The Lollards were England's first evangelicals. This is the story ...

John Wycliffe

In the mid-fourteenth century John Wycliffe (c1324-1384), who was a dean at Oxford University, protested against the abuses of the Established Church.

Wycliffe protested against many of the abuses and corruption of the organised Church. At that time the Catholic Church used Latin for the services and used the Latin Bible. It was basically a good translation but few people, including many of the priests, knew Latin well.

The Church was a series of rituals and ceremonies which most people did out of duty. The gospel was there but often lost under layers of tradition, corrupt practices, complications and superstitions, mixed up with politics. Instead John Wycliffe emphasised personal faith and a simpler form of religion, with priests living in poverty.

Wycliffe was himself a priest who wanted to see the Church radically reformed, and he believed that they should use English instead of Latin. His quarrel was not with faith itself. He was a strong Christian who emphasised personal faith based upon the Bible, but he was opposed to the errors of man-made organised religion.

In 1368, Wycliffe moved from Oxford to Bucks when he became rector of Ludgershall, near Aylesbury. He was there until 1374, when he became a priest at Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, where he stayed until he died in 1384.

Wycliffe Bible

Wycliffe and his followers translated the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English, which was completed about 1382, and went through various revisions. This was the first complete Bible in English, and it opened up the Scriptures to ordinary people. This was before the printing press came to England, and parts were copied by hand and distributed widely.

The Lollards

Many people supported Wycliffe's ideas which spread across England. Some people became itinerant preachers. They went in pairs to towns and villages, telling people the good news (gospel) about Jesus, and doing so in English. These were known as the Lollards. They were particularly numerous in the West Country, the Chilterns, the East Midlands and East Anglia. They were mainly in England, but there were also some in Scotland.

Lollards met without a priest and were mainly a lay movement although some priests were also Lollards. They prayed in English and read the Bible in English instead of Latin, and held meetings outside a consecrated building. People gathered in each other's homes, to pray and read the Bible in English. They were educated and peaceful people.

They emphasised personal faith and piety. Their services revolved around reading and expounding the Scripture. They did not believe in the necessity for priests to be celibate. Not many people were literate and so these meetings were led by those who could read, whether male or female, married or single. They taught their children the Lord's Prayer in English, and taught people to read the Scriptures.

They did not reject the Church as such, but they wanted a simpler, more pious Church, with educated priests who were free to marry, and who conducted services in English (or whatever the local language was). They condemned the excessive wealth and corruption of the mediaeval Church, and objected to pilgrimages and monasticism. They also rejected the supremacy of the Pope, but instead believed in the authority of the Bible.

In terms of beliefs one of the key heretical beliefs was that they believed that the bread and wine of communion were just symbolic, which went against the standard view then, known as transubstantiation. Their beliefs and practices were a challenge to the main Church authorities and they were regarded with suspicion and often regarded as heretics.

Persecution

In 1401, Henry IV enacted a cruel statute that Lollards who refused to renounce their beliefs should be executed by burning. In 1408, translations of the English Bible were banned unless authorised by a bishop (which none were), so from then owning and using a translation of the Scriptures in English became a crime.

In 1415, the Council of Constance posthumously declared John Wycliffe to be a heretic, although he was not condemned as one in his lifetime. Many Lollards were condemned as heretics and given various punishments, and some were burnt at the stake for heresy, especially the rejection of transubstantiation.

Similar movements

The views of the Lollards were not unique. Some equivalents of the Lollards were found in mainland Europe, notably in the Netherlands, and the Waldensians of the French and Italian Alps, and the Hussites of Bohemia and Morava (now called the Czech Republic).

Reformation

Later in Germany, a similar movement to the Lollards was started in 1517, by a monk called Martin Luther. The German word for someone who protests, in this case against abuses in the Church, is 'ein Protestant', in English we might say 'a protester'. The Lollards were protesters against many of the same issues, so in the early 1500s the Lollards associated themselves with the new Protestant movement, which they had a lot in common with.

Were the Lollards Protestants? On one hand it is anachronistic to call them Protestants, since they predate the Protestant Reformation and predate the first use of the word 'Protestant'; yet on the other hand they were effectively Protestants before the word was part of the English language. Once the Protestant Reformation began the Lollards were effectively absorbed into it, although their beliefs did differ from Lutheranism in some respects.

William Tyndale

One of the most important people to be produced by the Lollard movement was William Tyndale. He grew up amongst Lollards in South Gloucestershire using the Wycliffite Bible. Once Erasmus had published his Greek and Latin diglot of the New Testament, people in different countries were able to use it to translate the New Testament from Greek. William Tyndale used the 1522 edition of Erasmus's Greek New Testament to translate the New Testament into everyday English. It was in more modern and common English, and easier to understand that Wycliffe's translation. It was published in Germany and later Antwerp, and first smuggled into England in early 1526. Tyndale's New Testament became very popular and was adopted by the Lollards. Tyndale also wrote other theological works, which today would be classed as mainstream evangelical.

Legacy

The Lollards created an appetite in England for reform. They were England's first evangelicals. Certainly when the Church of England was created and the English Bible was introduced in 1539, and when priests could marry in 1549, these reforms were very popular, and were views already espoused by many people. The Great Bible which Henry VIII introduced in 1539 incorporated William Tyndale's New Testament and Pentateuch, which effectively had been the Lollard Scriptures. Lollardy had become mainstream. The English Reformation owed more to Lollardy and Tyndale, than Lutheranism and Luther.

Lollard beliefs and practices were rooted in their plain reading of the Scriptures, and by modern standards were quite mainstream in the Protestant world. Some of their beliefs would also be considered mainstream in the modern post-Vatican II Catholic Church, which now holds services in local languages and encourages use of the Bible.

Let us remember the Lollards who were England's first evangelicals.