Discussions of lollardy’s influence on the evangelical movement in England have, for the second half of the last century, largely reflected the wider discourse around the origins of the Reformation. This discourse, usually referred to as the ‘from above or from below’ debate, saw major changes in the praxis of the historical discipline within Reformation studies. Prior to the 1960s, the Reformation narrative was written largely with reference to the high church and government records.2 This
changed in 1964, with A.G. Dickens’ seminal survey, The English Reformation, which used evidence found in local archives and parish records to place the ordinary people of England at the centre of reasons the Reformation succeeded.3 Responding to
Dickens and to what they saw as essentially a ‘Whiggish’ interpretation of history, ‘revisionists’ such as J.J. Scarisbrick, Christopher Haigh, and Richard Rex have sought to demonstrate that England’s Reformation was an ‘anaemic substitute’ for a real Reformation, unwanted by the general population whose spiritually-fulfilling world of ‘traditional religion’ was disrupted by the greed and political exigency of the various Tudor monarchs (with the exception, of course, of Mary).4
Before delving into how this debate shaped lollard studies, it will be useful to briefly illustrate the historiographical tradition these scholars inherited prior to the 1960s. In his England in the Age of Wycliffe, G.M. Trevelyan, perhaps the last great Whig historian, used bishops’ records cited by John Foxe to prove that lollardy saw a revival between 1490 and 1521.5 Based on this evidence, Trevelyan did not be-
lieve that lollardy was ever ‘extinguished’ but rather ‘merged in another party’, the evangelicals.6 His sentiments were not echoed by James Gairdner, whose four-
2For a detailed account of the historiography of the English Reformation, see Patrick Collinson,
‘The English Reformation, 1945-1960,’ in Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (New York: Routledge, 2002), 336-60. Cf. also Peter Heath, ‘Between Reform and Reformation: The English Church in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,’ JEH 41/4 (1990): especially 668-9 and 677-8.
3A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York: Schocken Books, 1964). 4Ibid., 1-18. Collinson, ‘The English Reformation,’ 346-7.
5G.M. Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe (London: Longmans Green, 1904), 348. 6Ibid., 350.
volume tome, Lollardy and the Reformation in England, was published five years later; belying half its title, the lollards played a very small role in Gairdner’s version of the Reformation. Instead, ‘it was not from any protest against real abuses that the Reformation here took its origin’. Rather, Gairdner viewed the sea change as due more to monarchical impetus than the dwindling numbers of lollards in the sixteenth century.7 Two years later, William Frere referred to Gairdner’s work as a
‘disappointing study’, and asserted that Gairdner was far too restricted in his anal- ysis of the connections between lollards and sixteenth-century reformers. Whereas Gairdner looked merely at theological connections, Frere sought to associate the pol- itics, theories and criticisms, social and economic makeup, and the philosophy and intellectualism of the two groups, and then to combine those with the theological links—a lofty aim he does not accomplish in his rather short article.8
Historiographically, little changed between Frere’s article and Dickens’ survey,9
save K.B. McFarlane’s account of Wycliffe’s life and influence on English religious dissidence in John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (1952).10
McFarlane seeks to disentangle the heresiarch from the highly partisan hands of Bale, Foxe, and what he saw as their nineteenth- and twentieth-century counterparts, such as Trevelyan. He points out Wycliffe’s weakness as a practical reformer, citing ‘a characteristic failure to mould events decisively’ in the political realm, and claimed
7James Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation in England (London: MacMillan, 1908-13),
287-9. This position had been stated before by Mandell Creighton in his collection of essays found in The Church and the Nation (London: Longmans, Green, and Co: 1901), 164.
8William Frere, ‘Lollardy and the Reformation,’ Church Quarterly Review 69 (1910): 426-39. 9Collinson attributes this to a shift in historiographical emphasis which concentrated on the
crisis of the aristocracy in attempts to explain the English Civil War. See Collinson, ‘The English Reformation,’ 338-9. A year after Dickens’ survey appeared, William A. Clebsch’s work on early evangelicals had startling little to say on the topic of Lollardy; the work is notable because unlike Gairdner or Dickens, he does not begin his examination of Protestantism with an analysis of the Lollard movement. It seems he cannot escape them for long; by the third page Clebsch notes that the earliest reformers were forming a ‘moralistic theology and a scriptural religion’ that would appeal both to intellectuals and the ‘men and women still attached to old Lollardy.’ See Clebsch, The Earliest English Protestants, 1520-1535 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 3.
that the movement had limited social appeal (only to the lower middle class) and thus little influence on the Reformation.11 This is hardly a groundswell of religious
fervor that seamlessly flowed into the Reformation, which is what Dickens would essentially, if not exactly, argue twelve years later.
Dickens’ assertions, based on doctrinal links and evidence of contact between lollards and evangelicals, were put forth in two influential studies. In the first, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, 1509-1558, Dickens argues for lollard continuity from 1509 through the end of Mary’s reign, referring to lollardy as the ‘native medieval tributary to the English Reformation’ and claiming that ‘the foreign seed fell upon a ground prepared for its reception, and prepared by something more than anti-clericalism or royal propaganda’.12 This ‘something’ was
not the initial reformers but rather a ‘diffused but inveterate Lollardy revivified by contact with continental Protestantism’.13 These sentiments are echoed and
given fuller explanation in The English Reformation five years later (which was needed—for a title containing the word ‘lollards’, they were conspicuously absent for most of the book, save the introduction and conclusion). In this work, although in general the same ideas are expounded, Dickens moves beyond doctrinal similarities to discuss various points of contact between lollards and evangelicals. He cites evidence of lollards trading their old copies of the vernacular Scriptures for Tyndale’s New Testament (cited by most other authors in this survey); a group of eleven lollard men gathering to hear the reports of Nicholas Field of London who had been to Germany and brought back news of reformers there; and a much weaker example of a seaman from Hull whose visits to ports in the Netherlands and Germany only bolstered heterodoxical interests he may have developed prior to leaving England.14 Dickens
claims that this evidence is ‘incontrovertible’ and proof that lollardy survived and contributed significantly to the English Reformation.15
11Ibid., 74, 170.
12A.G. Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, 1509-1559 (London: Published
for the University of Hull by the Oxford University Press, 1959), 244, 245.
13Ibid., 243.
14Dickens, The English Reformation, 56-58.
Rather unsurprisingly, Dickens’ critics, who oppose his teleological perspective and long-term causes for the Reformation, have had relatively little to say on the issue of lollardy. J.J. Scarisbrick dismisses them in his collection of Ford Lectures published in 1984; he only mentions lollardy in three places.16 He characterizes
the prevalence of religious dissidence in Buckinghamshire as due to a ‘deep-rooted semi-paganism’ and writes that lollardy was largely ‘disparate, dispersed,’ and ‘un- dangerous’.17
Christopher Haigh follows suit. He claims that one could see the scant evidence of lollards as remains of what must have been a larger group, but that in fact, given the widespread hostility towards heresy, it is likely that the extant records fail to reveal very little.18 From here, Haigh seeks to revise Dickens’ other underlying cause
of the Reformation, anticlericalism, by showing that the majority of the English peo- ple were pleased with their clergymen. This view of a generally spiritually satisfied laity in late medieval England has been most deftly articulated and comprehensively researched by Eamon Duffy, whose Stripping of the Altars (1993) argued that ‘tradi- tional religion’ was ‘vigorous, adaptable, widely understood, and popular’.19 Duffy’s
seminal account of late medieval piety and English reform differed from other revi- sionists’ views in that while they doubted the efficacy of Edwardian and Elizabethan reforms, Duffy asserted that by 1580, they had been effective, England’s religious
the clergy from time immemorial. . . increasing in virulence’ and Lollardy’s survival and attraction of new adherents as reasons the Reformation succeeded in England. Cross, The Church and the People, 1450-1660 (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1976), 53.
16This not altogether unexpected from a book whose preface says that it will not ‘adequately
tackle’ the spread of English Protestantism—but why the spread of English Protestantism does not merit examination in an attempt ‘to trace some of the ways in which and some reasons why English society at large underwent and responded to the profound changes in religious loyalties, attitudes, and practices during the sixteenth century’ is not obvious to me. See J.J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 2.
17J.J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People, 46.
18Christopher Haigh, ‘The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation,’ in The English
Reformation Revised, ed. Christopher Haigh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 5.
19Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New
history irrevocably lost. Duffy unreservedly claimed that his work would not cover the lollards extensively (and in fact it hardly touches on them), believing that schol- ars have inflated their importance in the first place.20 When critics accused him of
painting a rose-tinted picture of pre-Reformation England—in particular, devoid of lollards—he responded in the preface to the book’s second edition. Duffy reiterated his case for the ‘grossly exaggerated’ historiographical emphasis on lollardy’s signif- icance, chiefly by demonstrating the overlapping impulses (such as a concern for the poor and desire for vernacular Scripture) that drove both lollards and non-Wycliffite members of the late medieval English church.21
Haigh claims, ‘It is far from clear what we should make of the Lollards’, but Richard Rex, another revisionist author writing fifteen years later, is less uncertain. Asserting that lollards were numerically insignificant and unimportant in English history, Rex strips lollardy of its causation of the English Reformation while al- lowing it connections with the reformers.22 He argues that far more converts came
to evangelicalism from conservative religious backgrounds than from lollardy, and therefore the historian’s task is not to determine how lollards became Protestant converts, but how Catholics did.23 While quick to dismiss the connections in terms
of causation, he never addresses how these connections might be significant in other ways;24 he merely drops the subject (referring to eight examples of non-book trade
connections between lollards and evangelicals as ‘crumbs’) after stating that while some lollards may have been attracted towards influential reformers, ‘there is lit- tle if any sign that the evangelical leaders made a special effort to contact their “forerunners”’.25 Rex sums up his chapter on the relationship between lollardy and
20Ibid., 6, 2.
21Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580, 2nd
Ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), Preface to the 2nd Edition.
22Haigh, ‘The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation,’ 5. Richard Rex, The Lollards
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 119. Rex states, ‘It is certainly not possible to maintain that Lollardy had no connections at all with English Protestantism.’
23Ibid., 119, 142.
24With the exception of the book trade, where he dismisses three examples; see below, p. 83-84. 25Rex, The Lollards, 119. Here, Rex echoes Craig D’Alton in his article on Cuthbert Tunstall’s
later evangelicalism by saying unequivocally that ‘The English Reformation did not come from Lollardy, owed nothing in practice to Lollardy, and would probably have developed along much of the same lines without Lollardy.’26