John Wycliffe

Morning Star of the English Reformation.

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John Wycliffe was born in the village of Hipswell near Richmond in the North Riding of Yorkshire in the mid-1320s. A brilliant scholar, he appears to have received his early education close to his home before moving on to England’s greatest seat of learning, Oxford University. It is not known exactly when he first went to Oxford, the place with which he later became closely connected, but he is known to have been there at around 1345.

Having completed his arts degree in 1356, Wycliffe produced a small treatise, ‘The Last Age of the Church’, which viewed the end times in the light of an outbreak of plague which decimated the country in 1348. While some viewed the plague as the judgment of God on the people, Wycliffe saw it as an indictment upon the clergy, most of whom he regarded as uneducated and generally disreputable.

In 1361 he was given the living of the parish of Fillingham in Lincolnshire, which he visited rarely during long vacations from Oxford. In 1368, he took over the rectory of Ludgershall, Buckinghamshire, not far from Oxford, which enabled him to retain his connection with the university. Continuing his studies he obtained a bachelor’s degree in theology in 1369, and his doctorate in 1372, the result of 16 years of hard work. Then, in 1374, he received the crown living of St Mary’s Church, Lutterworth in Leicestershire, a living which he retained until his death.

Wycliffe was now Oxford’s brightest scholar, a man renowned both for his intellectual ability and his administrative skills. But controversy was soon to surround him because of his opposition to the worldly power and excessive wealth held by the Church, which in his day was more a political organisation than a spiritual entity.