Summary: This is the 6th episode in our series The Long Road to Reform. Much of the reform energy in the European Church of the Late Middle Ages was among the poor, and being poor meant being illiterate. The poor and illiterate don’t, as a rule, write books about their hopes & dreams. So it’s often from sources hostile to the reforming movements of this era we learn of them. That hostility colors the picture of them much of history since has regarded them by. Wycliffe’s ideas lived on, not among scholars at Oxford or the few nobles who initial endorsed them, as among the poverty-committed Lollards who went from village to village, carrying his reforms like torches that continually set new places ablaze with reforming zeal. The Lollards preached a simple Gospel that contradicted a great deal of what commoners heard from their local priests. (more…)
