Wycliffe’s Death

During mass, at the time of the elevation of the sacrament, he fell to the ground in a violent fit of the palsy, and never spoke again until his death on the last day of the year.

Continuing Wycliffe Translates The Bible Into English,
our selection from How We Got Our Bible by J. Paterson Smyth published in 1886. The selection is presented in four easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Wycliffe Translates The Bible Into English.

Time: 1382
Place: Oxford University

The feeling of his opponents will be better understood if we notice the position of the Church in England at the time. The meridian of her power had been already passed. Her clergy as a class were ignorant and corrupt. Her people were neglected, except for the money to be extorted by masses and pardons, “as if,” to quote the words of an old writer, “God had given his sheep, not to be pastured, but to be shaven and shorn.” This state of things had gone on for centuries, and the people like dumb, driven cattle had submitted. But those who could discern the signs of the times must have seen now that it could not go on much longer. The spread of education was rapidly increasing, several new colleges having been founded in Oxford during Wycliffe’s lifetime. A strong spirit of independence, too, was rising among the people. Already Edward III and his parliament had indignantly refused the Pope’s demand for the annual tribute to be sent to Rome. It was evident that a crisis was near. And, as if to hasten the crisis, the famous schism of the papacy had placed two popes at the head of the Church, and all Christendom was scandalized by the sight of the rival “vicars of Jesus Christ” anathematizing each other from Rome and Avignon, raising armies and slaughtering helpless women and children, each for the aggrandizing of himself.

The minds of men in England were greatly agitated, and Wycliffe felt that at such a time the firmest charter of the Church would be the open Bible in her children’s hands; the best exposure of the selfish policy of her rulers, the exhibiting to the people the beautiful, self-forgetting life of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Gospels. “The sacred Scriptures,” he said, “are the property of the people, and one which no one should be allowed to wrest from them. Christ and his apostles converted the world by making known the Scriptures to men in a form familiar to them, and I pray with all my heart that through doing the things contained in this book we may all together come to the everlasting life.” This Bible translation he placed far the first in importance of all his attempts to reform the English Church, and he pursued his object with a vigor and against an opposition that remind one of the old monk of Bethlehem and his Bible a thousand years before.

The result of the Blackfriars’ synod was that after three days’ deliberation Wycliffe’s teaching was condemned, and at a subsequent meeting he himself was excommunicated. He returned to his quiet parsonage at Lutterworth — for his enemies dared not yet proceed to extremities — and there, with his pile of old Latin manuscripts and commentaries, he labored on at the great work of his life, till the whole Bible was translated into the “modir tongue,” and England received for the first time in her history a complete version of the Scriptures in the language of the people.

And scarce was his task well finished when, like his great predecessor Bede, the brave old priest laid down his life. He himself had expected that a violent death would have finished his course. His enemies were many and powerful; the Primate, the King, and the Pope were against him — with the friars, whom he had so often and so fiercely defied; so that his destruction seemed but a mere question of time. But while his enemies were preparing to strike, the old man “was not, for God took him.”

It was the close of the old year, the last Sunday of 1384, and his little flock at Lutterworth were kneeling in hushed reverence before the altar, when suddenly, at the time of the elevation of the sacrament, he fell to the ground in a violent fit of the palsy, and never spoke again until his death on the last day of the year.

In him England lost one of her best and greatest sons, a patriot sternly resenting all dishonor to his country, a reformer who ventured his life for the purity of the Church and the freedom of the Bible — an earnest, faithful “parson of a country town,” standing out conspicuously among the clergy of the time.

For Cristè’s lore and his apostles twelve
He taughte — and first he folwede it himselve.”

Here is a choice specimen from one of the monkish writers of the time describing his death:

On the feast of the passion of St. Thomas of Canterbury, John Wycliffe, the organ of the devil, the enemy of the Church, the idol of heretics, the image of hypocrites, the restorer of schism, the storehouse of lies, the sink of flattery, being struck by the horrible judgment of God, was seized with the palsy throughout his whole body, and that mouth which was to have spoken huge things against God and his saints, and holy Church, was miserably drawn aside, and afforded a frightful spectacle to beholders; his tongue was speechless and his head shook, showing painfully plainly that the curse which God had thundered forth against Cain was also inflicted on him.”

Some time after his death a petition was presented to the Pope, which to his honor he rejected, praying him to order Wycliffe’s body to be taken out of consecrated ground and buried in a dunghill. But forty years after, by a decree of the Council of Constance, the old reformer’s bones were dug up and burned, and the ashes flung into the little river Swift which “runneth hard by his church at Lutterworth.” And so, in the often-quoted words of old Fuller, “as the Swift bear them into the Severn, and the Severn into the narrow seas, and they again into the ocean, thus the ashes of Wycliffe is an emblem of his doctrine, which is now dispersed all over the world.”

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