Religions Reviewed

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.”