Book of Fire Read Free Page B

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    A list of the teachings in secret Lollard conventicles was prepared for Thomas Arundel, who succeeded Courtenay as archbishop of Canterbury. They were said to mock confession, indulgences, pilgrimage and the use of images; two Lollard chaplains at Leicester used a wooden statue of St Katherine as fuel to cook a meal. The pope, the Church hierarchy and the ‘private religions’ of monks and friars were described as conspiracies against the scriptures. Lollards maintained that only God could beatify; the pope was powerless to make a saint. The sacraments were described as ‘dead signs of no value … a mouthful of bread with no life’.
    Virginity and the celibacy of the priesthood were ‘not states approved by God’, and were inferior to wedlock. The Church was ‘nothing but a synagogue of Satan’; none should be baptised by priests, and purgatory was an invention. Forgiveness of sins flowed from belief, ‘because, as they say, whatever is stands in faith, as Christ said to Mary Magdalene, “Thy faith hath made thee whole.”’ Lollards held many Church rituals to be magic and the craft of the devil. ‘Exorcisms and hallowings, made in the Church, of wine, bread and wax, water, salt and oil and incense, the stone of the altar, upon vestments, mitre, cross and pilgrims’ staves, be the very practice of necromancy, not of holy theology …’
    As yet only England was affected by these ideas. Here, they aroused such fear of civil unrest that Arundel was able to press the king and parliament for powers to pursue and execute heretics. In 1401, at the archbishop’s urging, parliament passed an act whose Latin title displayed its lethal intent, De Haeretico Comburendo , On the Burning of Heretics. The English bishops were empowered to arrest Lollards and try them by the canon law of the Church. Prisoners convicted of heresy by the Church courts were to be handed to a secular court, which would ‘cause [them] to beburnt that such punishment may strike fear to the minds of others’.
    No heretic had been burnt in England since a deacon was convicted of converting to Judaism almost two centuries before. This laxness was swiftly remedied. Even before the legislation had been enacted, a special parliamentary sanction was granted in March 1401 for the execution of the Lollard William Sawtrey, a priest from Lynn in Norfolk. Sawtrey was defiant. ‘I, sent by God, tell thee that thou and thy whole clergy, and the King also,’ he told Archbishop Arundel during his trial, ‘will shortly die an evil death …’ He was burnt, alive and in public, at Smithfield in London.
    Arundel now turned on the Lollard Bible. He created the Constitutions of Oxford in 1408 to deal with translations of the scriptures. ‘It is a dangerous thing, as witnesseth blessed St Jerome,’ the Constitution said of the translator of the Vulgate, ‘to translate the text of the holy Scripture out of one tongue into another, for in the translation the same sense is not always easily kept … We therefore decree and ordain, that no man, hereafter, by his own authority translate any text of the Scripture into English or any other tongue, by way of a book, libel or treatise; and that no man can read any such book, libel or treatise, now lately set forth in the time of John Wycliffe, or since, or hereafter to be set forth, in part or in whole, privily or apertly, sub pena maioris excommunicationis , upon pain of greater excommunication …’ The penalty was comprehensive; it condemned its victims ‘to be accursed eating and drinking, walking and sitting, rowing and riding, laughing and weeping, in house and in field, on water and on land … Cursed be their head and their thoughts, their eyes and their ears, their tongues and their lips, their teeth and their throats …’ If they relapsed, they were to be burnt.
    Arundel ordered that all Wycliffe’s works be burnt, and sent the pope a list of 267 heresies and errors ‘worthy of the fire’ that