Although Rex’s work is not the last word on the subject, in order to see how the discussion of links between the lollards and reformers has developed outside of the wider ‘from above/below’ debate, I will move on to discuss the relationship between lollardy and the radical Reformation, a second main theme in the literature. His- torians have generally taken one of two approaches to establishing this connection: one tracing doctrinal links, the other, social and/or geographical links.
The shared doctrinal relationship between lollards and the radical Reformation, with its aversion to oaths, vehement anticlericalism (complete with calls to strip the clergy of endowments), and preference for the separation of church and state, are reasons that scholars such as W.H. Summers, a Congregationalist, called his first study of the movement Our Lollard Ancestors;27 McFarlane asserts that the heirs of
the lollards were ‘not the Anglicans, but the Brownists and the Independents’;28and
Margaret Aston, in her seminal study of Wycliffe’s sixteenth-century renown, states that Wycliffism and Anglicanism ‘demonstrably parted company’.29 Ernest Payne
recognized the origins of the Baptists in the lollards, looking chiefly at doctrinal con- nections, as did Michael R. Watts in his analysis of dissenters from the late medieval to the modern era.30 In his seminal tome The Radical Reformation, G.H. Williams
yet the earliest English Lutherans often held their Lollard brethren in something approaching contempt.’ See D’Alton, ‘Cuthbert Tunstal and Heresy in Essex and London, 1528’ Albion 35/2 (2003): 211.
26Ibid., 142.
27W.H. Summers, Our Lollard Ancestors (London: National Council of Evangelical Free
Churches, 1904). This denominational historian also pioneered the social history of the Lollards; see below.
28McFarlane, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity, 170. 29JWRR, 268.
30Ernest Payne, ‘Who Were the Baptists?’ Baptist Quarterly 16/8 (1956), 339-42. Michael R.
maintained that ‘the declining Lollards...for their part, surviving from the age of Wycliffe into an increasing biblicist and nationalist reformation, proved no longer to be possessed of the stuff of martyrs and about this time yielded place to a new Reformation biblical vitality, that of the more zealous Flemish and Dutch Anabap- tists.’31 In J.A.F. Thomson’s study of the previously neglected later era of lollardy,
he writes of a ‘tendency towards Puritanism’ based on a particular vitriol against bells being rung in church.32 In Claire Cross’ account of the Upleadon meetings in
Gloucestershire (whose participants discussed the Eucharist, questioned confession to priests and the sacrament, and even the Incarnation), she writes, ‘These Upleadon men may conceivably have heard and approved of some of the more extreme ideas of continental Anabaptism, but their views could equally well have been derived from a version of popular Lollardy.’33 Andrew Hope’s influential 1987 essay points out
that the Lutheran perspective on the law was incongruent with that of the Chiltern lollards. He writes that this could be ‘glossed over by emphasizing the redundancy of the ceremonial law and the priority over it of practical charity and social justice’, but then suggests that the Freewiller controversy of the mid-1550s was a sign of ‘this divide opening up again’.34 Susan Brigden draws more connections on a doctrinal
basis in her important study of the Reformation in London. She states that for the
31G.H. Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd Ed (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal
Publications, 1992), 605.
32J.A.F. Thomson, The Later Lollards, 1414-1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 129. 33Cross, The Church and the People, 75. Cross does not elucidate how these men could have
come into contact with Anabaptist ideas; for a fuller account of these men and their religious beliefs, see Alec Ryrie, ‘England’s Last Medieval Heresy Hunt: Gloucestershire, 1540,’ Midland History 30 (2005): 37-52, especially 47-50.
34Andrew Hope, ‘Lollardy: the Stone the Builders Rejected?’, 24-5. Although there could be
a possible link between Lollardy and the Freewillers, it is important to note that in my readings on the topic, Hope and Collinson are the only ones to make this connection. See Collinson, ‘Night Schools, Conventicles and Churches: Continuities and Discontinuities in Early Protestant Ecclesiology,’ in The Beginnings of English Protestantism, 228. Neither O.T. Hargrave nor Thomas Freeman mentions Lollard ties to the movement in their studies of it. See O.T. Hargrave, ‘The Freewillers in the English Reformation,’ Church History 37/3 (Sept 1968): 271-280 and Freeman, ‘Dissenters from a Dissenting Church.’
lollards, ‘as for their spiritual heirs the Puritans, to hear the Word was a kind of sacrament’ and notes that the radical view of the Mass, originating with Zwingli and the Swiss reformers, was ‘akin to Lollardy’.35
The argument for lollard and evangelical continuity based on doctrinal links has been argued to be essentially untenable for the last hundred years,36 yet historians
seem reluctant to let go of it—this is undoubtedly because the doctrinal links are numerous and uncannily similar. Richard Rex is more aggressive on this point than Gairdner, and argues that historians who have attempted to draw these religious movements together on a theological basis are guilty of ‘nothing more than post hoc ergo propter hoc’.37 Although Rex is right to point out that an association can-
not be made on merely doctrinal links, he comes dangerously close here to setting up a straw man, as I have not come across any historians who only use doctrinal connections to make their point after Dickens’ 1959 study.38 Even Dickens must
have found that this line of argument needed padding; as was stated above, Dick- ens’ 1964 survey includes theological associations bolstered (admittedly, not very strongly) by other criteria, such as direct contact between lollards and reformers. Even Irvin Buckwalter Horst, whose The Radical Brethren argued for the existence of Anabaptism throughout the early Reformation in England, acknowledged that it would take more than doctrinal connections to make the case, turning to the book trade to bolster his point.39 When discussing lollardy’s fate after the Reformation,
Rex asserts, ‘If there were significant continuities between lollardy and subsequent religious developments, these are likely to be found in the “radical” rather than the “magisterial” Reformation,’ and he himself uses doctrinal associations (for example, the aversion to oaths, the anticlericalism, the antiformalism, and the avoidance of
35Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 91, 124. 36Beginning with Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation in England, 287-88.
37Rex, The Lollards, 116. Rex praises Gairdner’s arguments, 115.
38Thomson does not use anything other than doctrine to make his point about ‘Puritan ten-
dencies’ but Thomson does not make the point in order to argue for continuity between the two movements; he merely notes a factual parallel. In fact, Thomson’s work is the least polemical of all the studies reviewed here.
39Irvin Buckwalter Horst, The Radical Brethren: Anabaptism and the English Reformation to
difficult dogmas such as predestination), among other continuities, to bolster his argument.40
Beyond doctrinal links, scholars have traced ecclesiological similarities between the lollards and later radicals. J.W. Martin’s collection of essays entitled Religious Radicals in Tudor England begins with the lollard conventicling tradition. Martin chronicles conventicles throughout the Tudor reign, seeing them as a developing phe- nomenon rather than a random group of phenomena. Tying the lollards to the rad- icals, Martin maintains, ‘Previous groups seem to have been generally content with an undeclared separatism in those aspects of the religious life which especially con- cerned them, leaving some aspects to the established church.’41 Patrick Collinson’s
important study, ‘The English Conventicle’, delineated the semi-separatist nature of these religious meetings. To explain the later ecclesiastical practice fully, Collinson went back to ‘its earliest discernible origins, in the religious gatherings held in private houese in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries...held by so-called “Lollards”’. Collinson contends, though, that with their church attendance and extra-parochial meetings, ‘This resembles Elizabethan Puritanism more than Elizabethan Sepa- ratism’.42
A third approach to connect the lollards with the radical Reformation has cen- tred on social and/or geographical continuities. This approach was anticipated by W.H. Summers’ The Lollards of the Chiltern Hills, which drew connections between dissenting families and known lollard towns in the Chiltern Hundreds, as did Dick- ens in 1959.43 Christopher Hill used social and geographical links to draw parallels
40Rex, The Lollards, 141.
41J.W. Martin, Religious Radicals in Tudor England (London: Hambledon Press, 1989), 35. 42Patrick Collinson, ‘The English Conventicle,’ in Voluntary Religion, ed. W.J. Sheils and Diana
Wood (London: Blackwell, 1986), 238.
43Dickens asserted, ‘The communities which displayed the most marked Lollardy-Protestant
tendencies before 1558 proceeded in each case to develop puritan tendencies in Elizabethan and Jacobean times. The fact cannot be purely coincidental. . . It might be rash to call the Lollard wing of the movement the ancestor of Independency, yet the two appealed to the same sorts of people for similar reasons. That future research may even trace certain Protestant family-continuities. . . looks probable enough.’ Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, 247-8. W.H. Summers, The Lollards of the Chiltern Hills: Glimpses of English Dissent in the Middle Ages (London: Francis
between lollards and seventeenth-century political radicals.44 Like Rex and oth- ers, he begins his study with doctrinal links, such as refusing oaths, advocacy for communal property, a common position opposing ecclesiastical hierarchy, and close study of the Bible; adding to this, though, he briefly summarizes the social makeup of these men.45
Aided by pioneering studies by Derek Plumb and Andrew Hope, Margaret Spufford has taken up the task of finding continuities between lollardy and the radical Ref- ormation by using social/geographical approaches.46 Her volume of collected es-
says, published in 1995, focuses on the Chilterns area and attempts to trace dissent through families’ bloodlines. Particularly compelling are Plumb’s contributions, which elucidate the social standing of later lollards and their involvement in their communities, and their corollary essays about later reformers by Bill Stevenson. Spufford’s thesis has been far from accepted, centrally because it provides com- pelling information about lollardy and about the seventeenth-century dissidents, while omitting the crucial period in between.47
Griffiths, 1906).
44Christopher Hill, ‘From Lollards to Levellers,’ in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill,
Vol. II: Religion and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985) 89-116, originally published in Rebels and their Causes, ed. M. Conforth (London: Lawerence and Wishart, 1978), 49-67.
45See Ibid., 56-63. Hill includes a rather dubious continuity, one of ‘lower-class traditions’ that
is based more on his Marxist historical philosophy, now out of vogue, than a serious study of ‘class hatred’ among Lollards; see ibid., 56.
46Derek Plumb successfully dispels the previously widespread belief among historians that Lol-
lardy only appealed to those in the lower economic strata; see Plumb, ‘The Social and Economic Spread of Rural Lollardy: A Reappraisal,’ in Voluntary Religion, eds. W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood (1986), 111-29. Hope, ‘Lollardy: The Stone the Builders Rejected?’ examines the social profiles of Lollards in provincial towns using tax lists to show that, contrary to what historians had initially thought about the social makeup of Lollardy, ‘Incidence of Lollardy decreases strikingly going down the social scale.’ That this was probably the case was suggested but not explored in 1976 by Cross, The Church and the People, 35. The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520-1725, ed. Margaret Spufford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
47Collinson, ‘Critical Conclusion,’ in The World of Rural Dissenters, 394; Rex, The Lollards,