 CHAPTER XVIII. It is not possible to make a pause in the history of the times with the Black Prince's death. It will be well for us briefly to consider the events which followed it. His death interrupted the reform begun by the Good Parliament by depriving it of his support and preparing the way for his brother's return to power. John of Gaunt interfered in the most unscrupulous manner in the elections for the next Parliament, and so obtained the return of men who reversed the acts of the Good Parliament. William of Wickham was again dismissed from office in the nobles who were once more triumphant. Alice Perres was allowed to return to the Old King who lived at Altam alone and neglected. When he died in 1377, at the age of 65, even Alice Perres deserted him after she had stolen the rings from his fingers. Richard II's accession was welcomed with joy by the Londoners and a magnificent ceremony graced his coronation. As he was only in his eleventh year, a council of twelve was appointed to govern during his minority. Meanwhile, the attack of the nobles upon the church went on, and Wickliffe, in his zealful reform, was working side by side with John of Gaunt. He was beginning to be regarded with suspicion and animosity by the Pope, and in 1377 was summoned to appear before Bishop Courtney of London to answer the charges of heresy made against him. John of Gaunt was present to defend him and spoke such insulting words to Courtney that the Londoners who loved their bishop rushed to his rescue. They showed their hatred of Lancaster by sacking his palace of the Savoy, but they only objected to Wickliffe insofar as he was Lancaster's friend. In his desires for reform they cordially sympathized, and when at the end of the same year he was again summoned to appear before the archbishop at Lambeth, the Londoners broke in and dissolved the sittings of the court. Wickliffe also found a friend in the Princess of Wales, the fair maid of Kent, who wrote to the bishop telling him to desist from the proceedings against him. In the University of Oxford he was allowed to teach and lecture as he liked, and his schemes for church reform were listened to with approval on all sides. From his living of Lutterworth he sent forth itinerant preachers, who went as the disciples of St. Francis had done before to labour among the poor and the neglected. One of his great desires was to reform preaching, and these men were taught to preach the word of God in simplicity and purity, where when and to whom they could. They were called the simple priests, and spoke to the people in simple homely language, writing Wickliffe's doctrines far and wide. For them Wickliffe wrote many small tracts which he published in large numbers and in which he appealed to the people in their own language and from their own point of view. He had set on foot a great spiritual revival, and if he had stopped short in his reforming tendencies and had not gone on to deny the doctrine of transubstantiation, he might have come down to as canonized as St. John to Wickliffe. The founder of a new order of preaching friars. But hopes of reform in the English church were destined to be crushed for a time. Wickliffe published in Oxford twelve theses on the subject of transubstantiation. The chancellor felt himself bound to interfere and forbid heretical teaching in the university. Wickliffe appealed to the king to have the questions settled. At this moment all England was disturbed by the outbreak of the peasant's revolt. We have seen in speaking of the Black Death many of the causes of discontent among the peasantry. The wages of the labourers were fixed by law. Rigorous attempts were made to bind the peasant to the soil and to restore the old conditions of serfdom. But since the days of serfdom there had been a great advance in the intelligence of the peasantry, who eagerly listened to the new views which the wandering preachers sent out by Wickliffe were spreading over the country. It was said that all men were equal and had equal rights. The popular rhyme, when Adam delved and Eve span, where was then the gentleman, ran from mouth to mouth. The iniquity of serfdom was becoming more and more clearly seen, and at the same time its oppressive character was making itself more and more harshly felt. The men who had served with courage and distinction in the French wars could not be expected to submit to their former serfage. A simultaneous rising of the peasantry in different parts of the country shows that the revolt had been long planned and carefully arranged. It was the result, not of any one special act of tyranny, but of a long course of oppression, and above all of the attempt to return to the old system of exacting personal labour as payment for rent instead of a money commutation. The insurgents of Essex under a leader who went by the name of Jack Straw joined with the insurgents of Kent under Watt the Tyler and marched on London striking terror by the way. The young king took refuge in the tower. The insurgents entered London and began their work of destruction. Their rage was especially directed against the lawyers. They destroyed the temple with all its books and records. The foreign merchants in the city were also treated with great cruelty. Then the insurgents swarmed round the tower and demanded that the king should come out and hear their grievances. Richard II was only a boy, but he knew no fear. Accompanied only by one or two attendants, he rode to Mile End and listened to the grievances of the peasantry. He granted all they asked and promised a general pardon to all concerned in the revolt. But whilst this conference was going on, the remainder of the rebels had broken into the tower, seized the archbishop Simon Sudbury and murdered him on Tower Hill. Their fury was directed against him not as an archbishop, but as a chancellor. Through this it was hardly to be hoped that there would be a peaceful end to the revolt. The next day, when quite by chance Richard met Wathetailer and his followers face to face, the peasant leaders spoke so insolently that the Lord Mayor Sir Richard Walworth struck him to the ground with his dagger, and when the insurgents cried, Kill, Kill, they have killed our captain, Richard rode boldly to the front saying, What need ye, my masters? I am your captain and your king. The peasantry was easily touched, they gathered round Richard kneeling and asking his pardon. The panic caused by the revolt was over, for a week the insurgents had kept the country in terror. Now Richard made a progress through the counties with forty thousand men at his back, and the rebels suffered stern and terrible justice for their revolt. The charters granted to the peasantry in the first moment of terror were revoked, and they seemed to have gained nothing by their rising. But they had shown the landowners their strength, and though no immediate change was made it became more and more clear that the old conditions of serfdom could not be enforced. It is quite certain that Wickliffe had nothing to do with the rising of the peasants. Still at the time it caused him and his teachings to be regarded with terror by the respectable classes of society. The communistic and socialistic views which had been spread among the people had in many cases been preached by men who declared themselves followers of Wickliffe. People were inclined to look upon the revolt as partly the outcome of his teaching, and so were no longer as ready as before to listen to his schemes for reform. Still Wickliffe was not proceeded against with severity. One of his opinions were laid before a council of bishops and doctors of theology held in London and were pronounced erroneous, but Wickliffe himself was left in peace. He stayed within the church, living quietly in his vicarage of Lutterworth and busying himself with his translation of the Bible till he died on the 31st December, 1384. This translation of the Bible was the natural outcome of Wickliffe's teaching. He had always insisted upon the necessity of the word of God being preached to everyone, and had said that the scriptures were the common property of all men. But as long as the Bible existed only in the Latin tongue it was a sealed book to the great majority of men. Wickliffe's earnest belief that all men should know and study it for themselves led him to conceive the idea of translating it. It was a great undertaking for one man to contemplate, and single-handed he could never have accomplished it. He himself began with the New Testament, whilst Nicholas of Hereford took the Old Testament in hand. This man was a doctor of theology and one of the chief leaders of Wickliffe's party in Oxford. He got as far in his translation as the Book of Baruch when he seems to have been suddenly interrupted, probably by proceedings conducted against him on account of his opinions. Wickliffe himself translated the entire New Testament and probably finished the translation of the Old Testament. The next step was to get copies of the translation made that it might be distributed amongst the people. This was done rapidly, and in 1382 copies of the separate books and portions were circulated widely. This English translation was made from the Vulgate, that is, the Latin translation, and not from the original Greek or Hebrew. Nicholas of Hereford stuck very closely to the Latin forms and was almost pedantically literal so that he was hardly successful in making his translation readable. Wickliffe's translation is very different. He wished above all to put into his work the spirit of the English language, to write in such a way that he might strike home to the hearts of readers. Of all his English writings, his translation of the Bible is the most remarkable for the force and beauty of the style. Wickliffe's writings mark an epoch in the development of the English language. Chaucer did much for it, but his poems could not influence the people in the same way that Wickliffe's Bible did. Nothing else could have had the same intimate relation with the spiritual life of the people as the Bible, a new book to most of them. No words could so firmly fix themselves in their memory as those in which their Savior had taught them the meaning and the duties of their life. The first translation of the Bible was soon found to be very faulty. It was revised with great care by Wickliffe himself, and more especially by his friend John Purvis. It was not complete in its new and greatly improved form till after Wickliffe's death. The Lollards, as the followers of Wickliffe were called, formed a strong party, and their fervor did not begin to die out till the end of Henry V's reign, but we cannot doubt that the movement would have had more permanent results had it not been interrupted by the Peasants' Revolt. With the remainder of Richard II's reign we have nothing to do. We have only thought it right to trace briefly the movement amongst the working classes which was the most important consequence of the Black Death. In Wickliffe's teaching and in the Peasants' Revolt we see the two most striking events of this epoch. In a certain way they were the results of the French wars whose course we had been following. These wars produced a general stir and ferment. They gave the people new ideas and new life. The men who had earned such distinction by their brave fighting at Caissie and Poitiers were not content to settle down on their return home to the old state of things. They wanted greater freedom, better wages, and improved manner of living. Their minds were open to receive new teaching. The result was the increasing discontent with their position which led to the Peasants' Revolt and the eagerness with which Wickliffe's teaching was received on all sides. But both Wickliffe's teaching and the views expressed by the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt were premature. They were founded upon principles which could not at that time meet with general acceptance and they were followed by a decided reaction. A period of darkness followed this great burst of intellectual life. In literature there were no worthy successors of Chaucer. The reforming views of Wickliffe were slowly stamped out. The Peasants failed in obtaining those results for which they had struggled. From the time of Chaucer till the days of the Reformation there is no great name in the history of English literature. It was not till then that intellectual life revived in England and England took those great steps in advance which Wickliffe had hoped she might take in his day. But we must not look upon the Reformation as in any way the result of Wickliffe's teaching. By that time his ideas had faded away from men's remembrance and the English Reformation received its impulse from Luther's teaching in Germany. Even in this way the influence of the French Wars was transient. The advantages which Edward III and the Black Prince gained by their victories were lost even in their own lifetime. In the same manner the intellectual movement produced by these wars was stamped out and was followed only by the long anarchy of the Wars of the Roses. End of section 21, Recording by Pamela Nagami in Encino, California, March 2019. End of the Life of Edward the Black Prince by Louise Creighton.