The Early Diffusion of Lollardy

Abstract

That Wyclif’s ideas should have spread beyond the academic environment in which they were originally conceived was far from inevitable. It was not usual for the squabbles of the schools to trouble the outside world. Indeed, the theory that popular heresy was inspired by Wyclif, despite the fact that it was widely held at the time, has been called into question for precisely that reason. J. A. F. Thomson concluded from his work on later Lollardy that the popular heresy was too diverse to be viewed even as a single movement, much less as a movement derived from the teachings of a single theologian.¹ The anti-Wycliffite case depends on counting all dissent as ‘lollardy’ and then noting that there was a reasonable number of dissenters whose views bear no relation to Wyclif’s. There is something to be said for this approach, in that ‘lollardy’ is nothing more than a synonym for ‘heresy’ or ‘dissent’ in the records of this period. However, it is not merely imposing an alien interpretative framework on to the data to observe that there is a larger group of ‘lollards’ whose views are similar to those of Wyclif and his immediate disciples, who tend to cluster in particular areas, often areas which can in turn be connected with those disciples; and a smaller number of stray individuals, often isolated cases from places far removed from dissident communities and with no known links to Wyclif’s disciples, whose views are extremely heterogeneous. The former represent a Wycliffite movement, the latter are eccentrics or misfits fortuitously swept up in the panic over the former.