graunted what he was & ayensaide noyt. And he graunted & said: for y nam nonyt crist. And hii asked him, what ertow than, ertow ely? And he answered, I am nouyt ely. And hii saiden, Ertow a pphete? And he answered and said, nai. And hii said to him, what ertow, that we may yif answer to hem that sent us, what sais tow of the seluen? I am a uoice of the criand in desert that dresceth our lordes wai as Isaie saith. And hii that were sent thei were of phariseus. And hii asked him and said to him wharto baptizes too, yif thou ne be noyt crist, ne heli ne prophete? Ion answered to hem and saide, I yow baptize in water fforsothe he stode in middes of you that ye ne wot nouyt, he scal com efter me that is made tofore me of whom inam nouyt worthi to undo the thwonge of his schoes. Thes thinges ben don in bethaine beyond iordan ther Ion baptized.

The purport of these different translations may only be divined; in many instances they appear to have been made for the instruction of the clergy, many of whom, being ignorant of Latin and Greek, needed just such helps; they may also have been made for occasional use by those of the highest culture among the nobility, as intimated in the speech of Sir Thomas More, and in a funeral sermon preached by Archbishop Arundel on Anne of Bohemia, wife of Richard II., to the effect that she was in the habit of reading the Gospels in the vulgar tongue with divers expositions. In all probability both Sir Thomas and the archbishop refer to these versions; but for all practical purposes they might not have existed at all, for they were never published, nor put in general circulation. Those who used them were either priests or unexceptionally good Catholics, for whose benefit the glosses and comments were likewise added. At the period in question, the earlier part of the first half of the fourteenth century, to which these versions have been referred, the people did not crave a version of the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue, and therefore there was no occasion whatever on the part of the Church to forbid it. But matters stood very different in the time of Arundel and More, as we shall point out in a subsequent paragraph.

There still remains to be considered the positive assertion* that John de Trevisa, Vicar of Berkeley, in the county of Gloucester, who was a native of Cornwall, translated the Old and New Testaments into English at the desire of Lord Berkeley, his patron. Horne supposes that as no part of this translation has ever been printed,' the alleged translation of the whole Bible seems to have been confined to a few isolated passages scattered through his works, or which were painted on the walls of the chapel at Berkeley Castle. Trevisa lived about the period of Wiclif, and whatever he did in the way of translation must have been done at that time or very soon after, for he had completed the Polychronicon of Ranulph of Chester in A. D. 1387. Dr. Waterland, who examined his writings, extracted for Mr. Lewis's use in his history the following passages:

St. Matt. xviii. 32, I forgave the al thy det bycause thou praydest me, wicked servant; xxv. 18, The slowe servant hidde his lorde's talent in the erthe; xxvii. 19, Moche have I suffred by syghte bycause of him; St. Luke xi. 45, My lord taryeth to come. If a servant begynneth

to drink, and is dronken, and smiteth and beateth the meyny his lord shall come. .; xix, 13, 16, The nobleman called his servauntes and bytoke hem ten mnas, and he saide to these servauntes marchaundise with it tyll I come Lo, lord, thy mna hath made ten mnas, and his lorde sayde to him, and be thou hauynge power over ten cities.

...

These are all the known attempts of translations of the Holy Scriptures into English down to the time of Wiclif of which I have been able to get information from Lewis's History of the Translations of the Bible; Johnson's Historical Ac

* The assertion rests on very slender foundation. Caxton, in the Prohemye to his edition of the Polychronicon, says: "At the request of Lord Berkeley, Trevisa translated the said book, the Bible, and Bartholomæus de proprietate rerum." Bale (Script. Illustr., p. 518. Basel, 1557) repeats Caxton, Ussher (Hist. Dogmat., p. 346) repeats Bale, Wharton (Auctar., p 348) repeats Ussher, and Fuller (Church Hist., and vol. i. p. 468) calls the revised Wiclifite version Trevisa's masterpiece. King James' translators actually say in their preface of early English versions, that in "King Richard's dayes, John Trevisa translated them into English."

count, etc., reprinted in vol. iii. of Bishop Watson's Collection of Theological Tracts; Newcome's View of the English Biblical Translations, Dublin, 1792; Baber's Historical Account, etc., prefixed to his edition of Wiclif's New Testament, 1810; Forshall and Madden, Preface to Wiclif's Bible; and the exhaustive statements in the preface to Bagster's English Hexapla, from which some of the samples have been transcribed. If there are others, their existence has not been made known to the world.

It has also been alleged (by Stow) that Reginald Pecocke, bishop of Chichester, A. D. 1450, made an English version of the Bible. But Lewis says that in his (MS.) account of that prelate's life he has shown the error of the statement, and that the biblical labors of Pecocke were confined to the translation of passages of the Bible quoted in his writings, of which the following are specimens:

S. Matth. xxviii. 19, 20, Go ye therefore and teche ye alle folkis, bap tizing hem in the name of the fadir and of the sone and of the holi goost; teching hem to keep alle thingis whatever thingis y haue comaundid to you; S. Mark xvi. 15, 20, Go ye into al the world, and preche ye the gospel to every creature. Thei forsothe goyng forth prechiden everywhere; St. John xxi. 25, Mo myraclis Crist dide, than ben written in this book, which if they weren written, al the worlde though it were turned into bokis, schulde not take and comprehende; Effes. iv. 5, Oon is the Lord, oon feith, and oon baptism; Ebrues vii. 7, The lesse worthi is blessid of the more worthi.

These are certainly very remarkable renderings for the times, and what the times were in the way of learning may be gathered from two or three significant facts. When Fitz-Ralph, archbishop of Armagh, sent (A. D. 1357) several of his secular priests to Oxford to study divinity, they were compelled to return for the almost incredible reason that they could not buy a copy of the Bible there. Wiclif charged the clergy of his day that they "left the Holy Scriptures to study heathen men's laws, and worldly covetous priests' traditions or the civil

and canon law."* Æneas Sylvius, afterward Pope Pius II., said of the Italian priests that they had not even read the New Testament. Robert Stephens states that some Sorbonists being asked where a certain passage occurred in the New Testament, replied that they had seen it in Jerome on the Decrees, but they did not know what the New Testament was. Indeed the ignorance of the clergy of the period almost beggars belief, for we have it on the testimony of Wiclif, Clemangis, Beleth, and others, that the majority were unable to read Latin or con their psalter.

CHAPTER III.

WICLIFITE VERSIONS.

WHETHER this, the simplest mode of spelling Wiclif, is more authentic than Wyclif, Wycliffe, and Wicliffe, I cannot determine; I adopt that given in the title on account of its simplicity: the pronunciation of the name is the same throughout.

John Wiclif was born in 1324, it is thought, in the parish of that name, near Richmond in Yorkshire. It seems an established fact that he studied at Oxford, although reliable data concerning his early career there and the greater portion of his life have not come to light. Similar obscurity hangs over his earliest writings, and there is nothing certain as to his public life except the prominent part he bore in resisting the Mendicants, denouncing their blasphemy in likening their institutes to the Gospels, their founder to the Saviour, and branding the higher members of the orders as hypocrites, and the lower as common, able-bodied beggars, who ought not

* Great sentence of curse expounded, MS. † Hody, De Bibl. textibus. p. 464.

to be permitted to infest the land. From 1361 to 1365 he was warden of Baliol Hall, rector of Fylingham, and warden of Canterbury Hall. His reputation for learning and judgment must have been very considerable, for he was appointed a royal chaplain, and in 1374 sent, probably through John of Gaunt's influence, to Bruges as second in a commission to treat with the papal legate to effect an understanding on the differences between the king of England and the pope. On his return to England the crown presented him with the prebend of Aust in Worcestershire, and the rectory of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, which he held until his death. The details relating to his ecclesiastical and theological status do not belong here, apart from their connection with the translation of the Bible, which probably would never have been executed but for his nearer acquaintance with Rome at Bruges, which led him to champion the cause of freedom and truth against the spiritual despotism and lying pretensions of the papacy. There was not in all England at the time, and for two hundred and fifty years later, an abler and bolder man than Wiclif; and it is a great mistake to represent him either as deficient in learning and scholarship or in judgment. But a man who did not hesitate to call the pope christ," "the proud, worldly priest, the most cursed of clippers and purse-kervers," who told the people in plain, bold, terse Saxon, and the theologians at Oxford in terms of the most consummately skilful language of the schools, that, according to the true teaching of Holy Scripture, the papacy, with its sacerdotalism, pardons, indulgences, excommunications, absolutions, pilgrimages, images, and transubstantiation, was a gigantic fraud-such a man could not escape the hatred of the Roman hierarchy, and being consigned, as far as they were able to consign him, to the never-dying flames invented for the peculiar benefit of heretics like Wiclif.

"Anti

It is generally stated that it was only during the last ten