aints of law. He dismissed the new lords and
prelates from the Council. He called back Alice Perrers and the disgraced
ministers. He declared the Good Parliament no parliament, and did not
suffer its petitions to be enrolled as statutes. He imprisoned Peter de la
Mare, and confiscated the possessions of William of Wykeham. His attack on
this prelate was an attack on the clergy at large, and the attack became
significant when the Duke gave his open patronage to the denunciations of
Church property which formed the favourite theme of John Wyclif. To Wyclif
such a prelate as Wykeham symbolized the evil which held down the Church.
His administrative ability, his political energy, his wealth and the
colleges at Winchester and at Oxford which it enabled him to raise before
his death, were all equally hateful. It was this wealth, this intermeddling
with worldly business, which the ascetic reformer looked upon as the curse
that robbed prelates and churchmen of that spiritual authority which could
alone meet the vice and suffering of the time. Whatever baser motives might
spur Lancaster and his party, their projects of spoliation must have seemed
to Wyclif projects of enfranchisement for the Church. Poor and powerless in
worldly matters, he held that she would have the wealth and might of heaven
at her command. Wyclif's theory of Church and State had led him long since
to contend that the property of the clergy might be seized and employed
like other property for national purposes. Such a theory might have been
left, as other daring theories of the schoolmen had been left, to the
disputation of the schools. But the clergy were bitterly galled when the
first among English teachers threw himself hotly on the side of the party
which threatened them with spoliation, and argued in favour of their
voluntary abandonment of all Church property and of a return to their
original poverty. They were roused to action when Wyclif came forward as
the theological bulwark of the Lancastrian party at a moment when the
clergy were freshly outraged by the overthrow of the bishops and the
plunder of Wykeham. They forced the king to cancel the sentence of
banishment from the precincts of the Court which had been directed against
the Bishop of Winchester by refusing any grant of supply in Convocation
till William of Wykeham took his seat in it. But in the prosecution of
Wyclif they resolved to return blow for blow. In February 1377 he was
summoned before