THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

complaint, struck certain English observers with particular force. If the worldliness of monks, friars, and religious
hangers-on was a butt of Chaucer’s satire, the more worrying inadequacy of the parish clergy proved a recurrent
theme in Langland’s poetry. Relatively few educated Englishmen and women expressed doubts concerning the basic
truths of Christianity as they were defined by the Church, but many more were prepared to question the standing,
authority, and behaviour of the Church’s ordained representatives. Central to the questioning of religious institutions,
practices, and hierarchies in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries are the writings of the theologian and
would-be reformer, John Wyclif (or Wycliffe, c. 1330-84). Wyclif’s attacks on the misuse of papal powers and
revenues, and his criticism of the sale of indulgences and of the parasitism of monks and friars, seem to have struck a
sympathetic chord in many otherwise orthodox believers. His questioning of more basic theological assumptions (such
as the status, authority, and special dignity of the Catholic Church and its ministers), however, brought him into
direct conflict with the Pope and the English ecclesiastical hierarchy. Wyclif’s later forthright denunciation of the
doctrine of transubstantiation as both philosophically unsound and likely to encourage superstition revealed him to be
skating on the thinnest possible theological ice. At the Blackfriars Council of 1382, he and his followers were
formally abominated and it was only the vigorous protection offered by King Richard’s uncle, John of Gaunt, that
shielded him from the dire secular consequences of religious displeasure. Although he died peacefully in retirement at
his rectory at Lutterworth in Leicestershire, in 1415 Wyclif’s remains were exhumed, burned, and sprinkled in the
river Swift after the Council of Constance had declared his teachings heretical. However, his English disciples,
popularly known as Lollards, continued to propagate his emphatic belief that the Holy Scriptures were the sole
authority in religion, despite powerful attempts to eliminate their teachings in the fifteenth century.
Although he was once popularly (if mistakenly) viewed by his contemporaries as an inspirer of the Peasants’
Revolt, and although he has often been subsequently lauded as the most important English precursor of the sixteenthcentury
Reformation, Wyclif himself was no real popularist. His surviving writings, virtually all of which are in Latin,
convey the impression of a dissident academic, not of a man intent on stirring up a premature reformation or
mounting a concerted popular attack on received notions of religious orthodoxy. In one significant area, however, he
did exercise a profound and long-term influence over national life. This was his call (in Latin) for a translation of the
Scriptures into English. The translation of the (corrupt) text of the Latin Vulgate was undertaken in the 1380s by
Wyclif’s disciples, Nicholas of
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Hereford (d. c. 1420) and John Purvey (c. 1353-c. 1428). Though this considerable enterprise was sufficient to win the
wholehearted praise of the great Czech reformer, Jan Hus (who could not speak English), and of one contemporary
English chronicler (who recognized the significance of opening the Bible ‘to the laity, and even to those women who
know how to read’), the translation none the less awkwardly echoed both the inaccuracies and the Latinate rhythms of
the Vulgate. Despite its historical significance, the ‘Wycliffite’ translation has justly been criticized as ‘a version of a
version’. Its real importance lay not simply in its implicit assertion of the status of the English language as the proper
medium for Holy Scripture but also in the incentive it provided to the equally determined, but more scholarly,
translators of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Langland and Piers Plowman
William Langland (c. 1330-c. 1386), an unbeneficed clerk in minor orders, knew his Vulgate Bible well; as his poem
suggests, he used it, and the Book of Psalms in particular, exactly and receptively. As a man intimate with the private
and public offices of the Church that he served he might properly have been expected to have read, marked, learned,
and expounded the Scriptures. For Langland the writer, however, these same Scriptures provided both a theological
framework within which to work out the implications of his poetic allegory and a series of moral ideas with which his
poem makes profound and sometimes radical play. If he was neither a professional scholar nor the kind of over-nice
academic exegete who for the most part dominated the teaching of medieval universities, he was none the less an
advanced, adept, and devout theological explorer. The Vision of Piers Plowman, on which he worked from the 1360s
to the early 1380s, is one of the most searching Christian narratives in the English language.
In common with his educated contemporaries, Langland would have read the Christian Scriptures both literally
and speculatively. While recognizing that the Old and New Testaments told a divinely inspired historical truth, he
would also have accepted that human readers could discern other layers of meaning-notably analogical, moral,
typological, and allegorical ones-which co-existed, intertwined, and overlapped one with another. Much as the Old
Testament was read as a grandly patterned parallel to the New, with the events of Christ’s birth, mission, and passion
variously prefigured in the historic and prophetic annals of the Jews, so Langland’s Piers Plowman would have been