Religions Reviewed

Although many of the Lollards were artisans who were likely to have been attached to guilds, Wycliffe had shown no more favor for the craft organizations than he did for the ecclesiastical ‘guild.’ He rebuked “men of sutel craft” for specializing and subdividing labor and working to fixed times, “when they might profit their master twenty pounds a day by legging on a wall.”  Stephen Justice claims that in creating and destroying documents, the rebels of 1381 were consciously seizing “what had been defined immemorially as a clerkly space.”  While the rebels were intruding on the Mystery of the Clerks with a special interest in the material justice of English society, the later Lollards did so with a goal of entirely dissolving the privity that attached to the mystery, in order to free the true church from the misty mastery of the devil’s church.  They rejected ordination as the mechanism of monopoly on learning and salvation, seeking instead—as many heretics had before in diverse ways—to defeat pretended holiness, and to align spiritual authority with personal virtue.

The views and behavior of the Lollard heretics, as nearly as can be concluded from their early published works and later trial documents, consistently opposed what they perceived as the conspiratorial usurpation of Christianity by a priesthood employing devices of privity and mystery. At the same time, they were forced into adopting tactics of secrecy due to the circumstance of their persecution by the authorities. Those authorities used popular concerns about the power and secrecy of craft guilds in an effort to form opinion against Lollard dissent. Ironically, it appears that the patterns of organizing used by the medieval artisans were the same ones embraced by Archbishop Arundel and his Church of England in their effort to suppress heresy. Secrecy and propriety, in the particular form characterized by craft mystery, were pervasive characteristics of the conflict between orthodoxy and dissent in late medieval England.

Whether or not Lollards actually chose to compete with ordained priests in dispensing bread and wine in memory of Christ, they were certainly in competition when it came to the business of producing and reading the book that they viewed as the sole vehicle of God’s Law. The period of Lollardy was a turning point in English book production, during which speculative book production for known markets had become possible.  Those markets themselves were increasingly made up of individuals like “senior guildsmen” who had experienced an “increase in their pragmatic literacy.” 
Lollard book production was an affair of artisans working in association.  Although the first Wycliffite texts were certainly produced at Oxford, the principal labor of their production must have moved to lay scribe-artisans by the 15th century.  While Lollard texts themselves were no doubt overwhelmingly produced “bespoke,” or produced on commission, the growing reality of the book industry during a period of craft organization suggests at least the possibility of a mystery of lay scribes and illuminators, which could reinforce Lollard cognizance of craft organizing.

Lollard books were evidently made with great care for their materials as well as their contents.  Rita Copeland goes so far as to suggest that some Lollards attached a “talismanic value” to their books. How does the importance of books to Lollards and their movement square with William Thorpe’s disdain for the Bible volume on which he was to swear, declaring it to be a “creature” that might not support an oath?  To invoke a cliché, familiarity breeds contempt, and Lollards who were intimate with the demands of book production (i.e. creation of the “creature”) might be more likely to view the reverence toward the material book as an effect of mystification by church authorities. Similarly, Margery Baxter, the wife of a wright, scorns church images, because “Ignorant craftsmen hew and carve such crosses and images out of sticks, and after that ignorant painters deck them out with colors.”  A reader might reasonably infer that she cannot “eat the sausage,” having seen how and by whom it is made. In keeping with these perspectives, the Twelfth Conclusion of the Lollards, regarding “Arts and Crafts,” derides the employment of excessive productive arts in the Church as “waste, curiosity, and disguising.”

The first of Arundel’s Constitutions in fact reads very much like the rule of a craft guild, seeking to restrict the trade to its authorized practitioners, to see that rogue apprentices and delinquent journeymen cannot find employment, and to ensure that they keep to the standards of their craft. A preacher who travels is expected to furnish credentials from his master (i.e. ordinary) in order to affirm his good standing with the guild (the Church), and approved topics of preaching are circumscribed by the book Ignorantia Sacerdotum.  When Richard Ullerston argued against vernacular translation of scripture, his claim that it would harm the prestige of priests was an almost explicit effort to defend their craft prerogatives, as it were.  In a direct attack on those prerogatives, Thorpe asserted that he and those of his mind “haue taken vpon vs the office of priesthood (though we are vnworthie thereto).”  And the Lollard Margery Baxter similarly was reported to have “said that every man and woman who shared Margery’s opinion were good priests.”

Intrinsic to the misterie of the clergy was the Mystery of the Eucharist, in which priests claimed in a sense to make God from raw materials of bread and wine, by virtue of the privy transmission of their ordinations. Lollard views with respect to the Eucharist followed Wycliffe in denying the orthodox doctrine of transubstantiation. They criticized the Eucharist of the Church’s mass as a form of idolatry.  Some sources suggest that Lollards performed their own masses with ritualists who were laity or even women.  Such a custom would constitute a practical defiance of the exclusive power of priests to perform the ritual. But as Hudson notes, such stories are perhaps “a scandal too good not to be repeated” whether true or not.  In any case, hardly anyone in history has shown such round contempt for the doctrine of transubstantiation as Margery Baxter, who traced the passage of “infinite gods” through their deluded worshippers “into foul stinking privies.”

Besides the theological issues at stake with respect to priviness, some Lollards may have brought ideas about secrecy and its functions from their daily work. Historians now tend to agree that artisans and craftsmen constituted a crucially large, and sometimes perhaps majority, membership of Lollards in general.  Whether they participated in it or not, late medieval craftsmen would necessarily be aware of the deep traditions of craft secrecy. There are some vague intimations of craft secrecy in antiquity, with Xenophon’s observation that artisans keep their key techniques secret.  But urban medieval craftsmen organized in order to maintain proprietary control of craft knowledge, beginning at least as early as the thirteenth century. Members were generally required to take an oath (sacramentum) to maintain the secrecy of guild practices and craft techniques, and to observe other regulations of the guild.   In the late fourteenth century, guilds were one type of a diversity of associations that were viewed as threatening to the political status quo. In 1383 London Mayor Nicholas Bembre tried to suppress craft guilds by outlawing “congreaciouns, conuenticles…assembles…alliances, confederacies, conspiracies…[and] obligations forto bind men to gidre, forto systeyne eny quereles in lyuinnge and deyennge to gidre.”  In 1388, the English Crown required the registration of all guilds, with a documentation of their rules. At that time there were over 150 guilds in Norfolk alone.

 The English term misterie denoted a guild, with an etymology from maister, the word that gives modern English both ‘mister,’ and more pertinently ‘master.’ The relationship between masters and journeyman workers was the germ of the guild association, and the mistery could mean the secrets they shared.  But the word mysterie was also used in its theological senses of the rites of the Church and the inscrutability of revelation, and it could mean ‘ministry’ in both ecclesiastical and secular senses. The Wycliffite Bible used the word in Rom. xvi. 25:
“The revelacioun of mysterie holden stille, that is, not shewid…the which mysterie is now maad opyn by scripturis of prophetis.”

   William Thorpe seems to have quite deliberately evoked this multiple sense of misterie in response to the unnamed churchman who rebuked him:  ”And a clerke said to me: These be full mistie matters and vnsauerie, that thou shewest here to us. And I said: Sir if ye, that are maisters, know not plainlie this sentence, ye may sore dread that the kingdom of heauen be taken from you, as it was from the princes of priestes and from the elders of the Jewes.” Thorpe here accuses his ecclesiastical questioners of being the official “masters” of the craft of reading scripture, who are in peril of losing their privileged control of the business through incompetence!

One belief repeatedly ascribed to Lollards was their rejection of the need or utility of auricular confession.  In Karma Lochrie’s study of medieval secrecy Covert Operations, she explores the dynamics of concealment and disclosure in the medieval Church’s procedures for confession. Besides serving as a component of the program of clerical and lay education inaugurated by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, confession was a practice which vigorously deployed modes of secrecy and disclosure into Christian observance and the relations between laity and clergy. The lay penitent was supposed to fully reveal to the priestly confessor all those sins which she had kept secret. The priest, in turn, was required to keep the matter of confession privy himself. The ideal of trust between these two parties was difficult to achieve, since fallible priests might well disclose confessed sins, and penitents might succumb to fear and keep them secret.  These concerns are explicitly cited in the ninth of the Lollards’ “Twelve Conclusions,” along with two other grave objections: the private time with a confessor could be occasion for sinful acts, and worst of all, since the priesthood was not genuinely Apostolic, it had no actual power to absolve sins.  The apparent absolution from the priest might merely encourage further sin. It would, in any case, not of itself provide the benefits of confession to God, nor to any person whom the sinner had wronged.  In the case of confession, as with the study of scripture, it was the Lollards who opposed the secretive and privy procedures of the Church.

Rhetorical imputations of secrecy to their foes were available to the Lollards as well, and perhaps with greater justification. “The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards” generalize the misdeeds of the Church of England as “flattering of private religion.”  The heretic William Thorpe’s account of his examination by Archbishop Arundel includes descriptions of the privy and furtive behavior of the churchman. Arundel “when that hee sawe me, he went faste into a closet, bidding all seculer men that folowed him to goe forth from him soone….”  De heretico comburendo says that heretics “make unlawful conventicles and confederacies, they hold and exercise schools, they make and write books, they do wickedly instruct and inform people.” 

Whether or not acts of instruction and information were judged inherently wicked, it appears that the forces of orthodoxy opposed schools, the public circulation of books, and lay assembly for study.  In contrast to that containment of learning, and contrary to Krug’s emphasis on the privacy of Lollard bible study, privacy does not seem to have been the ideal of Lollards’ encounters with the bible. They would not have troubled to organize “conventicles” and “schools” if it were. The Oxford translation debate in 1401-1407 clearly associated arguments of wider public access to scripture with the side of those who, like the Lollards, supported its translation into the vernacular.   Despite the hazards posed by persecution, Lollard preaching and bible reading in taverns continued throughout the 15th century.