There are still some important questions to ask about religious life in Penn in the Middle Ages, and a particularly interesting one is the extent of Lollardy, which was the first heretical movement to gain any ground in England after a thousand years of Catholic Christianity.

A painting in Wycliffe church believed to be John Wyclif

Before we look at Penn we need to look at the wider picture. John Wyclif (c.1330-84), a priest, theologian and philosopher of Balliol College, Oxford, was its inspiration. He articulated the strong sense of discontent with the wealth, power and pride of the clergy, which had been encouraged by the disorder in the Church following the Black Death and by the growing subversive sense of independence amongst ordinary people. This was allied with the anti­clerical feeling amongst the nobility. whose own arrogance and avarice had been encouraged by years of war with France. Wyclif was protected during his lifetime by sympathisers as powerful as the Black Prince and John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.

The term Lollard was first recorded in 1382 and, at first, was used widely to include anyone in opposition to the Church, whether anti-clerical knights of the shire, riotous Abbey tenants or parishioners refusing to pay their tithes. ‘Every second man was a Lollard’. The origin of the word is uncertain, but the most convincing explanation is from a Dutch word meaning ‘to murmur or mutter’, presumably against the Church.

Wyclif, like John Wesley four hundred years later, did not himself advocate setting up a breakaway church, but argued for radical reform. He called for a church whose members took their authority from the Scripture and the Holy Spirit and not from Sacraments or a corrupt priesthood. He attacked any practice not authorised by Scripture, including the wealth and secular interests of the clergy and their celibacy, and roundly condemned absolution, indulgences, pilgrimages, prayers for the dead and the validity of any sacrament in the hands of a sinful priest. Even the Pope should not be obeyed unless warranted by Scripture.

He therefore encouraged the reading of the bible in English rather than Latin and instigated the training of ‘poor preachers’, laymen, to work alongside parish priests.

This was all dangerously subversive, but it was his attack on transubstantiation, the central Catholic belief that the bread and wine of the Eucharist or Holy Communion become literally the flesh and blood of Christ, that crossed the line into heresy and became the usual test in trials for Lollardy. Lollards believed in a spiritual rather than a physical raged the Eucharist – ‘It is but a mouthful of bread’ the more courageous would reply.

Wyclif was way ahead of his time and his theology went far beyond that of the Anglican compromise established after the Reformation. In 1382, the Archbishop of Canterbury condemned twenty-four of Wyclifs ‘conclusions’, ten as heresies and fourteen as errors. Wyclif himself was not punished, although others were, and this was the start both of persecution and of a great extension of the movement during the last years of his life.

© Miles Green, June 2006

Penn Church is like a history book. It may tell us, for instance, what side our predecessors took during the Wars of the Roses in the 15th century, when the houses of York and Lancaster were rivals for the throne after the death of Henry V in 1422. The stone corbels which support the fine timbered nave roof, are our source of information. They can be dated by the roof itself to the early 15th century, and so belong firmly in the period of Lancastrian domination under Henrys IV and V.

Some years ago, I discussed the corbels with Dr Clive Rouse, a national expert in medieval church art, who was responsible for their repainting in 1953. He identified two of them as representing kings. The one with the crown and the lined forehead, he suggested, was Edward III (1327-77) and was a fine piece of portrait sculpture not just a random conventional view of a king. It is indeed not unlike his tomb effigy in Westminster Abbey, although that has a longer beard. He was a famous warrior king, but Penn had particular reason to honour him as the patron of their hugely ­successful floor tile industry.

The neighbouring figure, wearing a red Cap of Estate, is shown with a grotesquely enlarged and deformed nose and Dr Rouse suggested that this was a caricature of Richard 11 (1377-99) and a demonstration by Penn of their support for his deposition by Henry of Lancaster who faced a constant undercurrent of opposition and passed statutes declaring it high treason to even spread the rumour that Richard was alive. Rouse observed that caricatures of this kind were quite common and that there was quite a bit of fun about in medieval churches. For instance, bishops and kings were often shown in religious paintings amongst the lost souls en route for Purgatory.

My own investigations indicate that whilst the Cap of Estate was a sign of high rank, it was not, by this time, restricted to a king, but formed part of the insignia of a duke and lesser nobles and therefore could have been used on the corbel as a signal to say ‘here is a duke, but not a king’. The forehead is unlined, in contrast to its neighbour, as we would expect since Richard was only 33 when he died. However, the long split beard of the corbel does not match either of the two images of Richard in Westminster Abbey – his panel portrait, c.1395, shows him with an ordinary short beard, whereas his tomb-effigy of much the same date has it forked in two small points. The corbel’s forked beard is typical of Henry IV’s period (1399-1413), the most likely date of the corbel, but seems rather longer than the fashion. Henry V was clean shaven. Styles were clearly changing rapidly and the sculptor may have used the contemporary fashion out of ignorance, or it may be that he thought it politic not to be too specific.

The precise significance of the grotesque nose eludes me. A slit or amputated nose was a typical medieval punishment and it may refer to the charge of perjury levelled at Richard 11, who was accused of breaking his coronation oath or perhaps to lingering resentment following the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

There are uncertainties, but Dr Rouse’s proposal is supported by the knowledge that the Dukes of Lancaster were by this time the overlords of Penn manor in the feudal chain and that a John Penne was one of a dozen gentry and priests pardoned by the Yorkist Edward IV for taking part in a Lancastrian revolt in 1470. I would be very interested if anyone has any ideas to contribute to the debate.

© Miles Green, August 2006

In Part I, we looked at the origins of Lollardy in the 1380s with John Wyclif in Oxford and at his radical proposals for a bible in English to provide the ordinary person with direct scriptural authority rather than having to follow blindly the teachings and traditions of the Catholic Church which he argued had become corrupted and unscriptural. Even the Pope should not be obeyed unless warranted by Scripture.  Modern Protestants would feel quite at home with his ideas, but they were then condemned as dangerously subversive and heretical.

Original page heading 1.

The main source of information about the Lollards comes from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in Latin in 1559 and in English in 1563. John Foxe (1517-87) was ordained as an Anglican deacon in 1550 and fled from the Marian persecution of Protestants, spending the five years of Queen Mary’s reign in exile in Basle where he wrote most of the first edition of his great book. He protested against its popular title as ‘the Book of Martyrs’, because it was, in effect, a history of England interlaced with the history of the Christian Church from the earliest days. It included political history, lengthy accounts of events abroad, sermons and letters, theological disputes, anecdotes and jests, all in voluminous detail of over 4 million words, and grew in successive editions in his lifetime, occupying eight bulky volumes in the mid-Victorian edition, illustrated with 170 woodcuts.

His book was received with extravagant admiration and in 1571 it was ordered to be set up in every cathedral and in the houses of church dignitaries. Many parish churches had a copy, so we may well have had a copy in Penn. It was widely read for centuries. He recorded the Lollards and their Protestant successors as glorious martyrs, shining examples for the future. He used official documents and sought out invaluable written or oral testimony of first hand witnesses, including, as we shall see, one from Penn.

He spoke and wrote freely and frankly, showing both courage and industry and an enduring hatred of tyranny and cruelty, but it was hurriedly written and so not always accurate in detail, especially on dates, and was inevitably full of the grotesquely anti-catholic theological prejudices of his time.

© Miles Green, December 2006

1  “Acts and Monuments of Martyrs, with a General discourse of these latter Persecutions, horrible trouble and tumults, stirred up by Romish Prelates in the Church, with diverse other things incident, especially to this Realm of England and Scotland, as partly also to all other foreign nations”

In Part I, we looked at the origins of Lollardy with John Wyclif in Oxford in the 1380s, and at his radical proposals for a bible in English to provide the ordinary person with direct scriptural authority . Part 2 discussed Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in 1559, the main source of information about Lollards.

It was not Wyclif’s intention to start a breakaway church, but one of his proposals had been to train ‘poor preachers’, ordinary laymen who would work with parish priests teaching and preaching. After he died, in 1384, itinerant preachers encouraged the rapid growth of Lollard groups meeting in houses to read the Bible and discuss their radical ideas.

The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was a recent and frightening memory and the authorities were alarmed. In 1401, a statute was passed by Parliament, de Haeretico Comburendo ‘Concerning the burning of heretics’, which empowered bishops to arrest, imprison and examine offenders and hand them over to the secular authorities to be burnt ‘in an high place’ before the people, if found guilty. However, recantations were, understandably many and only one man, a priest from Norfolk, suffered this penalty in the following decade. The 1401 Manor Court Rolls of Wycombe record that ‘John Dryvere doth not set up a cross upon his house’. Lollards believed that worship or reverence of the sign of the cross was committing idolatry.

In 1413, Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, the most important Lollard leader, was arrested and sentenced, but escaped from the Tower and organised a rising outside London in 1414, which was suppressed by the young Henry V in person. Oldcastle escaped, but was eventually recaptured and burnt at the stake in 1417. 39 others involved in the 1414 rebellion were hanged or burned five days later, and they included three men from Amersham and one from Missenden. The so-called Merciless Statute of 1414 ruled that those convicted of heresy forfeited all their possessions, but the King made a compassionate exception for these widows and children. 40 others were pardoned, five of whom were priests, and they included the Parson of Latimer, a fletcher from Wycombe Heath who used grey goose quills, a carpenter from Amersham and two men from Wycombe.

Amersham, Martyrs Memorial¹

Wyclif was formally declared to be a heretic in 1415 and his bones were exhumed and burned in 1428. Large open gatherings were no longer attempted and the Wars of the Roses dominated the authorities’ attention.  The movement went largely underground, continuing to flourish for a further twenty or so years before gradually diminishing in numbers and importance, but still surviving. Evidence of Lollard sympathies around Penn is provided by the Vicar of Chesham, who was forced to recant of heresy in 1428, and the imprisonment for life of the parish priest of Hedgerley.

There was a small circle of landed proprietors in our part of the Chilterns, sympathetic to the Lollards in these early years and it may well be that this encouraged the unusual focus of Lollardy here. The will of the Lord of the Manor of Coleshill left several English bibles to Oxford University in 1457 and in the Bishop of Lincoln’s register four Amersham men recanted in 1462. Eleven heretics are recorded as having been burnt between 1401 and the accession of Henry VIII in 1485.  Foxe speaks of ‘a godly and great company’ of Lollards at Amersham, who had been meeting since at least 1495.

© Miles Green, February 2007

¹ The Martyrs Memorial off Stanley Hill in Amersham commemorates the Lollard martyr William Tylsworth, burnt there in 1506, recorded in Foxes Book of Martyrs.

Continued in ‘Altar Arrangements in Penn Church‘

Continued in ‘Interesting Vicars of Penn‘

Continued in ‘Monuments and Memorials‘