Lollards in the English Reformation: History, radicalism, and John Foxe

By Susan Royal

This book examines the afterlife of the lollard movement, demonstrating how it was shaped and used by evangelicals and seventeenth-century Protestants. It focuses on the work of John Foxe, whose influential Acts and Monuments (1563) reoriented the lollards from heretics and traitors to martyrs and model subjects, portraying them as Protestants’ ideological forebears. It is a scholarly mainstay that Foxe edited radical lollard views to bring them in line with a mainstream monarchical church. But this book offers a strong corrective to the argument, revealing that the subversive material present in Foxe’s text allowed seventeenth-century religious radicals to appropriate the lollards as historical validation of their own theological and political positions. The book argues that the same lollards who were used to strengthen the English church in the sixteenth century would play a role in its fragmentation in the seventeenth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526128829

Book preview

Introduction

Around 1680, Francis Bugg decided he was finished with the Quakers. There had been spats about fines which were injurious to his reputation, and misgivings about some of the procedural innovations initiated by the founder of the Society of Friends, George Fox, and it all left a bitter taste. Bugg had been a committed Quaker, sacrificing much for the Friends, including imprisonment in appalling conditions and a significant portion of his wealth, but when he rejoined the Church of England, it was for good. He invested the same zeal into defending the established church that he had previously applied to the Quakers, embarking on a polemical career to discredit the Society which spanned more than forty years, and which effectively bankrupted him. Among his arguments, Bugg disputed the Quakers’ interpretation of their own history. Strikingly, Quakers claimed that their origins lay in the reforms of John Wyclif, the fourteenth-century Oxford theologian who was lauded in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563) as the progenitor of the Reformation. Prior to his apostasy, he had likely believed that he and his co-religionists were among Wyclif’s spiritual brethren, as most Quakers did. His about-face, then, required a reassessment of his own historical place and a response to the Society who had so misunderstood the past. Writing against Quakers such as George Whitehead who pointed to Wyclif’s objection to tithes and episcopacy as historical proof of the Friends’ positions, Bugg urged that they were reading Foxe’s book the wrong way: Wyclif should instead be seen as the ancestor of the established church. Wyclif had criticised those institutions as they were imposed by the Roman church, not the Church of England. The Church of England had been reformed, thanks particularly to the initial efforts of Wyclif, and therefore the Quakers were not the natural heirs to Wyclif’s legacy but a wayward offshoot, the disinherited black sheep of the family. ¹

This exchange is remarkable. The Quakers prioritised the Spirit over Scripture, and placed a premium on looking to one’s ‘inner light’ for salvation. The authority Friends afforded the direct experience of Christ rendered outward sacraments and church traditions demoted or eradicated. Given the primacy of the Inward Light, the Quakers’ eagerness to legitimise their church at least partially on the basis of historical lineage is surprising in the first place, and that they maintained continuity through the medieval period – instead of merely identifying it as a time of corruption and neglect – reveals the extent to which Wyclif and his followers remained an important touchstone in Reformation-era debates about history.

Notable as it is, this exchange was just one of countless seventeenth-century theological spats in which combatants appealed to history to bolster their competing claims. The stated aim of early reformers was to return to the ideals of the early church because the ‘apostolic age’ was seen as a time of ecclesiological and ritualistic purity that had become more corrupt over time. If, as Euan Cameron rightly says, this was already a cliché in the later Middle Ages,² by the early sixteenth century it was being taken increasingly seriously: Protestants inherited the ‘apostolic age’ rhetoric of earlier reformers but were also influenced by Renaissance source criticism that led Christian humanists to return ad fontes, to the earliest sources possible, in order to uncover and correct the textual mistakes that they believed had crept into texts since the epoch of the church fathers.

Those engaged in historical-theological debates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thus inherited a strengthened notion of the early church era as a purer time. These reformers understood the apostolic age as uncorrupted by the secular entanglements and progressive debasement that came with Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.³ Because conformists (apart from those adhering to the theological project of Archbishop William Laud)⁴ and nonconformists, including puritans, presbyterians, Baptists and Quakers, rejected Catholic claims of continuity, many seventeenth-century religious groups overlooked the doctors of the medieval church as authorities in favour of early church fathers and, above all, Scripture.⁵

But as Bugg’s dispute with Whitehead shows, the medieval opponents of the papacy had not been forgotten in the search for ecclesiological and theological truth. The memory of these dissenters was invoked to provide examples of ancient witnesses to the true church, sustained by the Holy Spirit through the ages to the time of the Reformation. When looking at the historical consciousness of nonconformists in particular, scholars have emphasised the notion of primitivism, rightly pointing out that puritans, Baptists and Quakers sought to imitate the ecclesiological and moral models set out in the New Testament.⁶ In developing these ideas, however, historians have overlooked the important ways that medieval witnesses were incorporated into nonconformists’ arguments for historical legitimacy.

In fact, the appeal to medieval examples of godliness was made by both nonconformists and conformists, often to prove mutually exclusive truth claims, throughout the Reformation era. Among the earliest calls for reform were those of evangelicals William Tyndale and John Bale, whose tracts invoked medieval English dissenters called lollards to prove the historical longevity of their movement’s ideas. The lollards were significant because they criticised the same ecclesiastical ceremonies and institutions as the early reformers: pilgrimages, saints’ cults, images, the papacy and, most notably, transubstantiation. Just as significant as their beliefs was the fact that these dissenters were persecuted for them; even before the deluge of Reformation religious violence had ensued, the ancient Christian tradition that persecution followed holiness shaped the thrust and interpretation of the works of William Tyndale, George Constantine, and Christopher St German.⁷

In no other book of the early modern period was this tradition more celebrated, manipulated, and polemicised than in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Both Whitehead and Bugg believed Foxe’s medieval exemplars served as evidence that their own religious ideas were grounded in the past and they found no clarification in their mutual historical source, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’. Both men appealed to Foxe as an authority, assured that those he counted among the godly martyrs of history were worthy, having been vetted by one of the most revered Elizabethan churchmen. Moreover, Whitehead clearly believed that he could add his own movement to a list of medieval dissenters to whom Foxe bestowed his approval – evidence that this tome and the past it contained were to be used as a tool for understanding the present.⁸

This past seemed remote to many of Foxe’s readers. Few would have remembered personally the spate of early sixteenth-century heresy executions, though some did, of course.⁹ The vast majority would have learned of the lollard stories through Foxe’s book; while medieval tracts purporting to be from Wyclif’s time emerged in print from 1530 onwards, this was piecemeal.¹⁰ Foxe’s text gathered many of these works and formed them into a cohesive narrative, functioning in the same way as the memory of the human mind. As such, the lives, deaths, and beliefs of the lollards are preserved in this book, and as the book became a semi-official history of the Church of England, so too the lollards became part of that history. Foxe’s Acts and Monuments had become a key to cultural memory,¹¹ precisely what Foxe had intended when writing it; after all, the book’s title proclaimed not just the acts of the martyrs, but the monuments: the written records of their lives and deaths. These records preserved the memories of Christ’s true witnesses, supplying for posterity their beliefs, ensuring they would not be forgotten.

Foxe’s martyrs were amalgamated into the cultural fabric of post-Reformation England. Work by Tara Hamling, Alexandra Walsham, and Tessa Watt, among a wealth of other scholarship, has illustrated the far-reaching influence of Foxe’s martyrs in areas as disparate as home decor to ballads.¹² Wyclif, too, found his way into popular religious expression: there is evidence that at least one set of godly parents named their child ‘Wyclif’, and his visage appears alongside others like Luther, Calvin, and Beza in the common image of the Protestant pantheon.¹³

While these cultural histories have been immensely useful in tracking the influence of Acts and Monuments in popular culture, this book offers a study of textual transmission, taking a look at the intellectual debt later writers owed to Foxe and the first generation of English evangelicals. It should be made clear from the outset that this book is more about Acts and Monuments than John Foxe. Taking cues from history of the book studies, it is more concerned with textual content and reception rather than the intentions of its author (inasmuch as Foxe, collator of accounts and manuscripts, can even be considered an ‘author’). My concern is much more with the long-term impact and significance of his preservation of radical lollard opinions, which were picked up and deployed by radical Protestants, especially in the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Undoubtedly, the book has to cover Foxe and his sources, and his editorial practice is given special attention in Chapter 4. But demonstrating that Foxe’s overriding fidelity to his primary sources yielded a text which enshrined radical religious ideas provides a point of departure for the book rather than its destination: this book seeks more fundamentally to contribute to understandings of Protestant controversies in the seventeenth century, showing that the divergent understandings of the past offers a window into the nature of these groups and their relationship to each other, as the debate between Whitehead and Bugg reveals. Indeed, Bugg’s case is illustrative in many ways. While the followers of Wyclif, called ‘lollards’, played a valuable role in Bugg’s claims to the past, they did not form a central plank in his, or in other nonconformists’ arguments; rather, as this book shows, they provide a novel and compelling perspective into those arguments. Tracing the lollards’ place in Quaker texts, in particular, evidences the range of legitimising tools, beyond a simple appeal to the spirit, available to polemicists.

So this book takes a longue durée approach, and in tracing the influence of the lollards, as Foxe bequeathed them to his readers, asks not just whether those readers absorbed Foxe’s message about lollard godliness, but about what, then, that message meant for them. Were later Protestants to thank the lollards for their observations about the corrupt Roman church while equally recognising their theological errors? Or should they emulate the medieval dissenters, or even try to perfect the reform they had begun?

The lollards had not always been worthy of commemoration in the English church; it was Foxe’s text that had overturned their tarnished reputations as schismatics who were disloyal to both the church and the king. This book tells the story of how Foxe accomplished this reversal, explaining the way he built on the efforts of first-generation evangelicals, especially his prolific mentor John Bale. This reorientation of the lollards from heretics and traitors to martyrs and model subjects exalted the lollards as members of the true church and as Protestants’ spiritual forebears. This process, though, was far from straightforward. Because Foxe cast a wide net in his hunt for historical witnesses against the established church, those he claimed as theological predecessors held beliefs that spanned the religious spectrum, so long as they opposed the Roman church. While they mainly converged along what would later be the magisterial Protestant middle, some went much further in their rejection of the traditions of the late medieval Catholic church, looking more like the forebears of the radical reformers than of Church of England divines like Thomas Cranmer, John Jewel, or Richard Hooker.

The use of the term ‘radical’ warrants explanation, considering its well-known reference to European reformers who rejected reform in line with magistrates’ approval and the establishment of state churches. These so-called ‘Anabaptists’ also denounced infant baptism in lieu of a visible church of believers who had been baptised as cognisant adults. Although traditionally historians have categorised reform movements according to a divide between ‘magisterial’ and ‘radical’ reformations, this neat terminology is proving inadequate as scholars discover the contingencies of political support in the Reformation;¹⁴ uncover elements of overlap and influence between these two movements;¹⁵ and reject fixed, essentialist definitions of the term ‘radical’ itself, and instead understand its use as contextual and relative.¹⁶ Here, then, the term ‘radical’ will signify political ideas, cultural tendencies, and/or religious modes that contemporaries understood to undermine the status quo. This flexible definition recognises the moving goalposts inherent in the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Radicalism has not been traditionally associated with the English Reformation, as scholars have portrayed a reformed consensus centred on a via media between the theological extremes of Rome and Geneva.¹⁷ But this claim has been subject to demolition in the past generation: Diarmaid MacCulloch has ‘explod[ed] the myth’ on which this idea was built by demonstrating that England’s Reformation was characterised more by rupture than continuity;¹⁸ Ethan Shagan has dismantled its central pillar, the notion of the ‘moderate mindset of English religion’;¹⁹ and Karl Gunther has torn down its edifice, exposing the role of radical visions of reform in shaping the English Reformation right from the outset.²⁰ This study aims to contribute to this reassessment of English reform by offering insight into the editorial work and impact of John Foxe and his Acts and Monuments.²¹

As a magisterial reformer, Foxe was supposed to consider the radical strand of the Reformation to be a fanatical, sectarian liability to the evangelical movement. This perception has driven the way historians and literary critics have interpreted Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and the editorial policy underpinning it. This study challenges those assumptions and shows that Foxe was more comfortable with the radical views of the lollards than scholars have recognised. Far from eliminating or warping so-called ‘radical’ strains of lollard belief to align with the Elizabethan church, Foxe presents a wealth of perspectives in the lollard narratives, suggesting that this reformer was tolerant of an array of understandings about adiaphoristic and even doctrinal issues. This book demonstrates that Foxe’s lollards represent a variety of religious convictions that span (and sometimes exceed) the spectrum of reformed orthodoxy. Further, it shows that this would have far-reaching consequences, played out in the fissiparous religious climate of the seventeenth century.

The efforts of Foxe and other English reformers in appropriating lollardy for historical legitimacy are familiar terrain to historians, but less attention has been paid to the muddier issue of how these reformers understood the theological inheritance they claimed from the lollards.²² When scholars look at how evangelical editors such as Foxe handled radical theology, most claim that these editors removed material that was too extreme for their tastes. For instance, Susan Wabuda has shown that Henry Bull and John Foxe ‘suppressed evidence that [Marian] prisoners … were well acquainted with the free will men’,²³ and the commentary for the online edition of Acts and Monuments states that Foxe left out Walter Brute’s claim that women as well as men could preach and administer sacraments.²⁴ Shannon McSheffrey and Norman Tanner state that with regard to his handling of the Coventry lollards’ trials, ‘Foxe’s sins are those of omission rather than commission’, implying that to make his polemical point, Foxe would eradicate material he considered damning to his cause.²⁵

Beyond deletions, scholars argue that Foxe glossed what text could be smoothed over in order to create one mainstream view.²⁶ Patrick Collinson has argued, for instance, that the lollards were ‘represented in Foxe’s rhetoric monochromatically as a ‘secret multitude of true professors’, without nuances or shades of colouring’, and Brad Gregory has demonstrated the way Foxe’s marginalia could ‘clarify’ eucharistic opinions that sounded too close to crude sacramentarianism.²⁷ Wabuda asserts that puritan and moderate conformist tendencies ‘were worked into a seamless, resolute stream by Foxe and his friends, at the cost of obscuring other, more minor species of Protestantism’.²⁸ John Davis suggests that there were cases ‘which Foxe either ignored or masked in order to present all the martyrs as adherents of the Edwardine settlement’.²⁹ The conclusion, then, is that Foxe only offered readers a neutered simulacrum of the lollards.

The work of these scholars in examining the discrepancies between Foxe’s text and his primary sources has been tremendous and fruitful, but approaching Foxe in terms of his omissions can be problematic. One concern centres on how removed items are analysed: scholars pay little attention to issues that are not damning to Foxe’s reputation as a good historian or magisterial reformer, and this can distort understanding of both the excised material itself and its relation to the included material. Scholars rarely discuss eliminated text that is mainstream in nature,³⁰ and when they do, it is dismissed.³¹ The resulting picture of Foxe’s editorial practices and theological outlook, then, emphasises a rejection of radical tendencies, and comes with warnings that ‘we must always keep Foxe’s polemical purpose in mind when using the material he presents’.³²

An additional reason to read what is in the ‘Book of Martyrs’ instead of what did not appear in it, is that this is how the book was read at the time. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there are few mentions of medieval heretics that Foxe deliberately omitted from Acts and Monuments.³³ One rare case appears in a pamphlet debate over infant baptism between John Cragge, a preacher of Monmouthshire, and John Tombes, a minister whose rejection of paedobaptism resulted in his later ejection from the vicarage of Leominster in Herefordshire after failing to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity in 1662. In his defence of the Church of England’s practice of baptising infants, Cragge preached in a sermon that, ‘Mr Foxe in his Acts and Monuments approves of the Albigenses, Waldenses, Wickliffists, Lollards, Poor men of Lyons, Brownists, Barrowists, as members of the Reformed Churches, but wholly excludes the Anabaptists, as erring fundamentally.’³⁴ In his reply, Tombes maintained that if Foxe had omitted Anabaptists, it must have been due to other errors they held.³⁵ This exchange is illustrative for two reasons. First, it elucidates the authority that Foxe held for both conformists and nonconformists, both of whom were eager to stake a claim to the truth through history. Second, it shows that Foxe was successful in establishing a lineage of true belief, one to which later theological writers felt they could add. That Cragge thought he could add later separatists such as the followers of Robert Browne and Henry Barrow to a list of medieval dissenters to whom Foxe bestowed his approval demonstrates the ongoing purchase of Acts and Monuments in the early modern period.

Another problem with approaching Acts and Monuments with a special focus on Foxean deletions is an a priori assumption by scholars that those deletions are theologically meaningful, and directly the result of a deliberate choice made by its author. Despite Foxe’s strong editorial control,³⁶ however, Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas Freeman have shown that the 1570 Acts and Monuments was an unwieldy text. The exigent nature of early modern printing – particularly of a book on this scale – meant that there were limitations to Foxe’s management. The most significant limitation was the paper supply, which resulted in ‘difficult decisions, and occasional vacillations’ and at least one ‘frantic last-minute debate over what could and should be included in the edition’.³⁷ Another impediment was the sheer amount of incoming source material, which resulted in misplaced duplications and historical content appearing out of chronological order.³⁸ Beyond this, Evenden and Freeman have detailed the immense ‘complexity of the supervisory process’ used in the 1570 edition, which in the 1576 edition seems to have broken down, resulting in frequent errors, and in the 1583 edition meant that sometimes neither the printer John Day nor Foxe had responsibility for page composition.³⁹ Thanks to the work of Evenden and Freeman, the manifold contingencies involved in the printing of Acts and Monuments are much clearer. Therefore, it seems no longer tenable to identify an omission as a necessarily deliberate choice based on doctrinal grounds. While this is certainly the case for some, it was clearly an inconsistent rubric; this book demonstrates that, with very few exceptions, an idea excised from one lollard narrative was articulated in another.

Focusing on Foxe’s omissions creates another difficulty. While scholars tend to parse excised material carefully, theological matters that are incorporated into Acts and Monuments tend to be lumped together and considered to be evidence of what Foxe found acceptable, or believed himself.⁴⁰ But this practice smoothes over and obscures potentially fruitful indications that Foxe presented diverse views in his tome. Analysing this spectrum will allow for a much more precise understanding of which beliefs appeared in print, and whether these ideas were incorporated into the book because of Foxe’s high level of fidelity to his primary sources, or because he tolerated them.

That Foxe may have tolerated a range of religious beliefs represents an important moment in the history of toleration that has been hitherto overlooked. Foxe is typically portrayed as intolerant towards religious variety (so goes the case for his editorial practices), and towards theological error.⁴¹ The ‘Book of Martyrs’ has most often been characterised as a book that delineated the reformed doctrines of the Church of England, that defended those doctrines, and that was even instrumental in the confessionalisation of Reformation England.⁴² But there have been dissenting voices: scholars who have recognised that Foxe and his book may have been forces for tolerance over intolerance. V. Norskov Olsen has noted Foxe’s opposition to the death penalty for religious deviance, and Devorah Greenberg has shown that ‘Foxeian’ texts were used in the eighteenth century by nonconformists in England and New England to plead for toleration, influenced by seventeenth-century Quaker writings.⁴³ Greenberg claims that, contrary to expectation, later applications of Foxe’s book ‘may have initiated anti-popery less commonly than they aimed to discourage intolerance and to promote vigilant defence of liberties. That we have for generations read the reverse order – indeed have little commented on the role of Foxeian texts in promoting tolerance, is a piece of the puzzle that needs untangling.’⁴⁴

This book aims to do just that. It argues that Foxe’s tolerance was textual in nature; that is, that Foxe tolerated the existence of theological error in Acts and Monuments, though he disapproved of that error. I suggest that this tolerance is connected to what Foxe understood the form and purpose of his book to be: a repository of historical records proving that the Roman church, diverging from early church practices and persecuting Christ’s true followers, was a false church. Most analysis of Foxe’s book has concentrated on the second part of that sentence, with an emphasis on the author’s polemical purpose and the book’s content (selected for that purpose); more recently, beginning with the work of Patrick Collinson, Thomas Freeman, and David Loades alongside others affiliated with the John Foxe Project, scholars have prioritised the language and form of Acts and Monuments, foregrounding the work as a repository of historical documents.⁴⁵ This book takes up this approach to the text, showing that Foxe saw Acts and Monuments as a way to gather, to preserve, and, most importantly, to employ the primary source documents of the past – and that this is precisely how his readers used it. Indeed, understanding Foxe in this way is consistent with how we understand other sixteenth-century historians, many of which left decisions of truth to the reader.⁴⁶

In doing so, Foxe’s understanding of Acts and Monuments would be similar to Matthew Parker’s thinking when he assembled and deployed his own collection of historical records, now called the ‘Parker Library’. Anthony Grafton has argued persuasively that Parker and his team of antiquaries were committed to printing – and printing accurately – historical texts circulated among, and corrupted by, monastic chroniclers.⁴⁷ Grafton points to a passage in De antiquitate Britannicæ ecclesiæ (1572) in which John Jocelyn insists that it would be contrary to the historian’s purpose to meddle with texts, lest they themselves be accused of deliberately misconstruing the documents’ meaning.⁴⁸ Though Grafton notes that such high-minded distance would prove too lofty a goal for Parker and his team, who employed editorial methods much different to those of modern historians, this was their conception of the ars historica. As such, the historical works of Parker and his fellow antiquarians follow the Eusebian model of presenting a collection of documents for two purposes: to preserve them for posterity and to prove the historian’s argument. According this model, in Grafton’s formulation, the book itself acted as an archive (the notion of an ‘archive’ being more flexible than it is now). This book shows that Foxe, so deliberately and explicitly following Eusebius’ style, incorporated a wealth of historical documents (with the goal of being as accurate as possible in their replication) in his tome, and that this included mainstream and unconventional material.

The preservation of such theological and ecclesiological diversity in the ‘Book of Martyrs’ also has implications for how we understand puritanism. As several scholars have shown, puritans understood themselves to be actors in a progressive history, bringing to fruition a reformation that was begun by the medieval reformers, especially the putative heresiarch of the lollards John Wyclif (d. 1384) and his Bohemian counterpart, John Hus (d. 1415).⁴⁹ As the main conduit for the stories of these men and their followers, Foxe’s book had a major hand in puritans’ interpretation of the past. It was for this reason that anti-puritan writings from the likes of Richard Bancroft and Peter Heylyn sidestepped, modified, or even carefully castigated Foxe’s historical narrative.⁵⁰

There is another element here. Patrick Collinson, Nicholas Tyacke, Kenneth Fincham, and Peter Lake have shown the close links between those who agitated for further religious reform and the establishment.⁵¹ Puritans, then, look less disruptive to the status quo, with Lake demonstrating that puritan figureheads such as Thomas Cartwright were determined to maintain order and unity, and therefore amalgamated more radical strains into the established church. The significant findings of both Collinson and Lake (among others) have resulted in scholars doing away with an anachronistic ‘Anglican’ foil, and the Reformed character of the Elizabethan church has recently been foregrounded by Karl Gunther and Diarmaid MacCulloch (among others) – all of which has made puritans seem less antagonistic to the English church. Collinson’s and Lake’s research showing that puritanism marks one point in the wide spectrum of English religious practice accords with my own work on Acts and Monuments, a text which has what might be seen as ‘puritanical’ strains of belief within it (especially in the lollard narratives); in this way the text would rightly be seen as shoring up the Church of England while simultaneously trending in a more staunchly Reformed direction. This book shows that the lollard past served as one of many fault lines in the ensuing debates as puritans sought to understand their own place in the continuum of ecclesiastical history and the spectrum of correct religious practice. It offers insight especially into their polemical strategies and the interpretive lenses through which they understood history.

To do this, my study is divided into six chapters. Since religious identities lie at the heart of the book, the first chapter describes who the lollards were and, more importantly for this study, who they were according to early evangelicals and later Protestants. It then examines the figure of John Foxe himself, who recognised these lollard men and women as kindred spirits and incorporated them into his tome as such. The chapter introduces Foxe’s most acclaimed work, Acts and Monuments, sketching how the accounts of the lollards shaped the editions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from their central role in Acts and Monuments’ first Latin edition to their eclipse by the Marian martyr stories in later abridgements. Next, it explains the place of this work in the debate that has driven interest in the lollards for a century, over whether the existence of medieval heresy influenced the development of the English Reformation. From there, the chapter delineates how the lollards fitted into the evangelical historical imagination, elucidating the important idea of ongoing perfection: the belief that the Holy Spirit illuminated more people – and more fully illuminated those people – as time progressed. The chapter argues that Foxe’s recognition of the lollards as merely the beginning of a process of reform left open to debate when that reform would be completed. Moreover, it shows the long-term repercussions of this interpretation in the seventeenth century, when struggles over the extent of reform were in full swing. Looking at both these phenomena, how modern scholars view the relationship between lollards and evangelicals, and the way sixteenth-century historians saw that relationship, reveals the extent to which the latter has influenced the former.

Chapter 2 delves into the process of appropriation by early evangelicals and its codification by John Foxe, chronicling the way they redressed the lollard reputation for sedition and schism. It explores how John Bale, William Tyndale, and others sought to neutralise the lollard reputation for sedition, an association made by contemporary chroniclers since the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and underpinned by Wyclif’s teachings that lords might take away the church’s temporal possessions and that the laity could lawfully rebuke the clergy. To put the lollard rehabilitation effort in context, the first section of this chapter explains how Anabaptism threatened to undermine the relationship between the emerging evangelical movement and the authorities. Two subversive theological beliefs ascribed to the lollards, communitarianism and pacifism, came dangerously close to Anabaptist doctrines. This chapter therefore delineates the project of evangelical historians to correct what they saw as a smear job by corrupt medieval chroniclers, and also explains that this effort was only effective to an extent in the seventeenth century, when confessional allegiances came to drive interpretation. The last section sees the evangelicals move from the defensive position to the offensive. Though the lollard connection to sedition had indeed hampered evangelicals, it also provided opportunities: a direct association with Christ, who had also been accused of causing dissension; the chance to highlight that the Roman church itself had caused disorder in the world; and even a way to criticise the regime of Henry VIII. Finally, the chapter suggests that seventeenth-century dissenters who were also accused of fomenting political discord drew on the lollard tradition exonerated by early evangelicals and Foxe.

Just as early evangelicals sought to mould erstwhile traitors into loyal subjects, they also aimed to make heretics into persecuted members of the true church. The commonly held notion that God bestowed the mantle of martyrdom on those he favoured meant that evangelicals urgently sought a martyrological precedent to bolster their pedigree. But remarkably few lollard deaths conformed to the literary tropes and exemplary models of the early church. Chapter 3 addresses this little-acknowledged tension and shows that in recounting in excruciating detail the trials, imprisonments, abjurations, and penance of the lollards, Foxe shifted the focus away from the constancy of the martyr and towards the cruelty of the bishop interrogators. Foxe’s lollard narratives, then, conveyed the notion of a small persecuted sect, beleaguered by the Roman church for its true religious convictions. Owing largely to Foxe’s success in establishing the lollards as true martyrs, post-Reformation Protestants rarely questioned their martyrological value, and this paved the way for discontented religious advocates to appropriate the lollards in line with the trials of their own religious traditions. When these trials came to include swearing oaths, this chapter shows that Foxe gave lollard opposition to oaths – which ran the gamut – a full airing in his book. While some lollards apparently accepted making oaths as valid practice, others restricted the circumstances in which they could be used and a few called for a blanket ban.

After analysing an array of lollard beliefs about swearing, this chapter looks at the seventeenth-century reception of those beliefs, as mediated by Foxe, which were perhaps unsurprisingly incorporated into Quaker polemical tracts in particular. It also delves into the ex officio oath, which scholars have long recognised as as a locus for contemporary debates about the relative powers of church and crown. This oath forced lollards who had not yet been charged with a crime to swear to answer truthfully all the questions that ecclesiastical officials put to them, and it gained renewed prominence in the early seventeenth century when it was put to the dissenters of that era. Foxe saw the oath’s continued use throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as an injustice, and included his objections to its legality within Acts and Monuments. Later puritans and separatists not only used the lollard examples in Foxe’s book to speak against it, but rested on the authority of Foxe himself, too. Finally, this chapter draws together these strands to assess the role of history in early modern debates about oaths, the parameters of conscience and compulsion, and the nature of Christian liberty.

While early evangelical efforts to portray the lollards as model subjects and martyrs have been studied before, most historians and literary critics have ended the lollard story in the mid-sixteenth century. But due to their success, the majority of later Protestants accepted the interpretation of these medieval witnesses as model subjects and martyrs; this is significant because it made them theological models as well. The remaining chapters examine what sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestants gained from the lollard rehabilitation project: historical sanction for the establishment of the true church, marked by the correct administration of the sacraments and the true preaching of the Word. It is important to note that the book’s coverage of later Protestant writers makes no claims to be a comprehensive account. These sketches of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century appropriations of the lollards are merely suggestive of the many ways the impact of lollard ideas, as mediated through Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, affected later religious developments. Nevertheless, they offer intriguing evidence that the afterlife of the lollards did not end in their re-telling by first- and second generation reformers.

Viewed by many lollards as laden with unnecessary ceremony, every one of the seven traditional sacraments of the medieval church was called into question or rejected wholesale. After detailing how the lollards articulated their disappointment with nearly all the constituent parts of the traditional sacramental framework, Chapter 4 turns to the two sacraments that Foxe’s co-religionists upheld as valid: the Lord’s Supper and baptism. Although the lollard rejection of transubstantiation unsurprisingly passed muster with Foxe, the range of views concerning baptism – which included even a blunt rejection of its efficacy – forced Foxe into a precarious position. By using baptism as a case study to scrutinise Foxe’s editorial practices, this chapter reveals the inconsistency of his deletions. This inconsistency suggests that while some scholars have relied on the designation of Foxe as a ‘magisterial reformer’ to explain omissions of radical material in Acts and Monuments, in fact Foxe’s editing practices are less straightforward. By pinpointing what Foxe found acceptable for inclusion, this chapter nuances the way we consider his editorial style and overturns a historiographical commonplace.

Chapter 5 examines the role of the clergy in performing these functions, analysing the lollard narratives in the Acts and Monuments to see what Foxe’s readers may have gleaned about the place of the priesthood in the reformed church and, by extension, the tithes which sustained those priests. It analyses the nature of lollard critiques of the clergy and their fees in the ‘Book of Martyrs’, revealing that despite