Lollards of the Chiltern Hills: Glimpses of English Dissent in the Middle Ages, The
W. H. Summers
Number of quotes: 30
Book ID: 248 Page: 4
Section: 2E6
… the Puritan dislike to the sign of the cross...page 9 in new book.
Quote ID: 6224
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 7/8
Section: 2E1
Later tradition asserted that on this occasion he healed an afflicted girl with a piece of gold which had been touched by the Holy Lance (the spear which had pierced the Savior’s side); but unfortunately this was before the Holy Lance had been found at Antioch.page 17 in new book
Quote ID: 6225
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 10
Section: 3G
… a Benedictine or Cluniac priority appears to have been founded at Newton Longville, as a cell of the Abbey of St. Foy at Longueville in Normandy, by Walter Gifford,-------------
“At the close of Henry’s reign,” writes Mr. J.R. Green (History of the English People, i. 156), “and throughout the reign of Stephen, England was stirred by the first of those great movements which it was to experience afterwards in the preaching of the Friars, the Lollardism of Wickliffe, the Reformation, the Puritan enthusiasm, and the mission work of the Wesleys. Everywhere, in town and country, men banded themselves together for prayer, hermits flocked to the woods, noble and churl welcomed the austere Cistercians. A new spirit of devotion woke the slumbers of the religious houses, and penetrated alike to the home of the noble and the trader.”
oage 23-24 of new book
Quote ID: 6226
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 248 Page: 12
Section: 2E1
It became the most renowned place of pilgrimage in the county, for its founder presented it with a portion of the contents of a golden vessel, said to contain some of the blood of our Saviour, which he had obtained in Germany...page 27 in new book
Quote ID: 6227
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 13
Section: 3A1A,3A2A
The monastic houses enjoyed curiously varied privileges. For example, Biddlesden, by a grant of Edward II., to whom the Abbot had lent money, had the right of holding a market every Monday, and an annual fair during six days. The nuns of Burnham, in the second year of Henry IV., acquired the right of holding a market and fair at Burnham, and a fair at Beaconsfield. The nuns of Marlow similarly held a fair at Ivinghoe. The Prior of Snelshall held weekly markets at Snelshall and Mursley. The Abbot of Notley held the advowson and tithes of several parishes, with exemption from payments in the county and hundred courts, freedom from market tolls throughout the realm, and the right to use two carts at certain seasons to bring wood from the royal forest of Bernwood. The nuns of Ankerwyke might feed sixty swine on the acorns of Windsor Forest. Strangest of all, the Prior of Tickford had the privilege of setting up a “pillory and tumbrill, to punish and chastise transgressors;” while his near neighbour the Prior of Newton might keep his vassals in awe by means of his own private gallows.page 28-29 in new book
Quote ID: 6228
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 13
Section: 3A2A
The rule of the monks as landlords, too, was probably milder than that of the Norman baron, though we shall see that the great houses could be tyrannous enough to their tenants at times.page 30 in ne book
Pastor John’s note: A.D. 1100-1200 ±
Quote ID: 6229
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 14
Section: 3A1B
…. in every village there was a parish priest. There is reason, however, to fear that these clergy were as a rule sadly ignorant and inefficient. They preached but little; and when Archbishop Peckham tried to institute a reform in the days of Edward I., he went no further than to require that every clerk should deliver four sermons a year to his parishioners!page of new book
Pastor John’s note: A.D. 1100-1200 ±
Quote ID: 6230
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 15/16
Section: 2E3
The old Paganism, however, had died hard, and traces of it were to be found at a much later date than is commonly supposed. As late as the reign of Henry II., St. Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, had complained that he found many relics of heathenism in his diocese. (Vita Sancti Hugonis, Bolls Series, 348). Amongst others, it is recorded that he suppressed the worship of a certain “fountain” at Wycombe. This, it seems, was the spring at the east end of Wycombe Rye, by the piece of ground still known as Halliwell (Holy Well) Mead. But the worship of sacred springs was carried on, if in a modified form, for at least a century after the time of St. Hugh. In 1299 Bishop Sutton forbade the resort of pilgrims to the “holy well at Linslade,” alleging that it had become a public scandal, and that the vicar had encouraged it for his own emolument.page 34-35 of new book.
Quote ID: 6231
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 16
Section: 4B
Robert Grossetete, Bishop from 1235 to 1253, was born of humble peasant stock in Suffolk, and his whole career was not only that of a true Christian pastor, but that of a great English patriot. No “hireling that cared not for the sheep,” no cold and unsympathising foreigner, he looked on each peasant and serf in his unwieldy diocese as a fellow-countryman and a brother in Christ. He has been styled “a Reformer before the Reformation,” but his protests were against the corruptions of the Church in discipline, and the encroachments of the Papal Court, not against the received doctrines of Catholicism. He set himself against impropriation of tithes, against absentee and pluralist clergy, and against the holding of secular office by bishops and priests.page 35-36 of new book
Quote ID: 6232
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 17/18
Section: 2D3B
When we come to consider the traces of actual dissent from the teaching of the Church before the rise of Wycliffe, we find them singularly few and vague. Yet there was undoubtedly a good deal of secret dissent hidden below the surface; and it is curious that this is especially traceable in the adjoining county of Oxford. In 1166, according to William of Newburgh, a council was convened at Oxford to enquire into the heresy of a company about thirty German weavers, called “Publicani,” who had appeared in the diocese of Worcester. It is stated that Gerard, their leader, was a man of education, and that his answers showed him to be orthodox as to the person of Christ, but that he rejected baptism, marriage, the Eucharist, and the authority of the Church.---------
Newburg states that Gerard and his followers, by the king’s command, were stripped to the waist, scourged through the city of Oxford, and branded on the face with a hot iron. They sang as they endured their punishment, “Blessed shall ye be when men shall hate you.” Then proclamation was made that all men were forbidden to give them food or shelter, and they were driven forth, with loud cracking of whips, to perish miserably of cold and hunger.
---------
The admission that these Publicani were orthodox as to the person of Christ is of importance as distinguishing them from the wilder heretical sects of the period.
page 39 of new book
Quote ID: 6233
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 26
Section: 3A2A
"Instances are not wanting,“ says Mr. A. Clear in his History of the Town and Manor of Winslow, “in which the lord” (i.e., the Abbot) “to show his authority, issued the most trivial orders, such as directing that the tenants should go off to the woods and pick nuts for his use. If the ‘Nativi’ married without the lord’s consent, they were fined; if they allowed their houses to get out of repair, they were fined for being guilty of waste; if they sold an ox without the license of the lord, again they were fined; if they left the manor without permission, they were searched for, and if found, arrested and brought back into servitude.. . . . In all these offences, the whole of the jury were also fined if they neglected to report the delinquent.” The tenants were obliged to plough the Abbot’s land for so many days in the year, to cut his hay and corn, and perform various kinds of servile work. If they showed any tendency to insubordination, their horses and cattle were confiscated, and they were cast into prison. But the grievance which seems to have been most bitterly resented was the obligation to grind their corn at the Abbot’s mill, and to pay for its use. The handmills in their houses were confiscated and turned into paving-stones for the abbey cloisters.
page 56 of new book
Quote ID: 6234
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 28
Section: 3A2A
The Archbishop obtained from the young king after the Earthquake Council a royal ordinance for the arrest and imprisonment of the itinerant preachers.page 60 of new book
Pastor John’s note: 1380’s
Quote ID: 6235
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 30/31
Section: 2E1
In 1401, the Court Rolls of the manor of Wycombe contain the entry, “Item, they present that John Dryvere doth not set up a cross upon his house.”The Lollards, we are told, held that “all they who do worship and reverence the sign of the cross do commit idolatry;” and whether Dryvere was a Lollard or not, it seems likely that the authorities wished to show their zeal for orthodoxy by calling attention to his omission.
page 65-66 of new book
Quote ID: 6236
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 248 Page: 32
Section: 3A2A
The death of Henry IV, in 1413, and the accession of his son as Henry V., were followed by the initiation of far more stringent measures against the Lollards. Sir John Oldcastle, a personal friend of the young King, and one of the most distinguished soldiers of the time, was charged with heresy, and summoned to appear before the Archbishop of Canterbury. He at first refused to do so; but on the King intervening, he surrendered himself. On his refusal to abjure, he was excommunicated, and handed over to the secular power to be burned...page 69 of new book
Quote ID: 6237
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 248 Page: 51
Section: 2D3A,3A2A
The term ["laborer"] was often very vaguely used; and one remembers how, within the nineteenth century, that fine old relic of medievalism, Bishop Philpotts of Exeter, cited a newspaper editor before him as a “labourer.” Whatever his position, Morden had been abjured by Bishop Smith, who found that “he had used his Paternoster and Creed so much in English, that he had forgotten many words thereof in Latin.” The Bishop bade him for the future to say them in Latin only, and enjoined on him a pilgrimage twice a year to Lincoln.page of new book
Pastor John’s note: Good grief
Quote ID: 6238
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 61
Section: 2D3B,3A2A
Thomas Man had a remarkable and somewhat romantic career, though Foxe tells it in a very confused manner (iv. 208-213). He was cited for heresy before Bishop Smith at Oxford (1511), and after a period of imprisonment, he recanted in St. Mary’s, did open penance, and was kept as a kind of servant, with a faggot embroidered on his sleeve, first at Osney Abbey, and then at St. Frideswide’s Priory. The charges against him included the holding of some strange mystical views about the true sacrament of the altar being in heaven. He had called the priests’ pulpits “lying-stools,” and had said that “holy men of his sect were the true Church of god, and the only true priests.”page 132-133 of new book
Quote ID: 6239
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 62
Section: 2E1,3A2A
"Christopher Shoemaker . . . met with a fiery death. . . . He was charged with having read to Joan Say . . . ’out of a little book, the words which Christ spake to his disciples,’ and with having spoken against pilgrimages, image worship, and transubstantiation." page 133-134 of new book [new note!]PJ Note: Foxe, iv. 217.
"Andrew Randal of Kickmansworth (iv. 226). In February, 1518, he was apprehended and brought before Dr. Hed, Chancellor of the diocese of London. It was asserted that he again recanted; but this seems doubtful. On March 29th he was delivered to the secular power, with the usual hypocritical request that he might not be put to death; but before noon of the next day, he was committed to the flames in Smithfield."
page 135 of new book
Quote ID: 6240
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 62
Section: 2D3B,3A2A
One of the two was charged with joining with the martyr Robert Cosin in dissuading Joan Norman from pilgrimages, image-worship, fasting communion, and auricular confession. “Also when she had vowed a piece of silver to a saint for the health of a child, they (Thomas Man and Robert Cosin) dissuaded her from the same” (iv. 214). This must have been not later than 1506.page 135-136 of new book
Quote ID: 6241
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 65/66
Section: 5D
"John Longland, bishop of Lincoln instituted a strict inquiry into the prevalence of heresy." This led to a registry of heretics.page 137 of new book [new note]
Clark is on the list.
page 141 and 142 of new book
Quote ID: 6243
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 248 Page: 67
Section: 2A2,2D3B,3A2A
[Bishop Longland] summoned before him Robert and Richard Bartlett, well-to-do farmers, who, with their brother John, had abjured and done penance at Tylsworth’s martyrdom. They were the sons of old Richard Bartlet, of whom it was told that one day, as he was threshing, a passer-by had said to him, “God speed, Father Bartlet, ye work sore.” “Yea,” answered the old man, with a satirical reference to the doctrine of transubstantiation, “I thresh God Almighty out of the straw.” The old yeoman’s wife Katherine seldom went to church, pleading ill health, and it was noted that when she did attend, she did not join in the prayers, but “sat mum.”page 147 of new book
Quote ID: 6245
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 68
Section: 2A2,2D3B,3A2A
He and his brother Richard “detected” (be it remembered in dread of a fiery death) their own sister Agnes Wells, as guilty of the four great crimes, on which all these examinations mainly turned:(1). Reading the Scriptures in English.
(2). Denying the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
(3). Rejecting the worship of images.
(4). Speaking against pilgrimages.
page 149 of new book
Quote ID: 6246
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 71
Section: 2D3B,3A2A
The term ["laborer"] was often very vaguely used; and one remembers how, within the nineteenth century, that fine old relic of medievalism, Bishop Philpotts of Exeter, cited a newspaper editor before him as a “labourer.” Whatever his position, Morden had been abjured by Bishop Smith, who found that “he had used his Paternoster and Creed so much in English, that he had forgotten many words thereof in Latin.” The Bishop bade him for the future to say them in Latin only, and enjoined on him a pilgrimage twice a year to Lincoln.page 154-155 of new book
Pastor John’s note: some of his "crimes" are given.
Quote ID: 6247
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 76
Section: 2A2,2D3B,3A2A
In the little hamlet of Ashley Green, on the Hertfordshire border, lived John Morden, the uncle of James, Richard and Radulph, who had in his house a book of the Gospels and “other chapters in English.”At Little Missenden, three miles from Amersham up the beautiful valley of the Misbourne, the Vicar himself was believed to be tainted with heresy. So also were Elizabeth, the wife of Henry Hover; John Say, to whom the martyr Shoemaker had read Christ’s words out of his “little book”; William Say, his son; two Edward Popes (father and son); John Nash; Henry Etkin and his mother; as well as Joan Clark (perhaps the unhappy daughter of William Tylsworth),, who had said, "she never did believe in the sacrament of the altar, nor ever would believe in it."
page 164-165 of new book
Quote ID: 6248
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 248 Page: 77
Section: 2D3B
Roger said that once, in 1515, he had asked young Henry Phip whether he was going to Wycombe. Henry had just been chosen “keeper of the rood-loft,” and carelessly answered, “I must needs go and tend a candle before my Block Almighty.”page 167 of new book
Pastor John’s note: Ha!
Quote ID: 6249
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 78
Section: 2A2,2D3B
He begged him not to divulge his words to his wife, whose brother was a priest. Not long after, the priest got his sister to buy him some “singing bread” (sacramental wafers). It was damp, and the priest was laying it out to dry, when his brother-in-law ventured to suggest, “If every one of these is a god, then there are many gods.”page 169 of new book
Pastor John’s note: Ha!
Quote ID: 6250
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 80
Section: 2D3B
At Beaconsfield, Richard White and his son-in-law Bennet Ward carried on the uncouth processes of the old woolen manufacture, treading or “walking” the cloth, bleaching it, and teasing it with teasel-heads to raise a nap; unless indeed they had set up one of the fulling-mills which were then looked on with dislike as a new-fangled innovation. Both of them came under suspicion, and had to abjure. Ward had in his possession the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, and the Ten Commandments in English. He had sheltered one Thomas Pope in his house, and his wife and daughter had been heard to say that Pope was ‘’the devoutest man that ever was in their house, for he would sit reading in his book till midnight many times.” One John Marston testified that Ward had said, “It booteth no man to pray to Our Lady, nor to any saint or angel in heaven, but to God only, for they have no power of man’s soul.”page 172-173 of new book
Pastor John’s note: AD 1500±
Quote ID: 6251
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 88
Section: 2D3B,2E2
Another interesting case (Foxe, iv. 583) is that of a young man named John Ryburn, living at “Roshborough” (Risborough).---------------
Ryburn had eagerly adopted the reformed doctrines, but his family were still devoted to those of Rome. His sister Elizabeth, coming to him on the eve of the Assumption, found him at supper “with butter and eggs,” and was horrified at his inviting her to join him. “God never made such fasting days,” said John; “but you are so far in Umbo patrum that you can never turn again.” At another time she spoke of going on pilgrimage to the Holy Rood of Wendover. “You do wrong,” said John; “for there is never a step that you set in going on pilgrimage but you go to the devil; and you go to church to worship what the priest doth hold above his head, which is but bread, and if you cast it to the mouse, he will eat it; and never will I believe that the priest hath power to make his Lord.”
page 91-192 of new book
Pastor John’s note: AD 1520’s±
Quote ID: 6252
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 89
Section: 2D3B
John Simonds, the reader just now mentioned, was himself cited. He gloried in having “converted eight priests to his doctrines, and holpen two or three friars out of their orders.” He was charged with defending the marriage of the clergy, and also with saying, “Men do walk all day in purgatory in this world, and when they depart out of this world, there are but two ways, either to hell or heaven.”page 194-195 of new book
Pastor John’s note: 1530; Amen!
Quote ID: 6253
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 95
Section: 3A2A
A great change in the relation of the State to the Church is manifest when we come to the year 1534, the year of the Act of Supremacy, and of the formal separation form Borne.--------------
In 1535, Sir Thomas More, Fisher, Bishop of Bochester, and others, were executed for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy.
PJ: Note The Oath of Supremacy required any person taking public or church office in England to swear allegiance to the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Failure to do so was to be treated as treasonable.
page 269 of new book
Quote ID: 6254
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 248 Page: 100
Section: 3A2A
Alarmed by certain excesses on the part of the extreme Protestants, and anxious that his subjects should observe what he regarded as the golden mean between Roman superstition and Lutheran fanaticism, Henry had a Bill introduced into Parliament, styled with delightful simplicity “An Act for Abolishing Diversity of Opinions.” This was the famous Statute of the Six Articles, or as the Protestants called it, “the Whip of Six Strings.” It rendered penal the rejection of transubstantiation, of communion on one kind, vows of chastity, celibacy of the clergy, private masses, or auricular confession. Burning was the penalty for a denial of transubstantiation, and on a second offence, for an infraction of any of the other articles. Refusal to confess or to attend mass became a felony.page 218-219 of new book
Quote ID: 6255
Time Periods: 7
End of quotes