nhomme_, and was {32} appealed to as such by the
Protestant reformers of the 16th century.

The attack upon the growing corruptions of the Church was made more
systematically, and from the stand-point of a theologian rather than of
a popular moralist and satirist, by John Wyclif, the rector of
Lutterworth and professor of Divinity in Baliol College, Oxford. In a
series of Latin and English tracts he made war against indulgences,
pilgrimages, images, oblations, the friars, the pope, and the doctrine
of transubstantiation. But his greatest service to England was his
translation of the Bible, the first complete version in the mother
tongue. This he made about 1380, with the help of Nicholas Hereford,
and a revision of it was made by another disciple, Purvey, some ten
years later. There was no knowledge of Hebrew or Greek in England at
that time, and the Wiclifite versions were made not from the original
tongues, but from the Latin Vulgate. In his anxiety to make his
rendering close, and mindful, perhaps, of the warning in the
Apocalypse, "If any man shall take away from the words of the book of
this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life,"
Wiclif followed the Latin order of construction so literally as to make
rather awkward English, translating, for example, _Quid sibi vult hoc
somnium?_ by _What to itself wole this sweven?_ Purvey's revision was
somewhat freer and more idiomatic. In the reigns of Henry IV. and V.
it was forbidden to read or to have any {33} of Wiclif's writings.
Such of them as could be seized were publicly burned. In spite of
this, copies of his Bible circulated secretly in great numbers.
Forshall and Madden, in their great edition (1850), enumerate one
hundred and fifty MSS. which had been consulted by them. Later
translators, like Tyndale and the makers of the Authorized Version, or
"King James' Bible" (1611), followed Wiclif's language in many
instances; so that he was, in truth, the first author of our biblical
dialect and the founder of that great monument of noble English which
has been the main conservative influence in the mother-tongue, holding
it fast to many strong, pithy words and idioms that would else have
been lost. In 1415; some thirty years after Wiclif's death, by decree
of the Council of Constance, his bones were dug up from the soil of
Lutterworth chancel and burned, and the ashes cast into the Swift.
"The brook," says Thomas Fuller, in his _Church