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174 YORK.
CHAPTER XIII.
A NAME belongs to the fourteenth century which
cannot be passed over in any attempt to delineate
the religious state of England during that period,
and more especially so when we remember that to
Yorkshire he who bore it owed his birth. The name
of John Wycliffe holds perhaps a more prominent
position in various ways than that of any other
churchman of his day, for he was the precursor of
that great movement which in the sixteenth century
changed the religious attitude of this country and
severed it from any dependence on or subjection to
the sovereign pontiffs of the Church of Rome. He
is said to have been born at a small %illage near
Richmond in Yorkshire, and to have sprung from a
family which took its patronymic from a place of the
same name on the banks of the Tees in that neighbourhood.
His early history is obscure. Others,
bearing the same Christian and surname, have been
confounded with him, and controversial tracts
directed against the mendicant friars at a comparatively
early period of his life have been confidently
attributed to him " in the absence of all external and
in defiance of all internal evidence." The first thing
that rests upon distinct
historical testimony concerning
him is that in 1361 he was master of Baliol
College in Oxford, and that in the same year he was