The burden of Wycliffe’s teaching was the exposure of the indolent fictions which passed under the name of religion in the established theory of the church.  He was a man of most simple life; austere in appearance, with bare feet and russet mantle.[465] As a soldier of Christ, he saw in his Great Master and his Apostles the patterns whom he was bound to imitate.  By the contagion of example he gathered about him other men who thought as he did; and gradually, under his captaincy, these “poor priests,” as they were called—­vowed to poverty because Christ was poor—­vowed to accept no benefice, lest they should misspend the property of the poor, and because, as apostles, they were bound to go where their Master called them,[466] spread out over the country as an army of missionaries, to preach the faith which they found in the Bible—­to preach, not of relics and of indulgences, but of repentance and of the grace of God.  They carried with them copies of the Bible which Wycliffe had translated, leaving here and there, as they travelled, their costly treasures, as shining seed points of light; and they refused to recognise the authority of the bishops, or their right to silence them.

If this had been all, and perhaps if Edward III. had been succeeded by a prince less miserably incapable than his grandson Richard, Wycliffe might have made good his ground; the movement of the parliament against the pope might have united in a common stream with the spiritual move against the church at home, and the Reformation have been antedated by a century.  He was summoned to answer for himself before the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1377.  He appeared in court supported by the presence of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the eldest of Edward’s surviving sons, and the authorities were unable to strike him behind so powerful a shield.

But the “poor priests” had other doctrines besides those which they discovered in the Bible, relating to subjects with which, as apostles, they would have done better if they had shrunk from meddling.  The inefficiency of the clergy was occasioned, as Wycliffe thought, by their wealth and by their luxury.  He desired to save them from a temptation too heavy for them to bear, and he insisted that by neglect of duty their wealth had been forfeited, and that it was the business of the laity to take it from its unworthy possessors.  The invectives with which the argument was accompanied produced a widely-spread irritation.  The reins of the country fell simultaneously into the weak hands of Richard II., and the consequence was a rapid spread of disorder.  In the year which followed Richard’s accession, consistory judges were assaulted in their courts, sanctuaries were violated, priests were attacked and ill-treated in church, church-yard, and cathedral, and even while engaged in the mass;[467] the contagion of the growing anarchy seems to have touched even Wycliffe himself, and touched him in a point most deeply dangerous.