The Lollards were England’s first evangelicals. This is the story …
John Wycliffe
In the mid-fourteenth century John Wycliffe (c1324-1384), who was a dean at Oxford University, protested against the abuses of the Established Church.
Wycliffe protested against lots of the abuses and corruption of the organised Church. At that point the Catholic Church used Latin for the services and used the Latin Bible. It was mainly an excellent translation but few people, including lots of the priests, knew Latin well.
The Church was a series of rituals and ceremonies which most individuals did out of duty. The gospel was there but often lost under layers of tradition, corrupt practices, complications and superstitions, mixed up with politics. Instead John Wycliffe emphasised personal faith and a less complicated form of faith, with priests living in poverty.
Wycliffe was himself a priest who desired to see the Church radically reformed, and he believed that they need to use English as an alternative of Latin. His quarrel was not with faith itself. He was a robust Christian who emphasised personal faith based upon the Bible, but he was against the errors of synthetic organised religion.
In 1368, Wycliffe moved from Oxford to Bucks when he became rector of Ludgershall, near Aylesbury. He was there until 1374, when he became a priest at Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, where he stayed until he died in 1384.
Wycliffe Bible
Wycliffe and his followers translated the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English, which was accomplished about 1382, and went through various revisions. This was the primary complete Bible in English, and it opened up the Scriptures to atypical people. This was before the printing press got here to England, and parts were copied by hand and distributed widely.
The Lollards
Many people supported Wycliffe’s ideas which spread across England. Some people became itinerant preachers. They went in pairs to towns and villages, telling people the excellent news (gospel) about Jesus, and doing so in English. These were often known as the Lollards. They were particularly quite a few within the West Country, the Chilterns, the East Midlands and East Anglia. They were mainly in England, but there have been also some in Scotland.
Lollards met and not using a priest and were mainly a lay movement although some priests were also Lollards. They prayed in English and skim the Bible in English as an alternative of Latin, and held meetings outside a consecrated constructing. People gathered in one another’s homes, to wish and skim the Bible in English. They were educated and peaceful people.
They emphasised personal faith and piety. Their services revolved around reading and expounding the Scripture. They didn’t consider in the need for priests to be celibate. Not many individuals were literate and so these meetings were led by those that could read, whether male or female, married or single. They taught their children the Lord’s Prayer in English, and taught people to read the Scriptures.
They didn’t reject the Church as such, but they wanted a less complicated, more pious Church, with educated priests who were free to marry, and who conducted services in English (or regardless of the local language was). They condemned the excessive wealth and corruption of the mediaeval Church, and objected to pilgrimages and monasticism. They also rejected the supremacy of the Pope, but as an alternative believed within the authority of the Bible.
In terms of beliefs considered one of the important thing heretical beliefs was that they believed that the bread and wine of communion were just symbolic, which went against the usual view then, often known as transubstantiation. Their beliefs and practices were a challenge to the most important Church authorities and so they were regarded with suspicion and sometimes thought to be heretics.
Persecution
In 1401, Henry IV enacted a cruel statute that Lollards who refused to resign their beliefs must be executed by burning. In 1408, translations of the English Bible were banned unless authorised by a bishop (which none were), so from then owning and using a translation of the Scriptures in English became a criminal offense.
In 1415, the Council of Constance posthumously declared John Wycliffe to be a heretic, although he was not condemned as one in his lifetime. Many Lollards were condemned as heretics and given various punishments, and a few were burnt on the stake for heresy, especially the rejection of transubstantiation.
Similar movements
The views of the Lollards weren’t unique. Some equivalents of the Lollards were present in mainland Europe, notably within the Netherlands, and the Waldensians of the French and Italian Alps, and the Hussites of Bohemia and Morava (now called the Czech Republic).
Reformation
Later in Germany, an identical movement to the Lollards was began in 1517, by a monk called Martin Luther. The German word for somebody who protests, on this case against abuses within the Church, is ‘ein Protestant’, in English we’d say ‘a protester’. The Lollards were protesters against lots of the same issues, so within the early 1500s the Lollards associated themselves with the brand new Protestant movement, which they’d loads in common with.
Were the Lollards Protestants? On one hand it’s anachronistic to call them Protestants, since they predate the Protestant Reformation and predate the primary use of the word ‘Protestant’; yet however they were effectively Protestants before the word was a part of the English language. Once the Protestant Reformation began the Lollards were effectively absorbed into it, although their beliefs did differ from Lutheranism in some respects.
William Tyndale
One of a very powerful people to be produced by the Lollard movement was William Tyndale. He grew up amongst Lollards in South Gloucestershire using the Wycliffite Bible. Once Erasmus had published his Greek and Latin diglot of the New Testament, people in several countries were in a position to use it to translate the New Testament from Greek. William Tyndale used the 1522 edition of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament to translate the New Testament into on a regular basis English. It was in additional modern and customary English, and easier to grasp that Wycliffe’s translation. It was published in Germany and later Antwerp, and first smuggled into England in early 1526. Tyndale’s New Testament became very talked-about and was adopted by the Lollards. Tyndale also wrote other theological works, which today could be classed as mainstream evangelical.
Legacy
The Lollards created an appetite in England for reform. They were England’s first evangelicals. Certainly when the Church of England was created and the English Bible was introduced in 1539, and when priests could marry in 1549, these reforms were very talked-about, and were views already espoused by many individuals. The Great Bible which Henry VIII introduced in 1539 incorporated William Tyndale’s New Testament and Pentateuch, which effectively had been the Lollard Scriptures. Lollardy had turn out to be mainstream. The English Reformation owed more to Lollardy and Tyndale, than Lutheranism and Luther.
Lollard beliefs and practices were rooted of their plain reading of the Scriptures, and by modern standards were quite mainstream within the Protestant world. Some of their beliefs would even be considered mainstream in the trendy post-Vatican II Catholic Church, which now holds services in local languages and encourages use of the Bible.
Let us remember the Lollards who were England’s first evangelicals.
