 74
(see below, item 22, for selections), where the commandments are
discussed out of their biblical sequence to suit the author’s thematic
development.” Equally common is an emphasis on the integral unity

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
of the moral system the commandments propound, such that any of
them can be interpreted spiritually in such a way that it refers glob-
ally to all sin, and breaking any one of them breaks them all (as in Jas
2:10). All misdirected love is a form of idolatry and thus a violation
of the first commandment in The Ten Commandments, for example
(item 12, see p. 209). Similarly, swearing is idolatry in The City of
Saints, even as it is discussed under the second commandment (item
20, see p. 280). Swearing, in turn, is treated as a form of the idle
speech that is tantamount to spiritual murder, a violation of the fifth
commandment, in A Dialogue between a Wise Man and a Fool (item
17, see p. 248). Each commandment foregrounds a different aspect
of sin, rather than a different kind. This blending and shifting of
commandments might easily be overwhelming for less practiced
readers. Perhaps it is for this reason that these commentaries often
repeat biblical assurances that God’s commandments are not diffi-
cult to keep (Matt 11:30; 1 Cor 10:13; 1 John 5:3). See The Two Ways
(item 8, pp. 178-79) and The Ten Commandments (item 12, pp. 202,
203, 205).
Even among Wycliffite writings that are not as single-mindedly
focused on the commandments throughout their length, the com-
mandments are a leitmotif of Wycliffite moral instruction. There is a
sense of vast system, of communal interpretations allusively cited.”
When The Ten Commandments quotes “the Wise Man” to warn “let
all your telling, all your diversion, be the commandments of almighty
God” (item 12, p. 205),” the implicit opposition between proper tale-
telling and vain diversion that the interpolated “all your diversion”
introduces irresistibly recalls the conflict staged over the course of A
Dialogue between a Wise Man and a Fool (item 17), where the Wise
Man urges the Fool to believe and keep the commandments, while
the Fool protests that he prefers a good tale. More distantly it echoes
the concern for proper instruction of children in the command-
ments rather than in vain tales found in Of Wedded Men and Wives
(item 10, pp. 194-95). Worries about idle tales as opposed to proper
instruction are a commonplace, of course; what is unusual about
these examples is their strong emphasis that all the proper instruc-
tion that should replace idle tales can be extrapolated from the com-
mandments. The commandments are similarly fundamental in The
Our Father; “our daily bread” is both food and the commandments:
10

INTRODUCTION
“When we say, ‘give us today our daily bread} we pray for the suste-
nance necessary for our body, and to understand and keep God’s
word, and especially God’s commandments, which are spiritual sus-
tenance for our soul” (item 11, p. 199). Interpretation of “daily
bread” as God’s word is not at all new, but “The Our Father” goes out
of its way to emphasize that God’s word is most especially the com-
mandments. Word and commandments are similarly made equiva-
lent in The Ten Commandments: “For Christ says in the gospel, ‘He
who does not love me does not keep my words; that is, his command-
ments” (item 12, p. 219). In The City of Saints, the primary obliga-
tion of the citizens as a group is to keep the commandments (item
20, p. 279). Conversion toward God, in the Commentary on Psalm 87
as in A Dialogue between a Wise Man and a Fool, takes the form of
keeping the commandments (item 14, p. 237). Wycliffite writings
very frequently cite Christ's response to the rich man who asked him
what he should do to attain everlasting life: “If you will enter into life,
keep the commandments” (Matt 19:17).” It is important to them that
this should be enough, that this reply stands alone. They do not go
on to quote Christ’s second response, the one that most inspired St.
Francis: “If you will be perfect, go sell what you have, and give to the
poor” (Matt 19:21). Indeed, they reject Franciscan poverty as a
means to greater perfection (see further below, p. 14). In A Dialogue
between Jon and Richard, Richard’s claim that friars are more perfect
than other Christians because they keep not only the command-
ments but more besides inspires Jon’s most lyrical polemical flight
(item 21, pp. 297-98).
Wyclif himself devoted extended attention to the command-
ments as he was developing his account of dominion (see below, p.
37). Wycliffite writings on the commandments draw extensively on
Wyclif’s own commentary upon them. Some of this influence has
been recognized, for example, when a commentary on the seventh
commandment in three manuscripts cites Wyclif’s theory that
nobody sinful can own anything.” Other elements of the influence
of Wyclif’s commentary are less well known. For example, Wyclif
develops a carefully qualified account of how images used in
churches may be beneficial in On the Divine Commandments
(Selections) (item 4, pp. 108-13). The Ten Commandments follows
suit, citing Wyclif and drawing on his examples and quotations at
11

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
length in its commentary on the first commandment (item 12, pp.
214-18). Certainly, strong opposition to images later became an
important element of Wycliffism.” Still, this evidence of Wyclif’s
influence on Wycliffite writers offers some complications for schol-
ars who might attempt to use iconoclastic views as a kind of litmus
test for Wycliffism and encourages more and closer attention to how
Wycliffites made use of Wyclif’s writings.
Prayer without Ceasing
The necessity of keeping the commandments and living in love
that Wycliffites so frequently enjoin can also be viewed through the
lens of another necessary activity: prayer. As On Holy Prayers
explains, in showing how we can follow Christ’s and Paul’s injunc-
tions to pray at all times and pray without ceasing (Luke 18:1; 1 Thess
5:17), “As long as a man lives a just life, keeping God’s command-
ments and charity, then he prays well, regardless of what he is doing;
and whoever lives best, prays best” (item 9, p. 183). We pray without
ceasing when we keep the commandments. But prayer is more than
simply equivalent to living well by keeping the commandments. Talk
about prayer allows a closer focus on how one should feel, how one
should think, how one should turn one’s will toward God—on how,
that is, to cultivate the love that God commands. So it is that Wyclif
wrote five commentaries on the Lord’s Prayer in different forms (see
p. 38 below), while Wycliffites reworked the vast cultural storehouse
of both learned and catechetical materials on this prayer to produce
at least five commentaries, three of them expository, two others
polemical spinoffs.”
It should be no surprise that the tradition of commentary on the
Lord's Prayer should inspire polemical commentary. Commentary on
the Lord's Prayer is another means, alongside commentary on the
commandments, for describing proper human conduct in the world
(see p. 38 below). What is more, the biblical context within which the
Lord's Prayer is introduced as the best possible prayer, and an epitome
of all virtuous prayer, is itself polemical (see Matt 6:9-13, where the
prayer is part of Christ's instructions on how to avoid hypocrisy in reli-
gious practice; cf. Luke 11:24). However, Wycliffites not only use
commentary on prayer to instruct their readers about how they
12

INTRODUCTION
should and should not act, but also about how they should feel as they
dispose their souls toward God in prayer.
The proper disposition of the soul for prayer involves a careful
balancing, even sequencing, of feeling. Fear and love must work in
tandem. Wyclif devotes chapter 10 of On the Divine Commandments
to explaining this balance, then employs it through the rest of that
work (item 4, pp. 89-145). Wycliffites share his interest in the topic
and his tendency to devote more attention to fear than is perhaps the
norm. The final verse of the Commentary on Psalm 87 gives an
unusually detailed explanation of how emotions should work
together in prayer:
Each effectual prayer has this condition and strength in it.
First, it prays to be cleansed of all evil done before. And
after that, to be defended from all evil to come. Then, it
desires and yearns after God’s will, to be his heir in the
bliss of heaven. And so each effectual prayer to God has in
it sorrow and dread, desire and hope. (item 14, p. 240)
The aim of this focused address toward God is to dispose the self, as
The Our Father puts it, toward “holy desire and perseverance”: a will
conformed to God’s will as far as human frailty will allow, and filled
with hope that its efforts to persevere—and to renew its proper ori-
entation when those efforts fail—will prevail (item 11, p. 197). The
emphasis in that perseverance, once again, is upon action. In this
present life we cannot know whether we, or our neighbors, will
finally be saved or damned. Still, on the basis of a person's present
actions we can make shrewd guesses about which path he or she is
on right now. Wycliffite writings, following Wyclif, insist on these
two points over and over again.” The prevailing emotion is hope. In
the face of uncertainty about their own futures as well as those of
others, hope is the bulwark of the sometimes wavering or agonized
will. This is the hallmark of Wycliffite spirituality.”
Imitation of Christ
As we would rightly expect of a spirituality that places such
strong emphasis on action, Wycliffites had a great deal to say about
13

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
what right action is. The common late medieval model that would
encourage readers to cultivate the virtues in place of the sins is not
the primary focus of their ethics of action (though they do some-
times treat the virtues and sins cursorily, and very occasionally at
length). Nor, despite their polemical leanings and their interest in
the negative injunctions of the decalogue, was all of what they had to
say about action expressed in terms of what one should not do.
Instead, they looked to Christ. They paid close attention to all the
passages in the gospels where Christ teaches his would-be followers,
and especially his instructions to the apostles. They also looked
closely at the further advice on following Christ found in Paul's let-
ters and the Catholic Epistles.
Of course, Wycliffites were very far from being the only
medieval religious group to be gripped by the impulse to return to
the original model of Christianity laid out in the gospel. They had
plenty of competition, and they knew it. Perhaps the most com-
pelling alternative open to them was that offered by Franciscanism.
The late medieval controversies over poverty that Francis and his
followers sparked seem strongly to have shaped Wyclif’s and his fol-
lowers’ descriptions of how they hope to imitate Christ; some sort of
careful description of what exactly it means to be poor in the right
sort of way is never absent.” Poverty in spirit, rather than material
poverty, is what Wycliffites admire; those who lack bodily necessities
through no fault of their own, on the other hand, should be provided
for from what others can spare.
Wycliffite imitation of Christ is also characterized by an espe-
cially strong interest in models of response to persecution. Again, an
interest in what Christ has to say about persecution is far from
unique to Wycliffites, but in Wycliffite writings it has a special sort
of intensity, visible in the frequent quotation of Christ’s comforts to
his apostles in the face of tribulation and in a preoccupation with
martyrdom. The Five Questions on Love (item 7) follows Wyclif in
his On Love (item 3) by exhorting its readers to embrace at the very
least metaphorical (and quite possibly actual) martyrdom as the best
means of loving God, by means of a carefully interpolated exegesis of
Psalm 116:16-17. The Lantern of Light explains four ways of being
crucified in this world, concluding by exhorting its readers toward
the best of them: “Let us join that cross of God to our bare flesh, so
14

INTRODUCTION
that our place may be found among these holy saints that willingly
forsake themselves and rejoice in tribulation” (item 19, p. 276). And
A Dialogue between a Wise Man and a Fool revalues the insulting
epithet “loller” that had often been applied to Wycliffites by giving
the word a different etymology; rather than a noun derived from
Dutch lollaert (mumbler) or from Latin lolium (darnel), this writer
reads it as derived from the verb fo loll, meaning “to hang.”* While it
is possible to loll in a negative sense, for example by persecuting oth-
ers (“hanging them high”) or committing suicide (“hanging one-
self”), the author foregrounds the positive senses of “loller”:
As for where they call men lollers for speaking God's
word, I read of two kinds of lollers in the law of grace.
Some loll toward God, and some toward the fiend. I
intend to talk about both these kinds. The most blessed
loller that ever was or shall be was our Lord Jesus Christ,
who lolled for our sins on the cross. Wearing his livery
and belonging to his retinue were Peter and Andrew and
others as well. These were blessed lollers, lolling on the
right hand of Jesus with the repentant thief, trusting in
God's mercy [Luke 23:40-43], to whom our Lord prom-
ised the bliss of paradise on that same day. But good
friends, what was the reason why Christ and his followers
were lolled in this way? Certainly, because of their faithful
speaking out against the sins of the people. And especially
because they spoke against the covetousness and sins of
untrue bishops and of the false, feigned religious. (item
17, p. 249)
Christ is the ideal loller whom Christians should imitate, as did Peter
and Andrew and others; Christ hangs on, even when he is hanged up
for it, and he speaks out against sin regardless of the consequences.”
Communal Responsibility for Sin and Its Repair
But Wycliffism is not all about the cultivation of the self.
Indeed, the Wycliffite predilection on the one hand toward architec-
tural metaphors of the self as the church in which God dwells (or
15

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
where Christians dwell in God), and on the other hand toward cor-
porate models of society as a single human body made up of parts
whose functions are incomplete on their own, means that self and
community are always collapsing one into the other in their writ-
ings.” Even as Wycliffites place an extraordinary weight of moral
responsibility upon the individual, their sense of mutual responsibil-
ity within the community is also unusually strong. This leads them to
urge practical implementation of the seven works of mercy in both
their material and metaphorical senses: the genuine poor must be
provided for, those in need of pastoral instruction must be properly
taught. It also leads them to align the mourning (or “pleyning,’ in
Middle English) of the blessed who mourn in Matthew 5:4, whose
sorrow will be turned to joy in John 16:20, with the “pleyning;’ or
“complaining,” of social complaint: blessed are those who speak out
about inconvenient truths, who hunger and thirst for justice, and do
not hesitate to complain about injustice when they see it. This
impulse in Wycliffite thinking may stem, or gain impetus, from
Wyclif’s realist theory of sin, according to which any sin harms all
created things. Certainly Wycliffites frequently justify their “sharp
speech’—whose harshness would normally be considered a violation
of the proper conditions of fraternal correction—by recourse to a the-
ory of social consent that they draw directly from Wyclif, and that
Wyclif himself links to his theory of sin.”
Wyclif’s theory of social consent draws on a topic that had been
much debated by twelfth- and thirteenth-century canonists and theo-
logians: whether the innocent should be punished along with the
guilty.” It was generally agreed that sons should not be punished for
their fathers’ sins unless they imitate them; this was a topic discussed
by Gratian in his Decretum C.1 q.4, with reference to Ezekiel 18:20
and Exodus 20:5, and two of our selections reproduce these conclu-
sions.” But how, then, can it be legitimate to disinherit the orthodox
sons of heretical fathers? Or, even more harshly, since this punish-
ment might bring about their eternal damnation as well as pain in
this life, to impose a papal interdict, or mass excommunication, on a
ruler and all his subjects? The solution was to develop an explanation
of the various ways in which one person, or a whole community,
might be responsible for the sins of another because it had consented
to them; consent in and of itself was defined as a form of culpable
16

INTRODUCTION
imitation. By Wyclif’s time, these various kinds of consent had
become a mnemonic verse that he quotes very frequently in his writ-
ings, and that Wycliffites commonly translate or refer to: “He con-
sents who cooperates with the sinner, who defends him, who offers
advice, / who authorizes his sin, who fails to help prevent it, or who
fails to criticize him sharply“ Paul’s comment on consent in Romans
1:32, that “they who do such things, are worthy of death: and not only
they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them,’
provided support for these theories.* Yet, canonists of the twelfth
century were divided on the question of who could be culpable for
failing to prevent or criticize a sin: Was it only those in authority who
were culpable, by virtue of their office? Or were their subjects, their
inferiors, equally responsible, being required to criticize sharply the
sins of their rulers and preventing them if they could?“
These could remain safely academic questions when they were
being discussed among canon lawyers and theologians, and largely
with reference to the justifiability, and hoped-for effects, of papal
interdicts. It was quite another matter for Wyclif to insist that any per-
sons failure sharply to criticize, and to prevent if possible, the sin of
any other person, is also a sin, and to develop the implications of this
idea. And it was another matter again for Wycliffite writers to pro-
pound this theory in vernacular writings urging their practical moral
implications upon their readers. Consider, for example, this example,
from a commentary on the Ten Commandments in Bodley 789:
As clerks say, there are six kinds of consent, and men
should know them well. He consents to an evil who works
with the person who does it, who defends him, who coun-
sels him to do it, who authorizes it, who does not help to
stop it, or who does not sharply criticize it, when he is able
to do so, and should according to God's law. Among all
the sins by which the fiend beguiles men, none is more
subtle than this consent. Therefore, the prophets of the
old law told men of their perils until they suffered death
for it. And this is the cause for which the apostles of Christ
were martyred, and so should we be, if we were true men.
But cowardice and lack of love for God makes us start
back from doing so, as traitors do.”
17

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
The rhetoric of this passage is compelling; it implicates readers,
along with the writer, in a failure of the will, stemming from insuffi-
cient love for God, that leads them to this subtlest of sins. But now
that they know their sin, now that they recognize that they are
behaving as traitors do, they should overcome their fear and act.
While there are other medieval English writers who mention the
topic of consent to sin in their writings, only Wycliffites develop its
social implications in this direction, and this far.
The Few Who Are Chosen and the Many Who Are Called
Wycliffite writings frequently exhibit some sort of ambivalence
about the size of the community they hope to address, as well as that
community’s relationship to the larger society of which it is a part.
The City of Saints is characteristic in this regard; at one moment the
“little flock” of Christ’s chosen is small simply (though to us repel-
lently) because it does not include “heathens, Jews, [and] Saracens.”
At the next moment, slipped in at the end of the list, the greater flock
of the rejected has expanded to include as well all “false Christian
men” (item 20, p. 278). Only “true men” (a favorite self-descriptive
term of Wycliffites’) belong to the one true church of those that shall
be saved (a frequent descriptive term for the community Wycliffites
hope will be theirs). What, then, of the greater society in which they
lived, and its Christians false as well as true?
It seems doubtful that all Wycliffite writers, all reading groups
that gathered to hear Wycliffite preachers or read Wycliffite writings,
and all individuals involved with Wycliffite ideas in these and other
ways, shared in exactly the same attitudes about what sort of group
they were part of, what its relationship to the larger community was,
whether their version of Christianity was different or better than that
of their neighbors—indeed, whether their neighbors were their
neighbors in the Christian sense and so ought to be a focus of pros-
elytizing effort. We already have some evidence from historians that
the degree to which Wycliffites were integrated in their communities
and shared in mainstream practices varied from one locale to another.”
The case of Margery Baxter in this volume, who seems to have annoyed
a good number of other women through her claims to be holier than
they were, suggests that personality could be a factor as well (item
18

INTRODUCTION
24, pp. 329-35). And surely these relations also varied over time and
depending on the religio-political climate; there may have been
times, for example, where it was all too clear that Wycliffites would
never persuade the lay nobility to disendow and reform the clergy,
but at other times that hope may have been renewed. Nevertheless,
with all these factors in mind, it is probably correct to assert that
Wycliffite writers rarely if ever thought of their readers as a special
group chosen by Christ for salvation and separate from a greater
group for whom there was no hope.
This claim may seem unlikely to some readers, for if there is one
thing many people think they know about Wyclif, it is that he thought
he and his followers were God’s chosen, a special church of the saved
who were assured of their direct route to heaven in the next life.
Wyclif and his followers believed, that is, in predestination. More
than that, they believed they were predestined to salvation, while
nearly all others were foreknown to be damned. Certainly there are
plenty of passages in Wyclif’s and Wycliffite writings that might be
selectively quoted in support of this claim. Wyclif is fond of separat-
ing the “predestinate” from the “foreknown,’ and when Wycliffite
writers talk of the “church that shall be saved,” as they frequently do,
many readers have thought they knew exactly what that meant.
In fact, as is often the case in historical study, it is more compli-
cated than that. Any student of late medieval theologies of salvation
needs to begin by understanding that there was more than one kind
of predestination.” Virtually all medieval Christians believed in pre-
destination in the very soft sense that they believed that since God
knows everything, therefore he must know everything that will hap-
pen in the future, and therefore he knows in advance who will be
saved and who will be damned. In this sense, of course there are
people who are predestined and people who are foreknown, and of
course there is a group that could be called the church of those that
shall be saved (though in Middle English writings it is nearly always
Wycliffites who call them that). Where things get more difficult, and
more divisive, is in explaining who else can know who is predestined
and who is foreknown, how and when this can be known, and in
what sense human beings can retain any choice in the matter or any
influence over their fates, if God knows them all in advance. Only an
extreme determinist predestinarian believes that God’s foreknowl-
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WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
edge somehow rules out human free will. On the other hand, those
who find this conclusion absurd and repugnant must explain how it
is that God can know a fact without God’s knowledge unalterably
determining that fact.
What did Wyclif think? And what did Wycliffites mean when
they talked of the “church of those that shall be saved”? The intricate
subtlety of medieval debates over salvation need not concern us fur-
ther here, for these are not difficult questions to answer. The terms
that Wyclif and Wycliffites used to describe those who will be saved
and those who will be damned are misleading, and have misled
many. Predestined, foreknown, and church that shall be saved make it
sound as though those who used these labels believed that they
could know who belonged in each category, that the categories were
fixed and stable in the present as well as the future, and that human
beings had no ability to influence them. Instead, Wyclif and
Wycliffites insist over and over again that nobody but God can know
who will be saved and who will be damned. The membership of the
group on the way to salvation is imperiled and constantly shifting, as
some fall away into sin (perhaps never to return, who knows?), while
others turn from sin, ask God for mercy, and step away from the
path of damnation. We can make shrewd guesses about who is on
the right path and who is not on the basis of their actions. But it is
not past actions that decide the salvation of Christians, but the dis-
position of their soul—their feelings, their choices, their conformity
to Christ—at the point of death. Since death could come at any
moment, there is no time to waste; but at every moment when death
has not yet come, there is still time to turn from sin to Christ. Thus,
even in emphasizing the littleness of the flock of the saved, Wycliffite
writers always recall the radical uncertainty of its membership. And
in articulating hopes for social reform, they never fail to urge that
everyone should be properly taught.
Social Reform
Conservative, revolutionary, radical, reactionary, egalitarian.
Many value-laden political labels of the present day have been
attached to Wycliffites, usually without conveying much. In looking
around them at their own society, Wycliffites saw much that needed
20

INTRODUCTION
fixing. While they were not so optimistic as to think that sin could
simply be eliminated, they were often hopeful that conditions could
be improved. That improvement, in their view, generally took the
form of a return to the way things should be.
While Wycliffites are not naively invested in tradition, as we see
when the Wise Man dismisses the Fool's contention that the old ways
are best (item 17, pp. 244-45), they do typically give strong endorse-
ment to traditional hierarchies, for example, when the Commentary
on Psalm 87 approvingly compares God with a shepherd, bailiff, hus-
band, lord, lady, king, and father, each with his or her proper sphere
of authority (item 14, p. 231). Fathers should rule their households
just as kings should rule their countries, and social inferiors should
obey their rulers. Yet these endorsements of traditional authority
structures sometimes harbor surprising reservations, especially
when Wycliffites consider the messiness of life in the world. As an
example, let us consider Wycliffite treatments of the three estates.
Most of the time, when Wycliffites need to describe society as
a whole, they resort to dividing it in the most traditional of medieval
ways, that is, into the three estates of those who fight, those who
pray, and those who work: the nobility and gentry, the clergy, and the
commons. This is a very common medieval habit of thought, but
there are some idiosyncrasies in how Wycliffites deploy it.” First, the
three estates are very obviously a kind of hypostatization of an ideal-
ized relationship among social roles that was never so simple, yet in
the later Middle Ages even more obviously so than earlier.” When
later medieval writers talk about the estates in society, it is less com-
mon for them to stick with the traditional three categories, and more
common for them to expand the list to include many other social
groups that do not fit into any of these three categories. If they do
squash these subdivided groups into the three categories, they do so
with strain—strain that may well be overtly discussed.” Wycliffites
never complicate the model in this way; they stick to three estates.
Very few other later medieval English works deploy such a simplis-
tic model, but two that do are a famous sermon delivered by Thomas
Wimbledon in 1387 or 1388 and Piers Plowman. Wimbledons ser-
mon seems to have been very popular among Wycliffites; many of
the extant copies appear in manuscripts that also contain Wycliffite
writings, and its use of the three-estates model may help to explain
24

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
why.” Piers Plowman was also popular among Wycliffites, but while
this lengthy and complicated poem does sometimes use a three-
estates model, it also uses a variety of far more complex models and
raises problems both with the simplicity of the former and the com-
plexity of the latter.*
What is more, when Wycliffites talk about the three estates,
their categories exhibit a characteristic metonymy: lords, or some-
times knights, stand alone for the first estate; priests invariably rep-
resent the second; and the third is often represented by workers who
produce food, or sometimes more generally by “commons.” This way
of thinking about society seems oddly reductive in ways that clearly
would not reflect the everyday experience of readers. Curiously,
among those this model seems to leave out are many of the kinds of
people who seem to have been the most avid readers of Wycliffite
writings: townspeople involved in buying and selling, artisans, par-
ticipants in the book trade, minor gentry, clerks and clerics of vari-
ous kinds, households and their servants.* Part of the answer to why
this model is nevertheless so appealing is surely the polemical work
it can do. Each of the estates can be exhorted to behave as it should,
in sometimes very traditional ways. Their relative success in fulfill-
ing their obligations can be compared in a way that reflects much
more poorly on one group than on another. But at the same time the
three-estate structure allows Wycliffites to insist, over and over, that
the relationship among the estates ought to be otherwise than it is.
Producers of food fulfill their obligation to provide bodily suste-
nance for all, even if what they produce may not always be fairly dis-
tributed. Priests, on the other hand, fail to provide spiritual
sustenance for all, while the newer religious orders brought in to
remedy their deficiencies only make things worse. Lords and
knights, for their part, should fulfill their obligation to protect soci-
ety by ensuring that priests fulfill their primary obligation to preach.
What is more, they should remove the clergy’s excess wealth and dis-
tribute it to the poor, so that everyone gets adequate sustenance of
both kinds. If lords fail in this duty, then the commons should impel
reform from below. Usually they are enjoined to do so through obe-
dience that reforms superiors through sheer good example; more
rarely they are exhorted toward resistive obedience that refuses the
commands of a sinful lord.”
oe,

INTRODUCTION
Exegesis and Interpolation
Wycliffites took very seriously, and to its logical conclusions,
Augustine's claim in De Doctrina Christiana that all of scripture con-
tains the same truth, sometimes expressed openly, sometimes more
obscurely. This is the basis of both the pervasive interpolative habits
in their writing and the lurking sense of a larger system produced
out of much close discussion that these convey. Quotation of scrip-
ture that uses interpolation as an expository tool for rapid assign-
ment of the “spiritual” meaning is very common in Wycliffite texts,
and it is always revealing. It shows where authors feel justified in
specifying a significance that is of great importance to them—for
example, that a command requires both words and actions or must
be interpreted both bodily and spiritually—but that is not overtly
expressed by the biblical text. (We have signaled these interpola-
tions, in this volume, by placing biblical words in italics; see below,
“Notes on the Translations,” p. 52.) Some critics unfamiliar with the
larger body of Wycliffite writings have tried to suggest, in attentive
readings of individual texts, that their interpolative habit is unchar-
acteristic of Wycliffism more broadly.* In fact, it is entirely charac-
teristic. It is true that some writings, and some books in which those
writings are preserved, are more careful than others to distinguish
biblical text from explanatory gloss, for example, through visual dif-
ferentiation such as ink color or underlining. Some writers are also
more careful about quoting passages they plan to discuss in full or
providing full versions in both Latin and English. We suggest,
though, that these are differences in production values, not in the
habits of thought that lie behind them. That writers or book produc-
ers might diverge from an agreed-upon style, especially when pursu-
ing their own individual projects, is something that any copyeditor
knows only too well. The writers know exactly which words are bib-
lical, even if they, or a scribe, may fail to make this clear to readers.
What they have in common, even when they diverge from the kind
of very meticulous differentiation of text and gloss that we see in
some biblical manuscripts or in the English Wycliffite Sermons, is the
density of their allusive interpolation, the chains of piled-up quota-
tions that may even seem to lose the thread of any discussion.”
These feats are perhaps impelled by Wycliffite writers conviction
23

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
that everything true can and should be grounded in the Bible, as well
as the sort of creative interpretative synergy that this conviction
inspires. They do not seem to us to be fraught with theoretical con-
flict, as some have suggested.® This tension may be in the eye of the
beholder.
Wycliffite Spirituality in Heresy Trials:
Personal Holiness and Spiritual Simplicity
Many of the characteristics of Wycliffite spirituality that we
have been describing also appear in the records of suspected heretics’
trials. Heresy defendants experienced themselves as members of a
persecuted few; for instance, Margery Baxter, tried in Norwich in
1428, reportedly announced that “holy church is only in the place
where those of her sect lived” and invited one of her acquaintances
to join a secret reading group presided over by her husband." She
also disclosed which of her neighbors shared her beliefs, saying of
one of them that she “is in the good way of salvation”® Other defen-
dants emphasized fidelity to the law of Christ, rejecting what they
saw as superfluous regulations instituted by the church in contradic-
tion to the gospel and calling, implicitly or explicitly, for the reform
of the clergy.
We have already begun to explore the interpretative challenges
that accompany the use of trial records as evidence for heresy sus-
pects beliefs, yet despite these challenges, trial records remain an
important source of information about the ways in which Wycliffite
Christians envisioned and practiced their religion. In particular, the
themes that emerge from trial records point toward Wycliffites
interest in the holiness of the human person and the cultivation of
spiritual simplicity. This drive toward simplicity did not, however,
keep Wycliffites from criticizing the institutional church, or from
continuing to participate in the rituals of traditional religion.
Nevertheless, for at least some Wycliffites the records of whose trials
remain extant, criticism of institutionally sanctioned beliefs and
practices flowed from spiritual ideals, not the other way around.
Testifying in the case of Margery Baxter, the domestic servant
Joan Clifland told the Norwich court that Baxter
24

INTRODUCTION
asked her what she did every day in the church. And she
[Clifland] responded, saying that first after entering the
church, she was accustomed to genuflect before the cruci-
fix, saying in honor of the crucifix five Our Fathers and
the same number of Hail Marys in honor of the blessed
Mary, the mother of Christ. And then the said Margery,
rebuking her, said to this witness, “you do an evil thing by
genuflecting and praying before images in churches,
because God was never in any church, nor did God nor
will God ever go out from heaven.... [And] if you desire
to see the true cross of Christ, I will show it to you in your
own house.’ And this witness asserted that she would
gladly see the true cross of Christ. And the said Margery
said, “see, and then she extended her arms to their full
length, saying to this witness, “this is the true cross of
Christ, and you should and can see and adore this cross
every day in your own house, and to the same degree that
you in vain labors go to churches to adore or pray to what-
ever images or dead crosses.”
Later in her testimony Clifland also reported that Baxter had said to
her that no infant born of Christian parents needs to be baptized,
because infants are baptized in their mothers’ wombs; the sacrament
of baptism, in contrast, is “idolatry” that priests commit in order to
enrich themselves and their concubines with donations from the
people.
This last claim does carry with it the negative overtones tradi-
tionally associated with Wycliffite criticism of the institutional
church, but the underlying logic of Baxter’s spiritual world is far
more interesting than the simple claim that baptism, like other
sacraments and ceremonies, serves only as a vehicle for clerical
greed. For her, the reason that Clifland does not need to go to church
in order to pray before the crucifix and the reason a mother does not
need to have her newborn baptized are the same: the same dignity, if
not a greater dignity, that is in the wooden crucifix or the waters of
the baptismal font is already present in the human person. A similar
understanding animates the remark that Margery Jopson, tried in
Winchester diocese in 1512, purportedly made to a “gentlewoman”
25

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
who came to her house but refused to accept water until she had
made an offering to the crucifix. According to the records of her
trial, which do not identify the source of this claim, Jopson allegedly
said, “Why will you drink so sparingly; why should you offer your
money to the Rood? Give to a poor body, for priests have enough
money!”® In both cases, Baxter and Jopson explicitly drew compar-
isons between the wooden body of Christ on the crucifix and the
fleshly body of a person’s neighbor; in both cases, they privileged
attention to the living body over the inanimate one. It would seem,
therefore, that they not only feared that churchmen would misuse
their donations, but they were also making a theological point, that
human persons made in the image of God deserve more care than
the “stocks and stones,” to borrow a phrase that commonly appears
in Wycliffite texts and trial records, found in churches.
The focus of Baxter, Jopson, and other suspects on the holiness
of the human person provided the groundwork for theological and
polemical claims about the relationship between clergy and laity.
Baxter's abjuration included the claim that “any good person is a
priest, and... no person will finally come to heaven unless he or she
is a priest,’ a belief that had earlier been voiced by defendants in
Lincoln diocese in the 1380s. The same ideas also appear in the trial
of Wyclif’s so-called secretarius, John Purvey, who was said to have
taught that every good Christian who is predestined for salvation is
a true priest, ordained by God in order to offer up the body of
Christ. For these and other defendants, spirituality is centered on
the relationship between God and the human person, not on the reg-
ulations and practices of the institutional church. It is the human
person who is to be cared for, who is the best image of Christ, who
transcends the superfluous regulations of the institutional church.
The simplicity that many Wycliffites aimed to cultivate can be
discerned, among many other places, in their views on prayer. In
1428, John Kynget of Nelond appeared before Bishop Alnwick
accused not only of heretical beliefs but also of associating with
other known heretics, among them the infamous Wycliffite evange-
list William White. Like other defendants, Kynget spoke out against
the ways in which the church had bureaucratized the sacraments; he
also demonstrated sympathy with Margery Baxter's emphasis on the
goodness of the human person, being accused of believing that “no
26

INTRODUCTION
pilgrimage should be made, except to poor people.” His abjuration
also included two articles on prayer: first, that “prayer should be
made only to God, and to no other saint,” and second, that “no
prayer should be said other than the Pater Noster” Similar claims
appear in the trial of a later defendant, Robert Clerke, who was tried
in 1490 before Bishop John Blythe of Coventry and Lichfield.
Though the records do not indicate the source of this charge, he was
accused of having preached that “the Lord’s Prayer and the angelic
salutation were of no effect and that it is damnable to say the Our
Father and the Hail Mary, for the whole effect of prayer is in the
Creed.” What precisely Clerke’s inquisitors thought that he had
meant is unclear; as a starting point, it should be obvious that a
creed, if a prayer at all, is not the same sort of prayer as the Pater
Noster or the Ave Maria. His accusers may have misunderstood
Clerke’s beliefs, or they may have been given bad information, as is
confirmed in the next sentence of the record of his trial: “To this arti-
cle the said Robert responded with this qualification, that the Lord’s
Prayer should not be said by anyone outside charity, because this
would be more to his damnation than to his edification”
Clerke was not so much putting the Our Father out of bounds
for Christian prayer as he was setting a condition for its use. He was
imagining an essentially moral criterion, that the person praying the
Pater Noster should be in a state of charity. This concept, unparal-
leled in other trial records, seems to function not unlike the tradi-
tional theological category of a person’s being in a state of grace.
Indeed, the notion that a person should assess his or her moral fit-
ness before saying the Our Father evokes Paul's admonition about
receiving the Eucharist: “For he who eats and drinks unworthily, eats
and drinks damnation to himself” (1 Cor 11:29). By means of this
parallel, Clerke elevated the saying of the Lord’s Prayer to a level of
reverence that mainstream religion reserved only for the consecrated
Eucharist, the very body and blood of Christ; this is all the more
striking coming from the mouth of an individual who was accused
of skepticism about the doctrine of transubstantiation. If many trial
records depict Wycliffites as anti-sacramental—a judgment not
wholly without merit—Clerke’s case may serve as a helpful reminder
that for some defendants, at least, simple, biblical prayer functioned
not unlike the sacraments.
27

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
Both the ways in which Baxter and Jopson criticized the adora-
tion of images yet presented the living human body as an alternative
image, and the ways in which Kynget and Clerke criticized innova-
tive forms of prayer yet elevated biblical prayer to the level of sacra-
ment illustrate the complex interplay between Wycliffite and
mainstream Christianity. As we have already observed with regard to
the Wycliffites’ own texts, it is often adaptation rather than wholesale
rejection of traditional ideas that marks their spirituality. What is
more, the trial records also indicate that many Wycliffites were will-
ing to conform their spiritual practices to those of the mainstream
communities of which they were part, not least in order to evade
detection. Again, Joan Clifland’s testimony against Margery Baxter
presents a clear example:
And the said Margery said to this witness that she often
went falsely to confession to the dean of St. Mary in the
Fields, so that the dean might think that she had a good
life. And therefore he often gave Margery money. And
then this witness said to her, surely she confessed all her
sins to the priest? And Margery said to her that she never
did wrong to any priest, and for that reason she never
wished to confess to a priest nor submit herself to a priest,
because no priest had the power of absolving anyone from
sins, and priests sinned every day more gravely than other
men. And indeed Margery said that every man and every
woman who was of her opinion were good priests, and
that holy church is only in the place where those of her
sect lived.”
Not only did Margery participate in an ecclesiastically spon-
sored ritual, auricular confession, in order to persuade a local cleric
that “she had a good life,’ but she also borrowed from the discourses
of traditional religion many of the concepts with which she organ-
ized her thought-world: sin and confession, priesthood and church.
Her challenge, then, was not so much a challenge to Christianity as
it was to church structures, and her logic once again focused on the
spiritual dignity of the rightly acting human person. Though she did
not quail from taking part in a ritual that reinforced the notion of an
28

INTRODUCTION
ontological divide between ordained priests and lay people, she did
so in a way that reflected a different set of theological principles.
Whether he was the dean of St. Mary’s or her local parish priest, if
Margery had done nothing wrong to her confessor, why should she
confess her sins to him? The claim that auricular confession to
priests is unnecessary, which we find echoed in the records of trials
in Winchester diocese nearly a century later, harks back a broader
theme. Margery devalued the sacramental powers of priests because
they “sinned every day more gravely than other men’; she assigned
value to her co-religionists and elevated them to the priesthood
because of their spiritual wisdom. It is fidelity to God and, implicitly,
to God’s commandments that marks a person out as a member of the
church, and faithful people are of inherent dignity.
These two themes from the records of late medieval English
heresy trials—a focus on the human person rather than ecclesiasti-
cal ordinances and an emphasis on simple, biblically grounded
prayer—are of a piece with the spiritual values to be found in John
Wyclif’s writings and those of his followers. They are also of a piece
with the few Wycliffite practices of which the records of heresy trials
make mention; the reading, circulation, and copying of scriptural
and theological texts within a circle of likeminded believers, for
instance, testifies to the value of the written and spoken word for
many Wycliffites.
Partly because dissenters’ practices were often uncontroversial
in themselves—speaking, praying, reading—the inquisitorial
process has occluded many details about their devotional and spiri-
tual lives. Only when practices marked an individual out as a mem-
ber of a dissenting community or else were illegal on their face, as in
the case of the reading and copying of vernacular theological works
in the wake of Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s Constitutions of
1407-1409, do they stand out in the records. It is nevertheless possi-
ble to locate in these fascinating but frustrating documents ideas
about spirituality and traces of the practices in which Wycliffites
incarnated those ideas.
29

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
THE TEXTS IN CONTEXT
John Wyclif: Spiritual and Devotional Guide?
Wycliffism, the late medieval spiritual movement that served as
the essence of lollardy in England and the Hussite revolution in what
is now the Czech Republic, has its origins in the writings and teach-
ings of John Wyclif (ca. 1331-84). Wyclif came from minor nobility in
Yorkshire and became active in Oxford in the late 1350s.” This was the
age of Edward III; England had endured the plague just ten years ear-
lier and was engaged in ongoing war with France. The church was on
the verge of serious internal conflict. It had been based in Avignon
since 1309 and had been subject to an increased French royal influ-
ence, much to the consternation of the Holy Roman Emperor. By
1378, when Wyclif was becoming an important voice in English criti-
cisms of the ecclesiastical status quo, the papacy had reached the
breaking point. Gregory XI had attempted to return the papal see to
Rome, and upon his death the cardinals elected Urban VI. In response
to widespread dissatisfaction with Urban, another conclave elected
Clement VII, who moved the see back to Avignon. Western
Christianity was torn between two rivals claiming papal authority at a
time when the traditional social system was breaking apart and
increasing numbers of lay Christians were demanding moral leader-
ship by example from the church. Before the mid-1370s, Wyclif had
gained a reputation as a notable Oxford theologian, but he entered
into royal service in 1374, when he decided to occupy himself as much
with practical as with theoretical affairs. The theoretical framework
for what would become Wycliffism was set by then. He had con-
structed a formal, theological structure upon which to base his practi-
cal theology and would complete a postilla, or book-by-book running
commentary, of the entire Bible by 1376.”
Opinions about Wyclif’s works in the last decade of his life con-
tinue to vary widely. Some interpret Wyclif as having foreseen the
Protestant Reformation and since the sixteenth century have called
him the Morning Star of the Reformation. Others perceive his disre-
gard for many important elements in medieval theology and continue
to endorse the Council of Constance’s 1415 condemnation of him as a
detestable heresiarch. It has only been within the past century that
30

INTRODUCTION
scholars have managed to set aside sectarian biases about Wyclif in
favor of analysis grounded in an understanding of the fourteenth cen-
tury.” Because of the uproar his writings caused during his lifetime,
scholarship continues to focus on Wyclif the controversialist. The con-
troversies he engendered were indeed veritable hornets’ nests for the
later medieval Christian mindset: he questioned papal authority,
championing secular monarchy in its place; he doubted the validity of
the doctrine of transubstantiation; and he relentlessly criticized cleri-
cal abuses of the ecclesiastical system. Further, he demanded that the
laity have a vernacular version of the Bible available to them for their
spiritual nourishment. While the church was not as opposed to this
innovation as later critics would claim, it would be an exaggeration to
say that the ecclesiastical hierarchy looked favorably upon the idea.
Small wonder that Wyclif’s reputation has been determined to such an
extent by controversy; his eye seemed to fall upon every problem that
afflicted the late medieval church.”
Wyclif’s political and ecclesiological thought, accompanied by
his rejection of excessive sacramentalism in general and transub-
stantiation in particular, has accurately been described as an “ideol-
ogy of revolution?” Theorists had been exploring the nature of
property ownership and its hindrance of the Christian ideal for more
than a century before Wyclif was born. The best known arena for
arguments about the justifiability of ownership for Christians had
been the controversy between the Franciscans and John XXII, in
which arguments about the connection of the exemplarity of Christ's
life and the communalism of the early church led to a dangerous split
within the Franciscan order. Most (the Conventuals) were willing to
compromise on Francis’s ideal of poverty to preserve the special
place Franciscans enjoyed in the church as nonparochial preachers
and priests, but some, the Minorites, rejected compromise and began
a full-scale critical engagement with the very nature of the fourteenth-
century church. While the Black Death brought an end to most of
the players in the controversy, the Minorites’ arguments remained
searing indictments of the imperial church. Wyclif adopted many of
the ideals of the Minorites: private property is the result of original
sin, as is secular society and justice; the church is obliged to follow
the apostolic communalist lead; and any case of clergy involvement
in secular or political affairs is evidence of unacceptable compro-
31

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
mise. The Donation of Constantine, the ninth-century document
supposedly showing the Emperor Constantine's having willed con-
trol of the Western Roman Empire to the church, introduced secular
authority into the church, and by Wyclif’s estimation, only the firm
hand of a secular lord could hope to rid the church of this contami-
nation. His solution was for the king, whom grace endowed with
power over property and civil society, to divest the church of all its
holdings and take all secular authority away from its ministers.
These arguments earned Wyclif papal condemnation as early as
1377, and had he not been under the protection of the Duke of
Lancaster, he would most certainly have been tried at Avignon.”
Wyclif’s understanding of the church was a source of great dis-
agreement. His demand that the body of Christ be understood to be
the elect, those eternally foreknown to be saved by grace, was not a
departure from traditional Augustinian theology; indeed, his
famous predecessor Thomas Bradwardine, briefly Archbishop of
Canterbury (d. 1349) had made very similar arguments. Wyclif’s
departure from Bradwardine involved philosophical attempts to
explore God's eternally necessary knowledge that led him to think
that he had improved upon Bradwardine’s determinism. But Wyclif’s
criticisms of the clergy, especially his regular suggestions that priests
and bishops whose primary interests centered on possessions and
political power were not truly functioning as “evangelical lords,
sounded to many like Donatism. When this was combined with a
philosophically unsophisticated reading of his thought on the fore-
known nature of the church, many were led to conclude that Wyclif
advocated a dangerous combination of Donatism and determinism,
deemphasizing the sacraments and putting emphasis instead on
preaching. The body of Wyclif’s writings was viewed as a potent
brew of radical politics and heretical ideology that smacked of eccle-
siastical anarchism, denied clerical authority, questioned the efficacy
of sacraments, and cast doubt on the church's magisterial authority
in interpreting scripture and determining the Christian life.
Wyclif himself was never excommunicated for this, despite reg-
ular condemnations by the archbishop of Canterbury and the pope,
because throughout his writings he regularly indicated his willing-
ness to be corrected by appropriate authority.” His followers were
not so theologically adept, though, and Wycliffism became the cause
32

INTRODUCTION
of great concern in England and Bohemia within two decades of his
death. That his ideas were popular in England is readily comprehen-
sible to anyone familiar with the spirit of vernacular English litera-
ture in the later Middle Ages; many of Wyclif’s criticisms are echoed
in Middle English prose and poetry. William Langland’s Piers
Plowman is an example of a text that reflects many Wyclif-like criti-
cisms and concerns without actually entering into the dangerous ter-
ritory of heterodox theology. It is very likely that Wyclif had an
organized group of students and supporters while he was in exile at
Lutterworth in the last years of his life, and there is some evidence
that he envisioned a group of “poor preachers,’ traveling throughout
the countryside and preaching the gospel in direct competition with
the Franciscans, Dominicans, and other friars. The past hundred
years have seen disagreement about this subject, with some scholars
arguing that an absence of evidence of Wyclif having purposefully
organized “poor preachers” reveals this as part of the “Wyclif myth?
More recently, scholars have adopted the corollary that an absence of
evidence does not indicate evidence of absence and, following
Michael Wilks and Anne Hudson, have regarded the “poor preach-
ers” movement as having been instigated by Wyclif.”
That Wyclif’s writings became popular in Bohemia and
Moravia is likely to be surprising. Why would an English theologian
and preacher inspire the Czechs? This is, after all, what happened;
the great revolution that had been set in motion by followers of Jan
Hus after his murder at Constance in 1415 claimed Wyclif as the
source of its theological ideology. The young king of England,
Richard II, married Anne of Bohemia, the daughter of Holy Roman
Emperor Charles IV. Charles had established a new university in
Prague in 1347, and scholars there were interested in connections
with other universities. Czech scholars were hostile to German uni-
versities and ideas, and when the royal marriage occurred, they
eagerly embraced Oxford theology as a tonic against what they felt to
be an imperialistic German stranglehold on intellectual life in
Prague. A certain amount of popular dissatisfaction with the ecclesi-
astical status quo had been brewing in the Czech lands, exemplified
in the preaching of Mattias of Janow (d. 1394). The first Bohemian
scholars to return from Oxford in the 1390s brought with them
copies of Wyclif’s works, which served as the spark for a longstand-
Bd

WYCLIFFITE SPIRITUALITY
ing tradition of Czech reformist preaching, and by the first decade of
the fifteenth century, Wycliffism had captured the attention of impor-
tant minds in Prague, including Jerome of Prague, Jakoubek Stribro,
Peter Chel¢icky, and most important, Jan Hus. After Hus and Jerome
of Prague were burnt at Constance in 1415, Wycliffism became the
ideology that would sustain the Czech revolution against imperial
and papal authority for the next twenty years.”
What was it about Wycliffism that appealed to lollards and
Hussites? It is not enough for an ideology to be defined by what it
aims to overthrow, nor is a general feeling of the need for reform suf-
ficient to articulate its structure. Scholars have usually pursued lol-
lard and Hussite criticisms of the ecclesiastical and social status quo,
but in general one is left wondering whether lollards and Hussites
had any concrete, positive alternatives in mind. We have a good idea
of what Wycliffism was against. After all, its opponents were careful
to draw up lists of propositions they believed central to its hetero-
doxy, and much of the literature now available very effectively corre-
sponds to these lists. What is missing from both sets of literature,
both the condemnatory anti-Wycliffite material and the polemic
Wycliffite material, is the underlying vision of the Christian life as
envisioned by Wycliffism. It is not enough to say that it was a gen-
eral kind of late medieval Christian spirituality; this series of vol-
umes is testimony to the rich and varied nature of late medieval
Christian spirituality.
The selections from Wyclif’s works that follow are meant to
serve as the beginning of an answer to this question. In fact, Wyclif
had a distinct moral theology in mind when criticizing the friars and
the papacy for errors and abuses. Further, he had developed a com-
plex biblical hermeneutic, what he called the “logic of scripture?
meant to illuminate the Bible’s ideal for the Christian life, the lex
Christi or law of Christ.” Wyclif’s writings include the building
blocks for a moral theology intended to support an active Christian
spiritual life, and the surviving manuscripts attest to this. While
some of his philosophical and polemical works exist in only a few
manuscripts, the treatises described as pastoral tend to have many
extant manuscripts.” Three works in particular provide the fullest
picture of Wyclif’s moral theology: De Mandatis Divinis, Trialogus,
and Opus Evangelicum. Correspondently, these three works are very
34

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The paterfamilias
and those in
shares, but still as the representative members of the original gwely
or family group. One of them dies, and the question is whether the
surviving brothers ‘of the prior grade’ are to promote into this grade
at once the sons of their deceased brother. Such a course might
naturally be regarded as preferring these nephews to their own
sons. The rights of all the members of the ‘lower grade’ will come in
time when all of the ‘prior grade’ are gone and the grandsons share
equally per capita in the family property. In the meantime the sons
of deceased parents, like those whose fathers are alive, must wait.
So it may have been under ancient custom. But in course of time
family ties weaken and individual rights grow stronger in national
feeling, as we have seen them everywhere doing. And then little by
little compromises are made. The joint property of husband and
wife, even if not properly ‘defined,’ is recognised in the Scanian law
as belonging to the sons of the marriage to the very limited extent
that they may have equal shares with the other consortes whether
uncles or cousins. The sons of the deceased brother when the
grandfather is dead and division among the brothers comes in
question are allowed by the clause in the Gulathing law to buy back
their father’s share in the odal at a fifth less than its value instead of
sharing in it as family property.
So far the clauses in the Scanian and Gulathing laws considered
together seem to throw light upon the traditional principle on which
the rights of the odal-sharers of the Norse laws may have been
founded.
The rules of Cymric custom may not be identical with those of
Scandinavian custom, but we seem to recognise very similar tribal
principles at the root of them both.
Finally other clauses in the Scanian law may be
alluded to as pointing to the common liability of the

communion with
him.
family group, i.e. of the paterfamilias and others ‘in
communione’ with him.
Chapter IX. is as follows:—
Universos contingit de
communi consortio quicquid vel
culpa amittitur vel industria
conquiritur singulorum.
As regards the common
consortium whatever is lost by the
fault of or acquired by the industry
of individuals concerns all.
And in Chapter LXXXVII. it is enacted that if a person denies that
he is in possession of a thing stolen and if afterwards upon scrutiny
it is found in his house, double the value of the thing stolen is to be
taken, ‘not only from the portion of the paterfamilias, but also from
the common property (de bonis communibus), however many there
may be with the paterfamilias in communione.’
And the reason stated confirms the prevalence of family holdings
of the kind already mentioned.
The double value is to be taken,
… non de sola patrisfamilias
porcione sed de bonis
communibus quotcunque
fuerint cum patrefamilias in
communione. Nam cum omnes
lucrum respicerent in
detentione non est mirum, si
dampnum in ejusdem rei
contingat omnibus restitutione.
… not from the portion of the
paterfamilias alone, but from the
common property, however many
there may be with the
paterfamilias in communione. For
since all expect gain from the
detention [of the thing stolen] it is
not strange if all sustain loss in its
restitution.
The paterfamilias in whose house the stolen property is found is
evidently himself a member of a wider family group with common
interests and liabilities. And the clause goes on to say that the
accused must deny the charge with twelve co-swearers if the thing

The resort to the
ordeal if no co-
swearers.
The Scanian
wergeld.
How it was
divided.
stolen be worth half a mark, or submit to the test of the ordeal of
hot iron.
In Chapter XCIX. the ordeal of hot iron is
described as having three forms: (1) that of
walking on twelve red-hot plough-shares; (2) that
called ‘trux iarn,’ applied to cases of theft: i.e.
carrying an iron twelve feet and then throwing it into a basin; (3)
that of carrying it nine paces and then casting it down: called, from
the throwing, scuzs iarn. After the ordeal the feet or hands, as the
case might be, were to be wrapped in cloth and sealed to prevent
fraud, and so to remain till the sabbath, on which day it should be
opened and viewed in order to ascertain the innocence or guilt of
the accused.
This is one of the clauses which fixes the date of the Latin version,
for the ordeal was abolished in a.d. 1215.
[191]
On the whole, we may fairly conclude that the Scanian law when
regarded from a tribal point of view affords additional evidence of
family occupation or ownership and of the solidarity of the family
group in Scandinavian society. But at the same time it shows that in
Scandinavia, as elsewhere, family ownership was gradually
succumbing to the new rules of individual ownership.
The same process of gradual disintegration of tribal usage is
visible also in the chapters relating to wergelds.
In Chapter XLIII. it is enacted that the amount to
be paid for homicide is not to exceed 15 marks of
silver.
In Chapter XLIV. it is stated that the wergeld is
to be divided into three equal parts, of which each
is commonly called a sal. And in the next chapter,
‘De Compositione,’ we are told that before the time of the last

Later
modifications.
constitution it always lay upon the slayer or his heir to provide the
first portion only from his own property. He might then exact the
second portion from his agnates, and finally the third and last from
his cognates. Then it proceeds to say that, as excessive amounts
were levied by violence upon the kindred, King Canute had laid
down certain rules for the payments. Inter alia, it was enacted that
of the two thirds falling on the kindred, both agnates and cognates
being computed in their grades of kinship, the prior grade should
always pay twice as much as the grades behind it.
Further, in Chapter XLVII. it is stated that according to ancient law
the distribution should be so made that each third should be divided
again into sub-thirds, one of which should be paid to the heirs of the
slain, the second to the agnates, and the third to the cognates.
It appears also from Chapter XLV. of the Latin
version and s. 84 of the Danish version that special
care had been taken to prevent fraud on the part
of the slayer in claiming the aid of his kinsmen. He was to pay one
‘sal’ of his own payment before calling upon them for their portion,
which was called the ættæbot. He then was to collect together his
father’s friends and compute with them what each was to pay. And
when the day for payment came, not a penny was to be paid into
the slayer’s hands till the hour when he paid it over to the slain
man’s kindred. Then they were safe. The same course was to be
afterwards adopted as regards the payments of maternal relations.
The Latin version (Chapter XLV.) proceeds to say that this
legislation not having been successful in extirpating fraud and
discouraging murder, King Waldemar II. (a.d. 1202-1241) enacted
that the murderer should be liable for the whole wergeld (instead of
one third). The agnates and cognates were not to be forced by him
to contribute against their will. Within three days the murderer was
publicly to offer satisfaction or be outlawed, in which case he would
be liable to be put to death by any one. In case, however, of his
flight, his relatives, agnates and cognates, were individually to offer
their proper share of two thirds of the wergeld or be liable to the

Payment for the
servus and
libertus.
The Scanian
wergeld perhaps
that of the
‘bonde.’
vengeance of the relatives of the slain, so that the latter should not
be deprived of all satisfaction.
These clauses throw some light on ancient custom, but they are
evident signs of the gradual loosening of the ties of kindred.
In Chapter L. of the Latin version the payment
for a servus is fixed at three marks, and in Chapter
LII. the payment for a libertus is fixed at half that
of the freeborn man.
It is difficult to judge how far these are to be taken as the ancient
wergelds of Scanian custom, or whether they had been altered in
amount by changes in the currency or recent legislation.
The wergeld of 15 marks of silver is exactly half of that of the
normal wergeld of the Norse hauld. And yet it does not seem likely
that it had been reduced in amount by recent legislation when it is
considered that under the Norse laws, as we have seen, the
tendency seemed to be to add ‘sakauka’ to the ancient wergelds
rather than decrease them.
It may be noted also that in a later addition
[192]
to the Danish
version it is stated that ‘a man’s bot is 30 good marks and overbot
26 marks and 16 ortugs.’ And also in the ‘City Law’ of a.d. 1300 the
wergeld is stated at 30 marks with an additional ‘overbot.’
[193]
We seem bound to consider the wergeld of the
freeborn man under the ‘Lex Scania antiqua’ of the
previous century as 15 marks of silver.
The explanation probably may be that the bonde
and not the hauld was taken as the typical freeborn man.
When it is further considered that in the Danish version of the
Scanian law there is no mention of the hauld, and that, as we have
seen, the bonde seems to have been regarded as the ordinary

Lombardic
custom.
householder or paterfamilias of the family holding, the inference
becomes probably a fair one that the bonde was the typical
ingenuus or freeborn man for the purpose of the wergelds.
If this may be assumed, then the wergelds of the Scanian law
accord well with the Norse wergelds. For in that case the wergeld of
the bonde is 15 marks of silver in both laws. And further the wergeld
of the libertus of the Scanian law and that of the Norse leysing after
he had made his freedom’s ale also correspond, being half that of
the bonde.
It may further be noted that as in the Norse law so also in the
Scanian law the payment for an eye or hand or foot was half a
manbot, while the full manbot was payable if both eyes or hands or
feet were destroyed.
[194]
VI. SCANIAN AND LOMBARDIC CUSTOM
COMPARED.
Before closing this very imperfect chapter on the
Scandinavian laws it may be well to compare with
them clauses from the Lombardic laws relating to
the family holding of land and property ‘in communione.’
The laws of the tribes still remaining on the Baltic were five or six
centuries later in date than the laws of the Lombardic emigrants who
had left their old home and settled in the South upon Roman
ground. And yet in this matter we find traces of the same ancient
custom of family holdings underlying them both, notwithstanding
wide separation, and what is more, of the same process of change
going on notwithstanding the difference in date. Roman and
Christian influences had not reached the Scanian district on the
Baltic till the twelfth century, and were only then effecting changes
which in the seventh century had already been accomplished in
Transylvania and Italy.

Edict of Rothar.
a.d. 643. Kindred
of seven
generations.
Family holdings.
The first clause to which reference may be made
is s. 153 of the ‘Edict of Rothar’ (a.d. 643). It is
entitled ‘De gradibus cognationum.’ It is interesting
as showing that seven generations were necessary
to the complete kindred.
Omnis parentilla usque in
septimum geniculum
nomeretur, ut parens parenti
per gradum et parentillam
heres succedat: sic tamen ut
ille qui succedere vult,
nominatim unicuique nomina
parentum antecessorum
suorum dicat.
Let every parentilla up to the
seventh knee be named, so that
parent to parent by grade and
parentilla the heir may succeed;
so moreover that he who wishes
to succeed must tell name by
name the names of his antecedent
parentes.
Seven generations would reach back to the great-grandfather’s
great-grandfather, an important limit of kindred both in the Norse
laws and those of the Cymri.
Another clause of the same edict (c. 167), under the heading ‘De
fratres, qui in casam communem remanserent,’ enacts as follows:—
Si fratres post mortem patris
in casa commune remanserint,
et unus ex ipsis in obsequium
regis aut judicis aliquas res
adquesiverit, habeat sibi in
antea absque portionem
fratrum; et qui foras in
exercitum aliquit adquisiverit,
commune sit fratribus quod in
casa dimiserit.
If brothers shall have remained
in the common home after the
father’s death and one of them
shall have acquired some property
in service of the king or judge, let
him henceforth have it for himself
without the brothers sharing in it.
And if one shall have acquired
anything abroad in the army let
that be in common to the brothers
which he left behind in the home.

Rules of family
divisions.
Et si quis in suprascriptis
fratribus gairethinx fecerit,
habeat in antea cui factum
fuerit.
And if any one of the said
brothers makes a donation, let
him to whom it was made have it
henceforth.
The rest of the clause refers to payments to a wife brought into
the family holding by a brother. The ‘meta’ or portion has, in this
case, been given to her on marriage out of the common property,
and so the rights of the other brothers have to be considered.
Et qui ex ipsis uxorem
duxerit, et de rebus communes
meta data fuerit: quando alteri
idem uxorem tollere contigerit,
aut quando ad divisionem
faciendam venerit, simili modo
de comunes rebus ei refundatur
aliut tantum quantum frater in
meta dedit. De paterna autem
vel materna substantia quod
relicum fuerit inter se æqualiter
dividant.
And he who of them marries a
wife and her meta was given from
the common property, whenever it
happens to another likewise to
take a wife or whenever it comes
to a division being made, in the
same way there shall be refunded
to him from the common property
as much as the brother gave in
meta. But whatever is left of the
paternal or maternal substance let
them divide among them equally.
Attempts to settle such questions as these,
whether and how far property acquired by one
brother is to form part of the common family
property or be retained by the brother acquiring it, and again how
the fact that the payment for a wife’s ‘meta’ had been taken from
the common family property was to affect the rights of the brothers
when they came to a division, are in themselves good proof, so far
as they go, of the continuance of family holdings. But the changes
made by these clauses show the same tendency which we have
seen in the Scanian laws towards individual ownership and the
breaking up of the family holdings.

No succession of
sons by
representation at
first, but
afterwards
allowed.
Finally, the point which in the Scanian laws was most suggestive
of the original completeness of the family community of property,
viz. that originally there was no succession of sons to their father’s
share, but division per capita between the uncles on the
grandfather’s death, appears again in the Lombardic laws and is
dealt with in the seventh century practically in the same way as in
Scania it was dealt with centuries later.
From the tribal point of view the solidarity of the family group was
the chief interest regarded. But the point of view was changed.
Under the new influences the interests of the individual came more
and more into prominence.
It now seemed unjust to the sons that their
father’s property should be allowed simply to lapse
into the common stock of the family till the
grandfather’s death and then left to be divided
among the uncles. And to mitigate the injustice the
right to succeed was given, in the Lombardic as in
the Scanian laws, to the limited extent that upon the grandfather’s
death the sons took the share of their father with the uncles in the
division, as if he had been living at the time.
S. 5 of the ‘Leges a Grimowaldo additæ’ is headed ‘De successione
nepotum qui post mortem patris in sinu avi remanserint,’ and is as
follows:—
Si quis habuerit filios
legitimos unum aut plures, et
contigerit unum ex filiis vivente
patre mori, et reliquerit filios
legitimos, unum aut plures, et
contigerit avo mori, talem
partem percipiat de substantia
avi sui, una cum patruis suis,
qualem pater eorum inter
If any one shall have legitimate
sons, one or more, and it happens
that one of the sons dies, the
father being living, and he leaves
legitimate sons, one or more, and
it happens that the grandfather
dies, let him [the son] take such
part of the substance of his
grandfather together with his
uncles as their father if he had

fratribus suis percepturus erat
si vivus fuisset.
been alive would have taken
among his brothers.
Similiter et si filias legitimas
unam aut plures, aut filii
naturales unum aut plures
fuerint habeant legem suam,
sicut in hoc edictum legitur.
Quia inhumanum et impium
nobis videtur, ut pro tali causa
exhereditentur filii ab
hereditatem patris sui pro eo,
quod pater eorum in sinu avi
mortuos est, sed ex omnibus ut
supra aequalem cum patruis
suis in locum patris post
mortem avi percipiant
portionem.
Likewise also if there were
legitimate daughters, one or
more, or natural sons, one or
more, let them have their rights as
is decreed in this edict. Because it
seems to us inhuman and impious
that for such a cause sons should
be disinherited from the
inheritance of their father because
their father died in the mund of
their grandfather. But let them
take an equal portion with their
uncles of everything in the place
of their father.
The continued existence of community in the family property is
shown by the fact that, even after the concession made in this
clause, during the grandfather’s lifetime everything fell into the
common stock and not till a family redivision was made after the
grandfather’s death was the new rule admitting the sons’ succession
along with their uncles to take effect.
To trace further the survivals of tribal custom in the Lombardic
laws would lead us too far afield. The clauses already quoted are
sufficient to show a remarkable similarity of custom in the case of
tribes once neighbours on the Baltic notwithstanding that they had
been widely separated and that there was an interval of five or six
centuries between the dates of their laws.

Tribal custom in
the ancient laws
of Scotland.
Laws of the Four
Burgs.
CHAPTER IX.
TRIBAL CUSTOM IN SCOTLAND.
I. TRACES OF TRIBAL CUSTOM IN THE LAWS
OF THE EARLY KINGS.
The population of Scotland was so various in
origin and language that it would be unreasonable
to expect uniformity of custom. Even where Celtic
custom was best able to hold its own there must
naturally have been a mixture of Cymric and Gaelic elements. In
districts, on the other hand, where Frisian and Northumbrian and
Danish and Norse influences may have once predominated,
whatever survivals there may have been of tribal custom from any of
these origins may well have been afterwards submerged under legal
forms and ideas from Anglo-Norman sources.
It is worth while, however, to examine what scattered survivals of
tribal custom may be found in the laws of the early kings, and in the
various documents collected in the first volume of the ‘Ancient Laws
of Scotland.’
That tribal custom as to wergeld existed and was recognised is
proved by the necessity to abolish what remained of it.
Thus in the ‘Leges Quatuor Burgorum’ is the following clause:—
XVII. Of bludewyt and siklyk thingis.

Laws of King
David.
And it is to wyt at in burgh sall nocht be herde bludewyt na yit
stokisdynt [styngisdynt] na merchet na heregelde na nane suilk
maner of thyng.
This wholesale and disdainful disregard of feudal and tribal
customs on the part of the townsmen of the four Burgs was followed
somewhat later by an Ordinance of Edward I. (a.d. 1305) which
again testifies to the wider survival of more directly Celtic tribal
usages by forbidding their continuance.
[195]
Ordene est que l’usages de Scots et de Brets desorendroit soit
defendu si que mes ne soient usez.
Here we have the usages of the Brets and Scots distinctly
recognised as still lingering on so late as the beginning of the
fourteenth century in some parts of Scotland.
In the laws of King David
[196]
there are distinct
traces of ancient custom as regards wergelds and
the connection of the kindred with their payment
and receipt. In section XIV. it is enacted:
[197]
—
If in any place within the peace of the King any one shall attempt
to strike another, he shall pay to the King 4 cows and to the other 1
cow. If he shall really strike, but without drawing blood, 6 cows to
the King and 2 cows to the other. If blood be drawn, 9 cows to the
King and 3 to the person struck. If he slay the other, he shall give to
the King ‘XXIX ky and a colpindach’ (juvenca).
[198]
And he shall
assyth to the kin of him slain after the assyse of the land.
Clause XV. deals with violence done in the king’s court:—
If any one draws a knife to another in the King’s Court it shall be
stricken through the middle of his hand. If he draws blood, the hand

Assize of King
William.
shall be cut off. And if he slay any man, he shall give to the King XX
ky and a colpindach [ixˣˣ, Ayr MS.] and he shall make peace with the
kin of him slain and with the King ‘after the assyse of the kynrik.’
In both these clauses the wergeld to the kin is additional to the
payment to the king (of 180 cows?) for breach of his peace.
Clause XVI. forbids the letting off of a thief for money or
friendship. An earl or any one having the freedom and custom of an
earl who does this is to pay to the king 100 cows, and other great
men not of earl’s rank 34 cows. The thief is to be ‘outlawed through
all the king’s land.’
It is clear, then, that in the time of King David the system of
wergelds payable to the kindred of the person slain was generally in
force, though no amount is mentioned, and that payments were
made at this date mostly in cows.
In the ‘Assize of King William’ under date a.d.
1180 is the following mention of the wergeld to be
paid evidently for a thief who has been allowed to
escape as above.
XIV. Of the law which is called weregylt.
Of every thief through all Scotland whether that he be bondman
or freeman the wergeld is XXXIV ky and a half.
The following clause is further evidence of the continued right of
vengeance on the part of the kin of a person slain.
XV. Of a man slain in the King’s vengeance.
If any one for theft or rapin dies by law of iron or water, and of
him right be done, or if he were slain with theft found with him and
afterwards if his kin in vengeance of him slew him that brought him
to the law, the King shall have as fully right of such men slayers for

Laws of Alexander
II.
the death of him, as of his peace fully broken, without concord or
relaxation; unless it be through the counsel or the assent of his kin.
And if it happen by chance that the King grant peace to the
adverse party unknown to the kin of him that was slain, nevertheless
the kin of him shall take vengeance of them that slew their kin.
Among the Statutes of Alexander II. under date
a.d. 1220 the following fines were imposed upon
persons who held land of the king and who
absented themselves from the army. (Clause II., p. 68.)
From a thane, 6 cows and a gillot [juvenca].
From an ochtyern, 15 sheep or 6s. (half to King and half to the
thane or the knight).
From a carl [rusticus], a cow and a sheep to be divided between
the King and the thane or knight, but if with the leave of the thane
or the knight, then all to the King.
This clause reveals a social division of classes into thanes,
ochtyerns,
[199]
and carls or rustics; to which another clause (IV., a.d.
1230) enables us to add the nativus or ‘kind-born bondman.’
It is not needful to pursue the inquiry into the laws of the later
kings of Scotland. But among the ‘Fragmenta’ in App. V. (p. 375) of
the collection there is one which must not be overlooked, although it
may be difficult to fix its date. It seems to be made up of two
fragments united and is interesting as containing two very different
statements of the payment ‘for the life of a man.’
Put into modern English, the first part is as follows:—
All laws either are man’s law or God’s law. By the law of God, a
head for a head, a hand for a hand, an eye for an eye, a foot for a
foot.

Amount of the
wergeld doubtful.
By the law of man for the life of a man ixˣˣ cows, for a foot a
mark, for a hand as much, for an eye half a mark, for an ear as
much, for a tooth 12 pence, for each inch of length of the wound 12
pence, for each inch of breadth of the wound 12 pence. For a stroke
under the ear 16 pence, for a stroke with a staff 8 pence, and if he
fall with the stroke 16 pence. For a wound in the face he shall give
an image of gold [? a coin with the King’s head upon it].
The other part is as follows:—
And by man’s law for breaking of bones 5 ores, for a wound under
the clothes 12 pence. For a wound before the sleeve 16 pence, and
for each visible wound except the face 15 pence. For a man’s life 12
marks; for a wound above the chest 6 solidi, and under the chest 60
pence; for a foot stroke 60 pence; for blood drawn 25 shillings, and
beyond the sea 6 cows.
Now what are we to make of these ‘Fragmenta’?
Clearly the two fragments must be taken
separately, for in the first the payment ‘for the life
of a man’ is 180 cows and in the second the payment ‘for a man’s
life’ is twelve marks.
Mr. Robertson seems to have concluded that the payment of 180
cows was the wergeld according to the Assize of Scotland, or, as he
puts it, ‘the manbote for homicide throughout Scotia.’
[200]
But he
arrived at this conclusion apparently by connecting this fragment
with the clause already quoted in the Assize of King David which
states that a person killing another in any place within the king’s
peace ‘shall pay to the king 180 cows and a colpindach.’ He
concluded that the payment was 180 cows from the reading ‘ixˣˣ
cows,’ as it is found in the Ayr manuscript of one of the clauses, as
already stated. But the clause itself shows that this payment to the
king was not the wergeld, because after making this payment the

Scotch version of
Glanville.
slayer had still to ‘assyth to the kin of him slain after the assyse of
the land.’
Nor does it seem any more likely that the payment of twelve
marks mentioned in the second fragment was the wergeld of
Scottish custom. From its amount it seems much more likely to
correspond with the payment already alluded to as the ‘wergeld’ of
the thief allowed to escape, which, however, might possibly
represent that of persons of lowest rank.
The evidence of these undated fragments leaves us in the dark as
to what the wergeld of the ancient Assize of Scotland may have
been. Confused and mixed statements as to the wergelds are not
surprising when the mixture of races is taken into account, and,
after all, the phrase ‘after the assize of the land’ or ‘after the assize
of the Kynrik’ may refer only to those portions of the kingdom to
which the laws of King David specially applied.
II. THE ‘REGIAM MAJESTATEM.’
Further traces of tribal custom are mentioned in the treatise
entitled ‘Regiam majestatem’
[201]
apart from the remarkable
addition to it, which also appears again as a separate document,
under the heading ‘Leges inter Brettos et Scotos.’
The ‘Regiam Majestatem’ itself may be regarded
as a version of Glanville’s well-known treatise on
English law, applied with alterations and
adaptations to Scotland by a Scotch writer conversant with local
custom, and probably dating between a.d. 1200 and 1230.
[202]
As in the laws of King David and his successors, so in the body of
this treatise, references to ancient usages occur with occasional
survivals of untranslated Gaelic words which seem to refer them
back to Celtic tribal custom.
Thus, in Lib. II. s. ix, in reference to the modes by which nativi
might obtain freedom, a specially Scotch addition is made, to the

Celtic survivals
here and there.
Cro and galnes of
person killed paid
to the parentes.
effect that if a lord has carnal intercourse with the
betrothed wife of his servus, and this is proved by
the visinage, the servus is thereupon released from
the servitude of his lord; and then follows the phrase ‘nec aliud
enache habebit a domino suo nisi recuperationem libertatis.’ This
untranslated Gaelic word enache has already been met with in the
enec-lann of the Irish ‘honour-price,’ and we shall find it used again
when we come to the customs of the Bretts and Scots.
So, in Lib. IV. c. 7, in cases of rape the woman (according to the
text of Glanville) is to make it known to men in good position (probi
homines) or to the ‘prepositus of the hundred.’ In this Scotch treatise
the writer inserts instead of the words ‘prepositus of the hundred’
‘vicecomitatus vel le toshederach.’ The Gaelic Toshach or chieftain of
a district is much in evidence in the marginal records of the ‘Book of
Deer.’
[203]
Again, in IV. 12, in a passage not found in Glanville, the theft of a
calf or ram or whatever can be carried off on the back is described in
the local words ‘berthinsak seu yburthananseca.’
In the same chapter is inserted the already quoted clause from
the Assize of King William as to the wergeld of a thief who has been
allowed to escape.
De unoquoque fure per totam Scociam est wargeld triginta vacce
et una juvenca sive fuerit liber sive servus.
In IV. xxiii. a pledge is mentioned ‘quod vocatur culrach.’
In IV. xxx. of the treatise it is stated that if a
person on horseback rides over some one going
before him so as to kill him, he must render for the
dead man so killed ‘cro et galnes’ as if he killed him
with his own hands; and it goes on to say that if the rider treads a
man to death by riding over him when backing his horse (as it would
not then presumably be his fault) he is to pay nothing but ‘the fourth

Merchet of several
grades of women.
foot of the horse,’ which satisfaction the parentes of the man killed
ought to accept.
The mention in this treatise of cro and galnes payable to parentes
of the slain seems to imply that the customs relating to payments for
homicide were generally in force throughout Scotland and not
confined to any particular district. The words ‘cro and galnes,’
apparently meaning the wergeld, meet us again in the document
relating to the customs of the Bretts and Scots.
The final clause (IV. liv.) describes the ‘merchet’ of women
‘according to the assize of Scotland.’ It begins by stating that the
merchet of a woman, quecunque mulier fuerit, sive nobilis, sive
serva, sive mercenaria, is ‘una juvenca vel tres solidi’ with 3d. as
rectum servientis. Surely a female slave is here intended.
This seems to be the minimum ‘merchet,’ for the
clause proceeds:—
And if she be the daughter of a freeman and not of the lord of the
town (dominus ville) her merchet shall be one cow or six shillings
and ‘rectum servientis’ 6d. Likewise the merchet [of the daughter] of
a thane’s son or ochethiern two cows or twelve shillings and ‘rectum
servientis’ 12d.
Likewise the merchet of the daughter of an earl (comes); and that
of a queen; twelve cows and ‘rectum servientis’ two solidi.
This clause regarding the ‘merchet’ is useful as giving a scale of
values in cows and shillings.
juvenca = 3 shillings. cow = 6 shillings.
And the merchet scale:
Mulier {
nobilis [?]
} throughout Scotland
½cow.serva
mercenaria

Value the cow six
Norman shillings:
at 1:12 = stater.
Value of the cow
in the next
document three
ores, or at 1:8 =
stater.
Daughter of a liber 1 ”
” of a thane’s son or ochethiern 2cows.
” of an earl or of a queen 12 ”
The solidus of this document can hardly be any
other than the Anglo-Norman silver shilling of 12
pence of 32 wheat-grains, i.e. 384 w.g. The cow
equalled six of these shillings or 2304 w.g. At the
Anglo-Norman ratio of 1:12 the value of the cow would thus be 192
wheat-grains: that is, exactly the normal ox-unit of two gold solidi of
Imperial standard.
This curious result is not only interesting as one more instance of
the tenacity of custom in retaining the traditional gold value of the
animal used as the unit of payments when made in cattle, but also
useful for our present purpose as affording a valuable proof that the
Scotch compiler of the ‘Regiam Majestatem’ in appending the
important clauses relating to the customs of the Bretts and Scots
which follow closely upon this merchet clause was adding to his
work a quite independent document, probably of much earlier date.
In this added document while the payments are
again stated in cows, the value of the cow is
reckoned, not in shillings, but in ores, which the
figures, when examined, show to be ores of 16
pence. This reckoning in ores of 16 pence suggests
a Norse or Danish influence. For, although the
Anglo-Norman reckoning in shillings of 12 pence ultimately
conquered and became the prevalent reckoning in the Scotch
statutes, there was no doubt a period when the reckoning in ores of
16 pence was in use in Danish England, probably including
Northumbria.
This is shown by a law, probably of Cnut’s,
[204]
which enacted as
follows:—

Danish ratio of
1:8.
Laws of the Bretts
and Scots belong
to time of Danish
influence.
Et ipsi qui portus custodiunt
efficiant per overhirnessam
meam ut omne pondus sit
marcatum ad pondus quo
pecunia mea recipitur, et eorum
singulum signetur ita quod xv
ore libram faciant.
Those who have charge of the
towns (portus) shall secure that
under penalties every weight shall
be marked at the weight by which
my money is received, and let
each of them be marked so that
fifteen ores shall make a pound.
The ores of this law, as we shall see, were evidently ores of 16
pence, or 512 wheat-grains (16 × 32), for fifteen of such ores made
the Saxon and Anglo-Norman pound of 240 pence, or 7680 wheat-
grains.
The fact that the ore of the document describing
the customs of the Bretts and Scots was the same
ore as that in use with both Danes and English in
Danish England and probably Northumbria about a.d. 1000 is an
important one. For in this document the value of the cow of the
Bretts and Scots is stated to be three ores, i.e. 1536 wheat-grains of
silver, and at the Scandinavian ratio of 1:8 the gold value of the cow
would therefore be once more 192 wheat-grains or two gold solidi of
Imperial standard. That the Danish ratio was 1:8 as in the
Scandinavian laws we shall find to be involved in the Anglo-Danish
compacts making Danes and English ‘equally dear,’ while as late as
a.d. 1192 the Abbey of Kelso compounded for payments to the Pope
at the same ratio, two solidi of sterlings (24d. of 32 wheat-grains),
or 768 wheat-grains of silver being paid for the gold solidus of 96
wheat-grains.
[205]
We may therefore consider that the document
relating to the Bretts and Scots belongs to the
period of Danish influence, and is of much earlier
date than the work to which it was appended by
the Scotch editor of Glanville.
III. LEGES INTER BRETTOS ET SCOTOS.

Norman French
version thirteenth
century.
The cro and
galnes.
The remarkable document printed separately in
Appendix III. of the ‘Ancient Laws of Scotland’
under the above title is given in three languages—
Latin, Norman French, and Scottish English.
The oldest version of it is that of the ‘Berne Manuscript,’ now in
the ‘Register House’ at Edinburgh, which is considered to be of the
thirteenth century. It appears in this manuscript as a separate
document in Norman French, and therefore it would seem that we
owe this statement of ancient custom to a Norman scribe. The Latin
version added to the ‘Regiam Majestatem’ is of later date. The
earliest manuscript is of the fourteenth century.
[206]
As given in the ‘Regiam Majestatem’ it consists of four clauses, LV.
to LVIII.
The clauses are headed ‘Quid sit le cro quod
anglice dicitur “grant before the King,”’ ‘De occisis
in pace Regis,’ ‘De Kelchyn regis et aliorum
dominorum Scocie,’ and ‘De effusione sanguinis.’
It is printed in Appendix III. of the ‘Ancient Laws of Scotland’
among the ‘capitula vetustiora’ under the heading ‘Leges inter
Brettos et Scotos.’ The Norman French of the Berne manuscript is
accompanied by the Latin from the ‘Regiam Majestatem’ and a
Scottish-English version of unknown date.
The first clause is as follows:—
De cro quod
anglice dicitur grant
befor the Kyng.
De cro le Rey
descoce & des
altres choses.
Her folowis lee Croo.
Statuit dominus
rex quod le Cro
domini regis scocie
est mille vacce vel
tria millia orarum
aurearum scilicet
Cro le rei
descoce est · mile
vaches · u · treis
mil ores · e fet a
sauer treis ores · a
la vache. Cro a vn
Þe lord þe king has
statut þat þe Croo of þe
king of scotland iᵐ ky or
iiiᵐ orarum aurearum bot
iii ar for þe kow. Item þe
Croo of þe kingis soune

tres ore pro vacca.
Item le Cro filii regis
vel vnius comitis
scocie est septies
viginti [et decem]
vacce vel tres ore
pro vacca.
conte descoce · v
del fiz le Rei · viiˣˣ
· vaches · ⁊ x · ov
· iiiiᶜ ⁊ · L · ores.
or of ane erl of scotland
is vii tymes xxᵗⁱ ky and
ten ky.
Item le Cro filii
vnius comitis vel
vnius thani est
centum vacce.
¶ Cro a vn fiz a
cunt ou a vn thayn
· est · C · vaches ·
u · treis · C · ores.
Item þe Croo of þe
sone of ane erl or of a
than is jᶜ ky.
Item le Cro filii
thani est sexaginta
sex vacce et due
partes vnius vacce.
¶ Cro a fiz dun
thayn · est · lxvi ·
vaches · ⁊ · ii ·
pars dune vache ·
ou · CC · ores.
Item þe Croo of þe
sone of a thane is iiiˣˣ ky
and vi ky and twapert a
kow.
Item le Cro
nepotis vnius thani
vel vnius ogthiern
est quadraginta
quatuor vacce et
viginti unus
denariorum et due
partes vnius denarii.
Et omnes bassiores
in parentela sunt
rustici.
¶ Cro · del neuu
· a vn thain · u ·
de vn ogettheyrn
est · xliiij · vac͠c · ⁊
· xxi · đ · ⁊ deu
pars dun deñ. E tu
li plꝰ [bas] en le
parente sūt vilayns
· ⁊ vnt dreitᶻ a
vilayn.
Item þe Cro of þe
newow of a than or of
ane ogethearn is xliiii ky
and xxi penijs and
twapert of a peny. Item
al þir þat ar lawer þan
þir in kyn ar callit carlis.
Item le Cro vnius
rustici est sexdecim
vacce.
¶ Cro a vn vileȳ
· xvi · vac͠c.
Item þe cro of a carl is
xvi ky.
Item le Cro
cuiuslibet femine
virum habentis est
¶ Cro a checune
fēme q̃ barō at ·
est de la tierz
Item þe Croo of
euerilk woman hafand
husband is less be þe

Thane’s wergeld
100 cows.
minor per terciam
partem quam le Cro
viri sui et si non
habeat virum tunc
le Cro ipsius est
adeo magnum sicut
le Cro fratris sui si
quem habet.
partie mayns de
son barō · et si ele
nat nēt de barō ·
dūkes est le cro
ausi gʳnt cū vne de
se freres.
thridpert þan þe cro of
hyr husbande. And gif
scho has nocht a
husband þan þe cro of
hir is alsmekil as þe cro
of hir broder gif scho
ony broder has.
Item le Cro et le
galnys et le enach
vnius cuiusque
hominis sunt pares
scilicet in respectu
de le enach
feminarum suarum.
le cro ⁊ le galnis
· ⁊ le enach a
checū hōme sūt
peirs · ceo est a
sauer le enach ·
pur sa fēme.
Item þe Cro and þe
gallnes and þe enauch of
euerilkaman ar lik þat is
to say in respic of
enauch of þar wiffis.
It will be most convenient to put these payments of the cro and
galnes into a tabular form.
King of Scotland 1000cows=3000ores
King’s son and comes (earl) 140cows=420”
Comes’ son and thane 100cows=300”
Thane’s son 66⅔cows=200”
Thane’s grandson or ogthiern 44cows & 21d. and
⅔d.
All lower in parentela or kin and
rustics
16cows
The cro and galnes seem to be substantially the
same thing as the wergeld. The word ‘cro’ is of
uncertain meaning. The ‘cro’ of the Brehon laws is
translated ‘property.’ It seems also to have had the meaning of
‘death.’ The word ‘galnes’ can hardly be other than the Welsh
galanas or wergeld. Whether the phrase ‘cro and galnes’ means two
things or one thing, and if two things, what the distinction between

Payments for
breach of peace
of various
persons.
them was, it is not easy to see. But evidently the two together made
a single payment for each grade of rank. The payments, moreover,
are expressed in cows as well as in ores and pence, and the
payment of 100 cows seems to mark the thane as the typical and
complete tribesman.
The two explanatory clauses introduce a third element, the
‘enach.’
The Cro of a woman having a husband is one third less than the
husband’s cro, and if no husband she has the same cro as her
brother.
The Cro and the galnys and the enach of every man are alike, that
is to say in respect of the enach of their wives [i.e. one third less
than the husband’s].
The enach, as already said, seems to be the honour-price of the
Brehon law. We have seen that, according to the Scotch addition and
Glanville’s clause, if a slave was injured by his master, he was to be
set free and his freedom was to be in the place of any other ‘enach.’
This accords well with the Irish enec-lann and the Welsh saraad and
the Norse rett, all of which referred to insult rather than bodily
injury.
The next clause relates to homicide ‘in pace
regis’ or of other lords. We have already seen that
in the laws of King David the manbote or payment
to the king for breach of his peace, or for crime
committed in his grith or precinct, was a thing
distinct from the satisfaction to be made to the kin of the person
slain ‘according to the assize of the Kynrik.’ In these early laws the
payment for slaying a man in the king’s peace was, according to the
corrected text, 180 cows. In the following clauses 180 cows are
again the payment for breach of the king’s peace, but there are
payments also for breach of the peace of other classes.

De occisis in pace
regis.
Of þhaim þat ar slayn
in þe peis of þe king and
oþer lordis.
Si quis homo sit
occisus in pace
domini regis sibi
pertinent nouies
viginti vacce.
¶ Si hūme est
ocys en la pes le
rei · il a feit · ixˣˣ
vac͠c.
Giff ony man be slayn
in þe pes of our lord þe
king til him pertenis ix
tymis xxᵗⁱ ky.
Item si homo sit
occisus in pace filii
regis vel vnius
comitis sibi
pertinent quater
viginti et decem
vacce.
¶ Si hūme seit
ocis en la pes · le
fiz le rei · v en la
pees vn cunte ·
ilur · a feit · iiijˣˣ ·
vacc · ⁊ · x.
Item gif a man be
slayn in þe pes of þe
sone of þe king or of ane
erl til him pertenis iiij
tymis xxᵗⁱ ky and x ky.
Item si homo sit
occisus in pace filii
vnius comitis vel in
pace vnius thani sibi
pertinent sexaginta
vacce.
¶ Si hūme seit
ocis · en la pees ·
al fiz dun cunt · v ·
de vn thain · ilur a
feit · lx · vachis.
Item gif a man be
slayn in þe pes of þe son
of an erl or of a thayn till
him pertinis iijˣˣ ky.
Item si homo sit
occisus in pace filii
vnius thani sibi
pertinent
quadraginta vacce.
Item si homo sit
occisus in pace
nepotis vnius thani
sibi pertinent viginti
vacce et due partes
vnius vacce.
¶ Si vn seit occis
en la pees al fiz
dun thain · ili a feit
· xxvi · [· xl ·]
vac͠c.
Item gif a man be
slayn in pes of þe sone
of a thayn til him
pertenis xl ky. Item gif a
man be slayn in þe pece
of a nevo of a thayn til
him pertinis xxᵗⁱ ky and
twapert a kow.
The payments were as under:—

The Kelchin.
If a man be killed in pace regis180cows.
} To the
person in
whose peace
he was killed.
In that of the King’s son or comes 90 ”
” ” comes’ son or thane60 ”
” ” thane’s son 40 ”
” ” thane’s grandson 20⅔ ”
They seem to be very large, but they are not impossible, seeing
that in the Norse law, while the wergeld of the hauld was 27 marks
of silver or 96 cows, the payment to the king for the breach of his
peace (frith-bot) was 40 marks, i.e. 128 cows.
[207]
The next two clauses, under the heading
‘Kelchin’ or ‘Gelchach,’ seem to refer to insult or
wounding, (the Welsh gweli = wound). And as the
word enach does not occur again in the laws of Bretts and Scots it
seems probable that it may have been included under this heading,
and that the Kelchin or Gelchach, like the Irish enach and the Welsh
saraad, referred quite as much to insults to personal honour as to
bodily injuries.
De Kelchyn Of lee Kelchyn
Item le kelchyn
domini regis est
centum vacce. Item
le kelchyn filii regis
vel vnius comitis est
sexaginta sex vacce
et due partes vnius
vacce.
¶ Gelchach le rei
· a · C · vacc · a
cont v al fiz le rei ·
lx[vi] vac͠c · ⁊ · ii ·
pars deune vac͠c.
Item þe kelchin of our
lord þe king is jᶜ ky. Item
þe kelchyn of a sonne of
þe kingis or of an erle is
iijˣˣ ky [and sex ky and
twapert of a kow].
Item le kelchyn
filii vnius comitis vel
vnius thani est
quadraginta
quatuor vacce
viginti vnus denarii
¶ Gelchac · de
thayn · v · de fiz a
cunt · est xliiij ·
vac͠c · & · xxi · đ ·
⁊ deus pars deune
mayl.
Item þe kelchin of a
thane or of þe sone of
ane erle is xliiij ky and
xxi peniis and twapert of
a half peny. Item þe
kelchin of þe sonne of a

Payments for
blood drawn.
et due partes vnius
oboli. Item le
kelchyn filii thani
est minor per
terciam partem
quam patris sui et
sunt viginti nouem
vacce
vndecim denarii et
tercia pars vnius
oboli. Rusticus nichil
habet de kelchyn.
thane is les be thrid part
þan of his fader þat is to
say þar pertenis til him
xxix ky and xi peniis and
þe thrid part of a half
peny. And a carl has na
kelchin.
Item si uxor liberi
ominis sit occisa vir
suus habebit le
kelchyn
parentes eius
habebunt le cro et
le galnes.
¶ Si fēme a vn
franc hūme est
ocis · son barō
auera le kelchin · ⁊
ses parens auerūt
le cro & le galnis.
Item gif þe wif of a fre
man be slayn hyr
husband sal haf þe
kelchyn. And hir kyn sal
haf þe cro and þe
galnes.
Item si uxor
rustici sit occisa
dominus ipsius terre
in qua manet
habebit le kelchyn
et parentes eius le
cro et le galnes.
¶ Et si fēme a
vileyn seit ocis · le
seygnur del fe v le
vilein meint auera
le kelchin · ⁊ le
vilein auera le
turhochret a sa
fēme del kelchin ·
⁊ le parens [le cro]
et le galnis.
Item gif þe woman of
a carl be slayn þe lord in
quhais lande he duellis
sal haf þe kelchin and
hyr kyn sal haf þe cro
and þe galnes.
De effusione
sanguinis
Of blude drawyn

Item sanguis de
capite vnius comitis
aut filii regis sunt
nouem vacce. Item
sanguis filii comitis
aut vnius thani sunt
sex vacce. Item de
sanguine filii thani
tres vacce. Item de
sanguine nepotis
thani due vacce et
due partes vnius
vacce. Item de
sanguine vnius
rustici vna vacca.
¶ Le saūc de la
teste a vn cūte v ·
del fiz al rei · est ·
ix · vaches · del
thayn · v del fiz al
vn cūte · vi ·
vachis · del fiz al
vn thayn · iij ·
vac͠c.
Þe blude of þe hede of
ane erl or of a kingis son
is ix ky. Item þe blud of
þe sone of ane erle is vi
ky or of a thayn. Item þe
blude of þe sone of a
thayn is iij ky. Item þe
blud of þe nevo of a
thayn is twa ky and
twapert a kow. Item þe
blud of a carl a kow.
De sanguine
extracto subtus
anhelitum est minus
per terciam partem
in omnibus
supradictis.
¶ Le saunc de
suz le alayn · est
de la terce parte
meyndre.
Item blude drawyn
vnder þe aand is thrid
pert les of al þir
gangand befor.
Et si mulier non
habeat virum ius
suum erit sicut ius
fratris sui si quem
habeat.
⁊ ensemēt de lur
fēmes est saunc
est del tꝰce part
mayndre · mes si
fēme seit sen
baron ··· dūkes ad
ele tel dreitur ·
com sun frere.
And gif a woman haf
nocht a husband hyr
rycht salbe as of her
broder gif scho ony
broder has.
Item percussio
sine sanguine
effuso decem
denarii.
Item strikyn without
blud drawyn x penijs.

···· ¶ Et si hūme
est ocis en le ost ·
sun seingnʳ · auera
le kelchin · ⁊ ses
parens le cro · e le
galnis · ⁊ le rei ·
viij · vaches ·
flatha.

Put into a tabular form these payments are as follows:—
Kelchyn or Gelchach
King 100cows
Son of King or comes66⅔ ”
Son of comes and thane44 ”and21 d.and⅔ob.
Son of thane 29 ””11 d.”⅓”
Rusticus or carl nil
De effusione sanguinis or of blude drawyn.
Blood drawn from the head of a
Comes or King’s son 9cows
Comes’ son or thane 6 ”
Thane’s son 3 ” (? 4)
Thane’s grandson 2⅔ ”
Rusticus 1cow
Blood drawn subtus anhelitum one third less than above it.
If a woman have not a husband her right shall be as her brother,
if she has one.
Striking without blood drawn 10d.
That we are right in supposing the kelchin to be analogous to the
Welsh saraad seems to be confirmed by the interesting additional

The thane’s
wergeld the
normal one of 100
cows.
information appended to the clauses.
And if the wife of a freeman is slain her husband has the Kelchyn
and her kin the Cro and galnes.
Item if the woman of a carl be slain, the lord of the fee where he
dwells shall have the Kelchin and the vilein shall have his wife’s
turhochret of the Kelchin and her kin shall have the cro and the
galnes.
If a man be killed in the host, his lord shall have the Kelchin and
his parentes the cro and the galnes and the King eight cows flatha.
These clauses of explanation are very important when we try to
understand the laws to which they are appended as a whole.
Commencing with what seems to be the
wergeld, the ‘cro and galnes’ of the thane, who
may be taken as the typical freeman, was 100
cows. We have seen that the value of the cow was
three ores of silver or, at a ratio of one to eight,
192 wheat-grains of gold. The wergeld was therefore, not only the
usual round number of 100 cows, but also in gold value, like that of
the Cymric codes and so many others, exactly 19,200 wheat grains
or 200 gold solidi.
If we try to trace the connection of this wergeld with those of
other tribes, the coincidence with the normal wergeld does not help
us much.
It is the same as the Welsh galanas of the uchelwr, and the use in
the laws of Cymric and Gaelic words might lead us to look upon the
wergeld as a Celtic one. But the equality in the payment is in gold
and not in the number of cows. The cro of the thane was 100 cows.
The galanas of the Welsh uchelwr was 120 cows. Moreover, the cows

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Wycliffite Spirituality J Patrick Hornbeck Ii Stephen E Lahey

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