The Lollards (review)

The stated aspiration of this short volume, by the Tudor historian Richard Rex, is to replace K. B. McFarlane's fifty-year-old survey of Lollardy, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Non-Conformity. Unlike McFarlane's study, it is not based on original research, but is a synthesis of secondary literature in which Rex seeks to demonstrate that Lollardy was an insignificant dissident movement which had little impact on late medieval English Catholicism. The first of his five chapters, on the late medieval church, draws heavily on the work of Eamon Duffy and emphasizes the strength of traditional Catholic devotional practices among the laity. The second chapter, on John Wyclif, plays down the radical nature of his theology and is skeptical of his connections to the duke of Lancaster and the royal government. Although it was highly damaging to Wyclif, Rex insists that the Peasants' Revolt had little to do with Lollard teachings, since "none of the surviving accounts of the peasants' grievances and demands betrays any dissatisfaction with the religious services offered by the Catholic Church" (p. 52).

The third chapter, on the early diffusion of Lollardy, takes account of some recent advances made in the subject, but ignores others. Wyclif's academic followers receive scant attention, and Rex places little stock in either the gentry's patronage of Lollard preachers or its participation in the uprising of 1414. He is similarly unimpressed by the large corpus of extant Lollard texts, many of which he suggests belonged to orthodox Catholics, and doubts that Lollard book production was well organized or that the rise of a literate lay culture was an important factor in the spread of heretical doctrine. In his later chapters, Rex argues that after its early, more potent phase, Lollardy fell into decline. It experienced a renewed persecution, rather than a resurgence, at the end of the fifteenth century, merely continuing to exist in areas where it was already established. An enduring tradition of Lollardy, on the other hand, was virtually irrelevant to the emergence of Protestantism, since the vast majority of Protestants appear to have come from devout Catholic, not Lollard, backgrounds.

It is only on Protestantism, where he is on surer ground, that Rex is at all convincing. Many of his arguments are not borne out by the evidence, and the work is strewn with inaccuracies, omissions, and half-truths, especially in Chapters 3 and 4. To choose one glaring error: he lists Derbyshire among the counties which produced no or few returns to the Lollard commissions in 1414 (p. 86), when, on the contrary, it yielded the most. His geographical analysis flounders elsewhere as well. Evidence damaging to his arguments is swept under the carpet or dismissed with implausible, even ludicrous, explanations. This is an intensely personal view of Lollardy, which few (if any) historians of Lollardy would endorse; it is certainly not the balanced synthesis one would expect in a general survey. Let the reader beware.