The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

18 The United Kingdom and Human Rights Thinking
against their rulers. His work provided the foundations
for later individualist political theory. An Irish contribution
came from Richard Fitzralph of Armagh (d.1360),
who sought to answer the Franciscans. His reply, that
men were by nature just and held land in common,
provided arguments exploited by John Wycliffe to argue
that, when grace was forfeited by injustice, any holding
of land was subject to forfeiture and that Church reform
was necessary. Wycliffe, through direct transference of
ideas in the 14th century, encouraged popular democracy,
egalitarianism, notions of communism and even
revolt. An even more important consequence of Occam's
thought and Fitzralph's answer was the development of
a fully-fledged theory of natural rights by two French
thinkers, Peter of Ailly and Jean de Gerson, just before
1400. 14 These ideas were taken further by an earlier, but
Scottish, John Major (1467-1550) who moved to France.
Major contended that the community was the source of
political authority, that there were stringent limits to the
power of the King, that revolution could be proper and
that private property was natural. Among others he
taught were George Buchanan, John Calvin and John
Knox, a pupil who wrote (of Queen Mary of Scots) that:
"Nothing can be more unjust. It is contrary to God's
will that a woman should be exalted to reign above
men."
By the early 16th century it was generally accepted
that men had free will, property over their liberty and
things, and that this property could be "traded." In
short, society was made up of individual rational beings
who each decided for themselves. Just as had been the
case in the 14th century, political events were justified
by doctrines about the right to resist and to depose
monarchs, similar to those of John of Salisbury. In 1558
in England, Christopher Goodman, and in the same year