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.