Thomas Harding was the last Lollard to be executed for heresy, before the creation of the Church of England. This is the story …
The Lollards
The Lollards were England’s first evangelical movement. Many people supported John Wycliffe’s reforming ideas which spread across England. Some people became itinerant preachers, and went in pairs to towns and villages, telling people the excellent news about Jesus in English. People gathered in one another’s homes, where meetings were led by men or women, to hope and skim the Bible in English.
They were educated and peaceful people and were called the Lollards. Their beliefs were biblical, and by modern standards quite mainstream. In fact they were often known as evangelicals. However, on this pre-Reformation period, a few of their beliefs and practices were considered suspicious by the predominant Church authorities. They were considered heretics for things like meeting and not using a priest, using English as a substitute of Latin, having meetings outside a church constructing, giving primary authority to the Bible over the Church, and particularly believing that the bread and wine of communion were purely symbolic.
The Chiltern Lollards
Lollards were particularly quite a few within the Chilterns, within the heavily wooded area roughly between London and Oxford. Here Lollards were persecuted in 1414, 1462 and 1511. It was probably in 1511 that William Smith, Bishop of Lincoln, arrange an inquiry into heresy in south Bucks, based at the previous bishop’s palace at Wooburn, near Beaconsfield. In December 1511, some Lollards living in Amersham were interviewed and spoke against idolatry and superstition. Some were sentenced to be monks in monasteries, and a few were sentenced to make pilgrimages. These were cruel times, and others were sentenced to death in the event that they didn’t surrender their evangelical beliefs.
Thomas Harding
One of the associates of the Lollards at Amersham was Thomas Harding. His story is told in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and in local oral tradition. Thomas Harding, together with many other Lollards agreed to recant their views. By 1521, Harding was found to have returned to holding Lollard beliefs, and was again called before an ecclesiastical court, arrange by the brand new hard-line bishop John Longland. This time six Lollards, five men and one woman, were sentenced to death. Harding escaped death by recanting again. One of the conditions imposed on him was that he must not leave the Parish of Amersham. However, after the executions in Amersham in 1522, Thomas Harding moved to Chesham, where he kept a smallholding.
William Tyndale
Meanwhile there was a more recent version of the New Testament in English, translated by William Tyndale from the unique Greek. It was in additional modern and customary English, and easier to know than Wycliffe’s translation. It was published in Worms and later Antwerp, and first smuggled into England in early 1526. Tyndale’s New Testament became very fashionable and was adopted by the Lollards. Tyndale also wrote other theological works, which today could be classed as mainstream evangelical.
The Last Lollard Martyr
Around Easter in 1532, Thomas Harding, aged about 60, was found sitting by a stile going into the woods, where he was reading certainly one of Tyndale’s theological books called ‘The Obedience of a Christian Man’. Thomas and his wife Alice were arrested of their house, where other books were found under his floorboards, which were considered illegal, most notably Tyndale’s New Testament and one other theological work of William Tyndale’s called ‘The Practice of Prelates’.
Harding was taken to Wooburn to be interrogated by the bishop and by Rowland Messenger, the vicar of High Wycombe. The charges against him were that he was reading the New Testament in English, that he claimed the bread and wine within the communion service were merely symbolic (i.e. he denied transubstantiation), rejected the worship of images, and spoke against pilgrimages for earning merit. These were all considered heretical then.
On May 30, 1532 Harding was taken to Chesham for execution. The place was up White Hill, on the strategy to Botley, easily visible for instance to many. Harding was chained to a stake and a hearth was lit beneath him. It is recorded that certainly one of the spectators threw a firelog at his head, an odd kindness which hastened his demise.
It was just two years after Harding’s execution, in 1534, that the Church of England was formed, and it was in 1539 that Henry VIII introduced the English Bible into churches. With the creation of the Church of England, lots of the things that the Lollards had believed and practised were now not heretical.
Legacy
Thomas Harding is believed to be the last Lollard martyr, before the beginning of the English Reformation. There are quite a lot of reminders of Thomas Harding in Chesham which may be visited. Chesham lies on the north-west end of the London Underground Metropolitan Line. There is a granite cross memorial to his memory, near the doorway to St Mary’s parish church, and a commemorative stone erected on White Hill near to his place of execution. Neither are removed from the station. There can also be a primary school named in his honour. Harding remains to be a neighborhood surname, and plenty of claim to be related to him.
