The Free Spirit: The Lollards
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002
The Lollards
Their name, though, is not English. Before they appeared in England, the Lollards were well known in Germany and Flanders, and an explanation of their name is that it is from the low German verb “lollen” meaning “mumble”. The Flemish Beghards were called “lollards” because of their habit of muttering their prayers to themselves constantly. Du Cange adds that “they called the Lollard also a Waldensian”. Sir John Oldcastle, later Lord Cobham when he took his wife’s entitlement, was called “Lollardus”.
In 1401, after Henry IV had usurped the throne (1399) and the fallout had settled, Parliament enacted De heretico comburendo, reinforced in further enactments of 1405 and 1414, decreeing that heretics and anyone in possession of heretical writings, who refused to abjure or relapsed after doing so, were to be burnt by the lay authorities. Undoubtedly, the king knew he could use the new law against his political opponents, heretics or not.
To the sin of heresy was now added the crime of subversion.
Lollardy offered a religious justification for the uprisings of the desperately poor in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Oldcastle case was used to inspire a fear of heresy and a conviction that Lollardy was conspiratorial. Oldcastle was a friend of Henry, the prince of Wales, who became Henry V, and this saved him from prosecution when he was first accused of heresy. Shortly afterwards, when even the new king could not prevent a prosecution, he was found guilty, but Henry ordered a forty day stay of execution in the hope of finding a way out. Lollardus escaped from the Tower in this time and set up a Lollard conspiracy in which, most interestingly, the king and his brothers were to be seized during a Twelfth Night mumming at Eltham. The plot failed but Lollardus remained free and conspiring in rebellion for four years until he was captured and hanged in 1417, “the gallows and all” being burnt. The Pattishall riot in 1387, the South Yorkshire disturbances in 1392, and the 1400-1405 Welsh uprising of Owen Glyn Dwr were all linked to the Lollards, and, according to Doris Haddock, they were later said to have been involved in the Southampton plot of 1415, and attacks by the Scottish on Berwick and Roxborough in 1417.
Lollardy was forced underground but remained of significance in preserving an anti-authoritarian, anti-sacerdotal and anti-sacramental spirit which assisted in preparing popular beliefs for the English Reformation.D Haddock
Wycliff’s heresy—he was at first supported by his university and the nobles—was really a return to primitive Christianity—Essenism. It took such root in England that, in the middle of the fourteenth century, one-tenth of the nation, some historians estimate, were Lollards. Du Cange said, from a chronicle of 1318, heretics “hid themselves in many parts of the English kingdom”, contradicting the view that heresy was alien to England. This heresy paid the typical penalty of being true to Christ. Vasilev concludes:
The spiritual kinship between the Lollards and Waldensians directs our attention to the roots of the Waldensian doctrine which lie in Catharism. In fact, Waldo adopts from the Cathars their social vision and organisational model but abandons their complicated dualist mythology.
Vasilev sees a similarity of doctrines in the writings of the Lollards and in the evidence of the Norwich heresy trials (1428-31), and those of the Cathars or Bogomils. The nineteenth century scholar, J v Görres, says Cathars were also known by such names as Patarini and Piphlers, Beghards and Lollards. It might seem unlikely that doctrines separated by four centuries and a thousand miles could be linked. M D Lambert in his Medieval Heresy. Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus (1977) thought Cathars used stereotypical aphorisms to initiate a novice that were, even so, adapted, changed and interpreted for different situations. Their use shows a common thread or influence rather than identical meanings, and though Christians will not accept any such influences on their revealed religion, the historian and common sensical people know they are there. The anger of the Bogomils, Cathars and Lollards generated a vivid language which travelled almost unchanged across countries and centuries and was later used by the Protestants in their discourse with Rome.
Louis Moreri (Dictionnaire Historique, 1600s) cites old sources which reveal the beliefs of the Lollards:
These sectarians said that Lucifer and the angels that followed him were condemned wrongly, that rather Archangel Michael and the good angels deserved this punishment. They added inadmissible blasphemies against S Mary, they said that God does not punish us for the faults we commit here… They taught also that the Mass, baptism and the extreme unction are useless. They also denied penance and refused to obey the Church and the secular authorities.
Moreri was not entirely reliable. These allegations probably came from the official Church aiming to discredit the Lollards as Luciferians, or Satanists. It is not typical of the English Lollards, and the role reversal of Lucifer and Michael must be a slander by the reporter, his confusion, or a confusion of some Lollards, through the difficulties Cathars had in preaching their views. Vasilev shows the myths and beliefs of the Lollards were in the Bogomil-Cathar tradition:
- Beliefs and myths—the fall of Lucifer, Satan as creator and ruler of the visible world, denial of hell and purgatory,
- ritual practices—baptism in the Holy Spirit, preference for the Pater Noster, direct confession to God, denial of Transubstantiation,
- anti-clericalism—the official Church is a community of Herod or the Anti-Christ, Church buildings are synagogues, cross-roads or wastelands,
- denial of the cross and crucifix, of icons (images) and relics of saints,
- refusal to worship the Virgin and the saints,
- denial of social norms—legal authority and oath taking, condemnation of bloodshed, effective rejection of the feudal system.
Professor Thomas Butler of Harvard has noted that the cross reappeared as a religious symbol in Bogomilism, being carved on monuments like a crucifix but not with a body, with clusters of grapes topped with a rosette where the head would be. Some monuments featured a numinous tree of paradise, which one could also take as a cryptic reference to the The Tree of the Cross.
Vasilev points out the Bulgarian contribution to the popular myth of Christ’s return to earth as a plowman in a gesture of love to all mankind. Christ is Peter the Plowman and shown with an aureol of farm tools. Vasilev, in his paper (Etudes Balkaniques 1, 1993), compares the Tract against the Bogomils by Prezviter Kozma (Presbyter Cosmas), the Secret Book of the Bogomils and the Panoplia Dogmatica by Euthymius Zygabenus with Lollard and tracts from Lambert, finding ample parallels.
The Bulgarian presbyter (bishop) Cosmas gave a sermon against the Bogomils in about 970 AD. Cosmas explained about the new heresy of a man named “Bogumil”, “beloved of God”, who is rather “Bogu-ne-mil”, “not beloved of God”. The Bogomils were like sheep, pretending to be meek, humble and quiet, while attacking the human frailties of other Christians, including the clergy. They appeared pale from their hypocritical fasting. They did not utter excessive words, nor laugh loudly, and were not inquisitive. When they saw someone “simple and ignorant”, there they sowed the weeds of their teaching, reviling the rules passed down to the holy churches. They opposed the veneration of the cross, of icons, and of relics of the saints. They scoffed at miracles as the works of Satan. They thought Christ and Satan were brothers, but that Satan created the material world, including the earth and mankind. That is why the world was evil.
The Bogomils denied that Mary was the Mother of God, and thought Christ’s birth was only an illusion. They opposed the sacraments, except for baptism but which was spiritual—the laying on of hands—not by immersion in water for water as a material substance was the Devil’s work. John the Baptist was Satan’s emissary. Confession was necessary but it enough to confess one’s sins to another “Christian” (their name for each other). Cosmas was particularly outraged that confession could be to a women. Bogomils opposed the priesthood and hierarchy in the Church, the liturgy and Holy Communion, both of which were invented by John Chrysostom.
This sect relied almost exclusively on the New Testament and the Epistles and Acts of the Apostles as their authorities, but rejected most of the Old Testament, particularly the Prophets. They sought the return to a more primitive form of Christianity—to a renewal of Christ’s message as they interpreted it—minus the accretions of the Church. They recognized only two groups of worshippers—the “perfect”, who had had spiritual baptism (the consolamentum) at a mature age, and the “believers”, who had yet to receive baptism. Cosmas mentions no writings, rather implying their message was by word of mouth. The medieval Church considered Bogomil “errors” as leading to the perdition of the soul, and as a threat to the Church. Notably, however, they also were seen so early as a threat to the secular powers, to the tsar and to the boyars.
The coincidences can be enriched even further. The appellation “good men” (boni homini), “good Christians” (boni christiani), the title of the Perfecti, the spiritual leaders of the Bogomils and Cathars, “is unique in the whole spectrum of medieval heresies and is typical only of the dualists” (Vasilev). Yet, in the records of the Norwich heresy trials “every good man or good woman is a priest”. “Also that every good Christian man is a priest” also appears, and certain variants, and they also speak of some people being “the most holy and most perfect”. Wycliffe confirms this in Conclusiones Lollardorum. Sometimes what was likely to have been “good man” is expanded upon by the recorders either because they did not realise it was the heretics’ name for themselves, and they sought a little literary variation, or because the heretic had sought to explain what he meant by it:
Some held that every good Christian, or a man who was living in charity, was a priest of God, and this was carried to its logical conclusion by those who held that the true vicar of Christ was the best man.John Thomson, Norwich Trials
The word “charity” (caritas) was interpreted by Cathars as equalling love.
Lollards were like the Cathars in encouraging reading by setting up reading circles. The inquisitors used possesion of the testaments in the vernacular, or even evidence of it as proof of heresy, because the Church forbade it.
Norman Tanner notes that the heretics tried at Norwich…
…were accusing the Church of using magic, thus reversing the roles played in the trials of witches.
In giving the right of women to become Perfecta (spiritual leader), the Bogomils, Cathars and Lollards are unique in the Middle Ages for allowing women the same spiritual function as men. Vasilev concludes:
These almost perfect coincidences and astonishing similarities point to the common roots of Bogomilism and Lollardy. Yet, it is surprising that given the well-studied problem concerning the views and beliefs of Lollards, there has been no attempt to trace down their Bogomil-Cathar roots.
Profesor Butler summarises Vasilev’s work as distinguishing “an official, Church-controlled, stagnant, antihuman culture, and an unofficial, folk, and ever-evolving vernacular stream—a counter-culture that is both wise and loving, nourished by old myths and more recent, apocryphal tales, gradually absorbed into the prerenaissance literature which gave us Dante’s Divine Comedy and Langland’s Piers Plowman”.
In 1960, M A Aston found resemblances between Lollards and Cathars in their social conditions and dispersal:
Lollards, like Catharists and earlier continental heretics, and like friars themselves, flourished along the main roads, and found supporters among the trades people of large towns.
Certainly, the movement across countries and ages produced visible distinctions between the views of Lollards and Bogomils. Even then there is doubt, as there must always be when much of the evidence is missing. Vasilev finds some apparent differences, but does not seem to think deeply about them. Thus Lollards do not regard the Old Testament as wicked, being the work of Satan, but they do often say that the New Testament forbids bloodshed. So the Old Testament stands condemned by the New, as it is full of God, His holy angels or His Chosen People killing people all over the place often in large numbers.
Bogomil and Cathar Perfecti denied marriage as providing for an entrapment of souls in the human being thus born in Satan’s material world, but Lollards did not insist on sexual abstinence. But nor too did the Perfecti for people who were not perfect! And the Lollards had the same view in that they denied that the ritual of matrimony in church was necessary for marriage. Lollards do seem to have rejected the Cathar taboo on meat, although again, it was for the Perfecti only.
Both Bogomilism and Lollardy involved their followers in cultural activity which was surprising for the Middle Ages. Catharism on its part was a major creative stream in the Provençal culture of the twelfth century. Bogomils contributed to the advancement and propagation of literacy, with schools in most of their communities. The literacy and creativity that they taught contributed to the spallation of their culture under the inquisition. People sought compromise, they sought a synthesis out of the thesis and antithesis of Church and Heresy. Eventually it was realised in Protestantism.
Among the books mentioned as owned by Lollards, besides non-religious books, and some of the books of the New Testament, are a book of S John the Evangelist and the Gospel of Nicodemos, both alluding to books that the Cathars used, but are non-canonical for the received Churches. Wycliffe translated the latter into English. Many other marginal books were translated which would have been neglected otherwise. The influence of the Evangelion Nicodemi on The Vision of Piers Plowman and the miracle plays confirms this.
Vasilev draws attention to the prayer, Pater Noster (Mt 6), which in its Cathar version ends with the words, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” This is missing in the Vulgate. C Schmidt, who wrote about the Cathars in the mid-nineteenth century, thinks the Cathars translated the bible from the Greek independently of the Vulgate. The Perfecti, as is accepted by many experts, were often educated in Greek and Hebrew. There is no information that Waldo or his disciples knew Greek.
When the king of Bohemia married an English princess, the Lollard ideas passed to that country, then one of the most enlightened in Europe, and, by the preaching of John Hus, a large part of the nation embraced and developed them. The Hussites scorned the corrupt priests, monks, and nuns, attacked clerical celibacy, confession, the eucharist, and the ritual. Two hundred years of war and savage persecution were needed to suppress them. At one time, most of the nobles of Bohemia were Hussites.
