The Free Spirit: Heretics in England and Wycliffe
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002
Heretics in England and Wycliffe
In 1167, heretics, called Poplicani or Deonarii, were charged in Vezelay that they denied the cross, holy water, churches, donations, marriage and the holy orders. A little earlier, in 1162 AD, some heretics, led by a man called Gerbert and called “publicani” by William of Newburg, came from Germany to England on the crest of the heretical wave, mentioned by Eckbert, later Benedictine abbot of Schonau. There were about 30 of them and they were described as uneducated, perhaps because they denied the sacraments of baptism, marriage, the mass, and the Catholic church generally. Most had a tragic fate, being put on trial at Oxford, branded, chased away, or starved to death. It seems the English were much opposed to heresy, and it never even got a foothold. Later evidence, though, from the 1300s, seems to tell a different tale. Of the Publicans tried, branded and chased out of Oxford, some seem to have adapted, kept their heads down and avoided any direct conflict with the ecclesiastic power until they emerged as Lollards.
Georgi Vasilev found it curious that the heretics never got to Britain, at least as far as British scholars were concerned. Despite their apparent absence in British history, medieval English literature and language has tantalizing hints of a dualist Bogomil-Cathar heretical presence persisting in England until the seventeenth century. Apocryphal writings and dualistic themes appeared first in manuscripts of the Old English period in the ninth and even the eighth century, including works like Beowulf. The Lament of the Fallen Angels in MS Junius retells a fragment of The Secret Book of the Bogomils. The poet William Langland, Anglo-Norman variants of The Legend of the Tree of the Cross (De arbore crucis) composed in the tenth century by the priest, Jeremiah, and The Infancy of Jesus Christ, the reformers John Wycliffe and William Tyndale, the iconography of the Lollards, and the apocryphal volume Cursor Mundi as well as Milton’s poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained all suggest that dualist ideas pervaded England, persisting through the Lollards. William Empson, in Milton’s God, confirms William Blake when he says, “Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it”—unless, of course, he did know it!
The Vision of Piers Plowman is full of Bogomil-Cathar imagery and theology—the Fall of Lucifer, the Descent of Christ into Hell to liberate all sinful souls. Christ teaches Piers Plowman how to plough the spiritual field, a version of a scene in De arbore crucis where Christ taught the ploughman to plough. In Langland’s poem the land is given to Piers Plowman, as it is given to Adam in the heretical works, and it uses Bogomil vocabulary like “good people”, “the Perfect” and “Spiritus Paraclitus”. Linking with the free spirit of the travelling artisans was the image of the Christ of the Trades in poor Lollard churches like S Mary’s Church in Ampney, Gloucestershire, in the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, and others listed by Georgi Vasilev from T Borenius and E W Tristram (1927).
John Wycliffe agreed with the Bogomil belief that “the Devil is master of the world”, insisted on sermons in the vernacular, was fond of the dualistic myth of the pride and fall of Lucifer, attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation on the grounds that God’s word is “our supersubstantial bread”, the Bogomil-Cathar view.
The OED tells us “Bugger”, in English, a form of the old French “bougre”, from the Latin “Bulgarus”, Bulgar or Bulgarian, is a name used in the eleventh century of the Cathars, a sect of heretics in Southern France whose origins were Bulgaria. In the Middle Ages, it was used particularly of the Albigenses, to whom the Church ascribed the abominable practice of sodomy. “Bougres” was also a name used of usurers. Usurers in Provence and Lombardy were called “bougres”, and Lombardy became famous for it, but both also had many heretics in their populations. Moses Gaster, in 1887, associated the word “boggard”, the name of a lurking ghost or ghoul (becoming the modern bogey and bogeyman), with “bugger”, suggesting it was a dialectal form of Bulgard, Bulgar or Bulgarian, applied to the heretics who were allegedly worshippers of the Devil. Matthew Paris is said to have used the word.
Eric Partridge showed that the “bougres”, the heretics, in fact had been vilified. The troubadours of the thirteenth century, Vassilev notes, used “bougre” with an honorable meaning in the Song of the Crusade against the Albigensians. After the Albigensian crusades against the Cathars in the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Catholic clergy launched the inquisition and simultaneously blackedned the character of the heretics in any ways they could. The same ploy is still constantly used, against enemies of the west like the Russians, the Moslem Arabs and the Vietnamese communists.
Charles Schmidt, the scholar of heresy, says the Church often resorted to calumny in dealing with the heresies, beginning with S Bernard of Clairvaux. The lie is given by the fact that some Catholic writers characterised them much more generously, as “respected, with honest conduct and dignified bearing”, and a Catholic chronicler wrote, “they say that the heretics are virtuous and accomplish miracles”. And curiously “bugger” also has a connotation in France, Britain and the USA of a “good chap”, “un brave homme”. Perhaps it signified the dual truth about the heretics, they were good people but blackened by propaganda. The Perfects, unlike most of the clergy, genuinely eschewed sexual relations, and so the clergy claimed they were able to do it because they preferred sex with animals. It is a slur that has never been upheld by any evidence, and the clergy had a reason for that too. Cathars fornicated secretly by night! The Perfects were famously pale and thin because of their constant fasting, but the clergy had their own explanation—they were worn out by fornication.
Bogomil Perfects looked pale because they really did fast incessantly. Vasilev cites Euthymius Zigabenus as declaring that they fasted “on the second and the fourth day and the Friday of every week fast right up to the ninth hour”, besides fasting throughout Lent. Bernard Gui (A Manual for Inquisitors) confirms that they fasted on bread and water three days a week for the whole year, and nor did they touch a woman. As children of the Good God, Cathars were all members of one spiritual family. Taken to the limit by the Perfects, it meant that sexuality with any woman was like incest with a sister or mother. This principle, needless to say, was reversed by catholic Inquisitors, like R Sacconi, into Cathar men and women both enjoying intercourse with sisters and brothers. Yes indeed, but only the Hearers, not the Perfects, and the sisters were spiritual sisters and the brothers the same—just as the sisterhood and brotherhood of the first disciples of Christ was, and the Essenes before them.
Schmidt, in 1849, also identified the “poblicans” in Northern France and England as Cathars, observing that a good many chroniclers mentioned them. Stephen Runciman derived “publicani” or “poplicani” through Latin from the Greek word Paulicians. The Greek “Paulicani” gets written with the Latinized letter “u” looking like a “v” (Pavlicani) and that easily gets pronounced as a “b” (Poblicani)! The Paulicians were the original and stricly dualistic heretics which spawned the somewhat less rigid Bogomil church.
Vasiliev explains that the Chronicle of Rodulphus Coggeshalensis from the time of Louis VII (1137-1180) says publican was the popular name of the “heretics who had spread to many parts of France”. Many historians have pointed out that it was merchants and travelling tradesmen who were among the main propagators of the Cathar heresy in Europe. As early as 1017 AD, “popelicani” appear in Du Cange’s Glossarium, that being “how our Manichaeans are called”. Du Cange goes on to say that, at the Third Lateran Council of 1179, the Cathars, Patrenes (Patarenes) and Publicani were bracketed together because they had spread in Albi, Toulouse and elsewhere, and citing Magna Chronica Belgica (1208), he says the Popelicani “professed both principles”—they were dualists.
The “bougres” and the “poblicani” might have been distinct dualistic sects from Bulgaria, but they were sufficiently alike to be seen as the same heresy in the west. It is inconceivable that the publicans or buggers did not have a strong influence on the emergence of the Lollards, but the indistinctness of their traces suggest they kept their heads very low, after the fate of Gerbert and his party in Britain and the shocking events of Languedoc. One way they seem to have done it is to use the parable of the Pharisee and the publican (Luke 18:9-14) to give themselves the caché of the reformed sinner. The conclusion of the story is the Christian truism, forgotten by many if not most of them, that the exalted are humbled and the humble exalted. There is little doubt that the Cathar Christs took this seriously, unlike traditional Christians who prefer to act the part of the Pharisee. The catholic inquisitor, Bernard Gui, noted that Cathars called their catholic Christian persecutors Pharisees whereas they were persecuted as Christ and the apostles were.
Guillaume de Saint-Amour (1202-1272), to whom a chapter of The Roman de la Rose is dedicated, was rector of the liberal University of Paris. Facing up to the papel orders of the Church, in one of his sermons, he called the catholic clergy “falsely pious” and vain, whereas publicans were “men of the world who, even if they are sinners” admitted their sins. Thus the publicani were associated in the writings of English authors of the seventeenth century with an anti-Catholic, Protestant spirit, arising, in actuality, from their heretical beginnings with the Paulicians.
Even in the eyes of the strictest moral judgement the Cathars would be worthy of the name they have chosen for themselves (Cathari, Puritans.N Osokin, cited by G Vasilev
And the affection of the peasantry has come down in a variety of fourteenth century observations noted by Jean Duvernoy in the medieval registers. A farmer aroused the suspicions of Cathars when he attended one of their secret meetings around 1303, and was gently led away protesting:
But, sir, I too want to receive a part of the Good!
And after the Cathars had fled the crusade and the Inquisition:
The land does not produce anything good.
Since the heretics were chased from Sabartes there is no longer good weather in the area.
When the heretics lived in these lands we did not have so many storms or lightning. Now that we are with Franciscans and Dominicans the lightning strikes more frequently.
Others recorded that people thought the Cathars brought happiness and plenty and no one could do evil in the day they had seen a Perfect. It was the purity of the Bogomils that attracted disaffected catholics to the heresy.
The Bogomil-Cathar heresy, in many respects, is influenced by pre-Christian pagan beliefs, notably Orphism. Vasilev relates Orphism with Bogomilism in the myth of Christ’s descent into hell and his freeing of the imprisoned souls there, and shown in a fresco of Boyana Church. Christ descending into hell is a Christian version of Orpheus in the underworld. The story of the Harrowing of Hell was known everywhere in the Middle Ages. Yet, it came from a heretical work, The Gospel of Nicodemus, a non-canonical book, but the favourite reading of the dualists, according to Vasilev (Bogomils And Lollards. Dualistic Motives in England during the Middle Ages, online). In it, the captives in hell are in darkness, then see a light, the arriving King of Glory. He had come to cause confusion and stop the tyranny of hell that kept the souls entrapped, and the mediæval reader too! The reader was considered as caught in the darkness as the poor captives. They were the captives! In the Carcassonne version of the Secret Book, Christ meets and subdues Satan in hell, but none of this happens in the Vienna version, thus leaving Satan as coequal with his brother and rival, Christ. This is not Catholic Christianity. People in the Christian hell are there because of God’s judgement on them, yet here they are subject to a tyranny, and are to be freed from it. This is Catharism. This world is hellish, and the Church is its tyrant.
The miracle plays of the British towns, popular in the Middle Ages, covered the passion of Christ, including the Harrowing of Hell, and in the order of the gospel of Nicodemus, suggesting it was their source, and Langland’s Piers Plowman also has it. Dualistic apocrypha like these were brought over to England via France in the thirteenth century, but Vasilev thinks the presence of the Harrowing of Hell in the tenth century Exeter Book shows heretical influence that early.
If weaving was one of the crafts that the heretics practiced, England was important to it from the tenth century as the centre of the supply of wool, and the Rhine valley was the route taken by the cloth merchants to the east where some could meet familiar beliefs from the Bogomils. The Fall of Lucifer and his Angels found in the Caedmon Ms is another dualistic theme. Did the heresy create its own cultural infrastructure in England, apart and often opposed to the official Church?
The Lollards of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are well documented as connected with the reformist efforts of John Wycliffe, and taking part in John Ball’s Peasants’ Revolt of June 1381, certainly according to the Catholics, some say to discredit Wycliffe. Like the earlier heretical sects, Lollardy criticised clerical abuse of power and position, denied Church authority particularly as the only route to salvation, and its holding temporal power and possessions. Like the Waldenses, Lollards believed faith was founded directly on the bible as the source of all truth. God needed no clergy as intermediaries between Himself and the laity, and they denied the sacraments, deplored church rigamarole and ritual, and rejected the need for confession before priests. The Lollards also said the Catholic priesthood used Latin to “make the laity as ignorant as themselves”.
The Catholic Church reacted by defaming the holders of these beliefs, claiming Lollards threatened law and order. Suppression was considered more effective than argument. The aim was to get the secular arm to do its dirty work for it. The Church always acted under cover of the secular authorities, or the “secular arm”, recommending to the secular arm what it should do, usually execute. Technically, the state burned people at the stake, not the Church, and so the Church could not be accused of killing anyone. Notionally, the secular authorities need not have followed the Church’s recommendation, but the lords and princes were superstitiously Catholic and feared for their mortal souls if they defied the bishops or inquisitors, so only the Cathar lords in thirteenth century France declined to follow clerical recommendations in this respect. The ruling nobility wanted to remain united with the Church against the growing artisan and merchanting classes. Heresy was linked with the new tradesmen, and it was seen by the nobles as well as the clergy as threatening.
Pope Gregory XI, in 1377, having read Wycliffe’s Propositions, wrote to king Richard II, the University of Oxford, and Archbishops Sudbury and Courtenay in protest. Historian, Doris Haddock, explains that the demands of Wycliffe were unquestionably close to John Ball’s, including the abolition of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, monks, and the distribution of clerical property among the laity. Wycliffe had written, in early 1381, that there would be “a rising of the people under prophetic leadership”. Moreover, in Ball’s “confession”, he said he had been a disciple of Wycliffe for two years and learned from him “the heresies which he had been taught” and “the heresy concerning the sacrament of the altar”. Ball was said to have admitted openly preaching this and other matters taught to him by Wycliffe. He also confessed the sect travelled around England preaching the doctrines of Wycliffe and conspired like a secret fraternity. They meant to destroy the kingdom within two years. A Catholic chronicler, or propagandist, wrote that Lollards spread dissension and incited the people to insurrection.
