Wycliffe, John, also spelt Wycliff, Wyclif, Wicliffe or Wiclif c.1329-1384
English religious reformer

He was born near Richmond, Yorkshire. He distinguished himself at Oxford, where he taught philosophy, was Master of Balliol College (1360), then assumed the college living of Fillingham, which he exchanged in 1368 for Ludgershall, Buckinghamshire. He became rector of Lutterworth (1374), and was sent (doubtless as a recognized opponent of papal intrusion) to Bruges to discuss ecclesiastical abuses with ambassadors from the pope. His strenuous activity gained him support among the nobles and the London citizenry. In 1376 he wrote De Dominio Divino, expounding the doctrine that all authority is founded in grace and that wicked rulers (whether secular or ecclesiastical) thereby forfeited their right to rule. His maintenance of a right in the secular power to control the clergy was offensive to the bishops, who summoned him before the archbishop in St Paul's in 1377. Pope Gregory XI banned him, and urged that he be imprisoned and made to answer before the archbishop and the pope. When at last proceedings were undertaken, at Lambeth in 1378, the prosecution had little effect upon Wycliffe's position. The whole fabric of the Church was in the same year shaken by the Great Schism and the election of an antipope. Wycliffe now began to attack the constitution of the Church, and declared it would be better without pope or prelates. He denied the priestly power of absolution, and the whole system of enforced confession, penances, and indulgence, and asserted the right of every man to examine the Bible for himself. He began to write in English instead of Latin, and by issuing popular tracts became a leading English prose writer. He organized a body of itinerant preachers, his 'poor priests', who spread his doctrines widely through the country, and began the first English translation of the Bible. His 1380 attack on the central dogma of transubstantiation was more dangerous. A convocation of doctors at Oxford condemned his theses. Archbishop Courtenay convoked a council (1382) and condemned Wycliffite opinions. His followers were arrested, and all compelled to recant, but for some unknown reason he himself was not judged. He withdrew from Oxford to Lutterworth, where he continued his incessant literary activity. His work in the next two years, uncompromising in tone, is prodigious and consistently powerful. The characteristic of his teaching was its insistence on inward religion in opposition to the formalism of the time. He attacked the established practices of the Church only so far as he thought they had degenerated into mere mechanical uses. The influence of his teaching was widespread in England, and, though persecution suppressed it, continued up to the Reformation. His supporters came to be derisively known as 'Lollards' (from a Dutch word meaning 'mumblers'). Jan Huss was avowedly his disciple, and there were Lollards or Wycliffites in Ayrshire down to the Reformation. Forty-five articles extracted from his writings were condemned as heretical by the Council of Constance (1414), which ordered his bones to be dug up and burned and cast into the River Swift - a sentence executed in 1428.

Bibliography: H B Workman, John Wyclif: A Study of the English Medieval Church (2 vols, 1926)