l parish priest must have represented a familiar type, so
that we may believe that much good work was here and there unobtrusively
done by the clergy. Prominent among abuses were the sale of pardons, and
the extortions of the ecclesiastical courts; their decrees were enforced
by excommunication, and on a writ issued to the sheriff an
excommunicated person would be imprisoned until he satisfied the demands
of the church. The state needed money and attacks were made in
parliament on the wealth of the church. Already, in 1340, Edward III.,
who quarrelled with Archbishop Stratford on political grounds, had
appointed lay ministers, and in 1371 William of Wykeham, bishop of
Winchester, and other clerical ministers were turned out of office and
succeeded by laymen. A political crisis in 1376 was followed by a
struggle between the bishops and John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, the
head of the anticlerical party, who allied himself with John Wycliffe
(q.v.). He was unpopular, and when the bishops cited Wycliffe before
them in St Paul's, the duke's conduct provoked a riot and the
proceedings ended abruptly. Wycliffe held that the church was corrupted
by wealth; that only those in grace had a right to God's gifts, and that
temporal power belonged only to laymen and not to popes nor priests.
Later he attacked the papacy itself, which in 1378 was distracted by the
great schism; by 1380 he condemned pilgrimages, secret confession and
masses for the dead. While holding the presence of Christ in the
Eucharist, he denied a change of substance in the elements, arguing that
accidents or qualities, such as form and colour, could not exist without
substance. He taught that Holy Scripture was the only source of
religious truth, to the exclusion of church authority and tradition, and
he and his followers made the first complete English version of the
Bible. His opinions were spread by the poor priests whom he sent out to
preach and by his English tracts. That his teaching had any direct
effect on the insurrection of 1381, though commonly believed, appears to
be an unfounded idea; many priests were concerned in the rising, and
specially the mendicant orders, Wycliffe's bitter enemies, but the
motives of the insurrection were essentially secular (Oman, _The Great
Revolt of 1381_). The reaction which followed extended to religion, and
Wycliffe's doctrines were condemned by a church council in 1382.
Nevertheless he died in peace. He had many discipl