
Myself, I’d never heard of the Lollards until I studied the Tudors at university. The Reformation in pop culture is remembered in binary terms: Team Catholic and Team Protestant.
Historians debate the importance of the Lollards in the grand scheme of English church history. After all, in 1517 they weren’t about to take over the country. There was no Lollard gunpowder plot when Henry VIII came to the throne. While Lollard communities were tightly knit, they weren’t a unified force. Without the Reformation, Lollardy probably would have stayed underground forever. Still, it blew my mind that these radical Protestant-y ideas were running around in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries- centuries I thought of as Catholic England.
The Lollards honoured John Wycliffe as the father of their movement, but they didn’t keep strictly to his beliefs. Instead, they took his ideas in new directions. So Wycliffe is in the interesting position of being the father of Lollardy…. without being himself the first Lollard. Lollards eagerly devoured several different texts under the mistaken impression that Wycliffe wrote them.
John Wycliffe was a theologian at Oxford. He was kicked out of the university but had the patronage of John of Gaunt. Gaunt’s piety was conventional, but he found it politically useful to sponsor anti-clerical preaching. In his eyes, the clergy were a threat to magnates like himself. I can’t help but be reminded of Gaunt’s great-great-great-grandson Henry VIII, though Gaunt’s admirers probably don’t love the comparison.
Matters came to a head in February 1377, when Wycliffe was tried for heresy. The trial was held at St Paul’s Cathedral and a huge crowd gathered outside. Gaunt had summoned four Doctors of Divinity to serve as Wycliffe’s defence counsel. Henry Percy, the Marshal of England, was there to oversee the trial. He had the unenviable task of organising crowd control. Percy told Wycliffe to sit down ‘because there were many questions to answer so he would need a soft seat’. At this point, Gaunt’s nemesis William Courteney, Bishop of London, told Wycliffe to stay standing. An argument broke out and escalated until John of Gaunt stormed into the Lady Chapel. Backed up by an armed following, he threatened to drag the bishop outside ‘by his hair’. Wycliffe escaped further questioning.
By 1382 John of Gaunt had fully rejected Wycliffe’s theology, but Wycliffe had enough luck to avoid execution. He suffered a horrible stroke in 1383, then another one in December 1384. A few days later, he died on New Year’s Eve.
Despite Wycliffe’s death -and a boring death, with none of the spectacle and shock of martyrdom- Lollardy became even more popular. John Purvey translated the Bible into English, and the late 1390s was the Lollard heyday. Like the Puritans and the suffragettes, they were named by their enemies. Lollard means ‘mumbler’. Lollards called themselves ‘privy’ or ‘known’ men/women, and ‘children of salvation’.
That Bible would have been handwritten: it was not until the 1520s that the Lollards had the technology and the resources to print their texts. Some Lollards owned Bibles that they could not read, knowing their co-religionists would read it aloud to them. If they didn’t have access to a copy, they memorised it. Two hundred complete Lollard Bibles have survived, while other copies have survived in chunks or sections. Then again, the Bible is such a huge collection of short texts that whole medieval Bibles are already rare: it made practical sense to print or copy one or several of its books. Individuals might not have owned a whole Bible, but a copy of the four gospels or a psalter. You can read the Lollard bible digitally on biblegateway.com.
In 1414, Sir John Oldcastle led a Lollard revolt. (If you’re a Shakespeare fan, his name might ring a bell – he was the inspiration for Falstaff.) The attempted rebellion was a disaster for the movement: not only did it fail spectacularly, but it also allowed the king to paint the Lollards as traitors, so sympathisers were tainted by association. Lollardy was driven out of the universities. Realising the hopelessness of their situation, most Lollards renounced their beliefs. Only a few were martyred. Henry V’s Parliament declared that Lollards wanted “to annul and subvert the Christian faith and the law of God, to destroy our sovereign lord the king himself.”
English Protestants claimed the Lollards as their intellectual and theological ancestors. They dubbed Wycliffe ‘the flower of Oxford’, ‘the morning star of the Reformation’. So it’s interesting that Protestant England revered Henry V as the ideal medieval king while hating Mary I, even though both monarchs used violence to enforce Catholicism and papal authority. Military victory works wonders on posthumous reputations.

Who were the Lollards? Where were they? We have the names of only a few hundred. They tended to be peasants and artisans, in cities like London, Bristol, Coventry, and Gloucester. But they could also be found in the countryside: in Essex, Kent, Oxfordshire, and Gloucestershire. Lollardy reached as far north as Ayrshire (southwest Scotland) but didn’t have much of a foothold in the north of England. When the European reformation arrived, it was received far more warmly in some regions than others. The places where the new ideas were popular map onto the areas where there was a Lollard presence: East Anglia, Bristol, Gloucester, the Thames Valley, the Chiltern hills (Buckinghamshire) and Kent. There is evidence from the 1520s of evangelicals networking with the Lollard underground.
Recent research has shown that some Lollards were slightly higher in status than we thought. In 1514 the Bishop of London’s summoner claimed that he knew of heretics who were each worth £1,000. John Foxe would later claim that Eleanor Duchess of Gloucester ‘had long been a follower of Wickliffe’ – this is unlikely to be true, and the crime she was accused of (probably falsely) was witchcraft, not Lollardy. Humphrey of Gloucester was also not a Lollard: he idolised his brother Henry V.
By 1500, the number of Lollards was stable: not withering away, but not booming. The last Lollard text had been written around 1440. This stagnation is understandable: they were now a tiny minority in little pockets throughout Britain (except for the Chiltern hills in Buckinghamshire). It’s quite impressive that the large Chiltern community managed to survive undetected. And they were communities: Lollards stuck together, marrying and employing fellow Lollards. Like later religious dissidents, they met in safe houses or in fields to talk theology and read aloud their books – not just the Lollard Bible but a cycle of sermons.
No matter how much they hated it, they had to conform to survive. They went to their parish churches, had their infants baptised there, had to swallow their antipathy to the religious artwork surrounding them.
But I think they would say, if we could talk to their ghosts, that it was worth it. Henry V was crushingly victorious over the French and the Lollards. But by 1600, I think we can say it was the Lollards and the French who had the last laugh.
Further reading: The Red Prince by Helen Carr New Worlds, Lost Worlds by Susan Brigden All Things Made New by Diarmaid MacCulloch The Later Reformation in England 1547-1603, also by MacCulloch The Age of Reformation by Alec Ryrie The Tudors by Richard Rex
Read CF Kirkham-Sandy’s NEW BOOK:
SHACKLED TO A GHOST
At the turn of the sixteenth century, young law student Thomas More meets the scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam. Caustic and clever, Erasmus has a vision of what Christendom could be – and More shares his dream.
Without wealth, noble blood, or even physical strength, Erasmus’ only weapon is his mind. Despite the obstacles they face, More and Erasmus blossom together. But the Reformation is coming for them. They can’t stop it, but can they survive it? And can they trust the man the other has become? As the Reformation gathers pace, More’s daughter Meg yearns to make her mark. Can she succeed, or is she doomed to repeat her mother’s fate?
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Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DV5F6585/

CF Kirkham-Sandy grew up in Devon and has a BA and an MA in History from the universities of York and Bristol. CF lives and works in Herefordshire, and moonlights as a history tutor for students of all ages. CF is currently writing another novel and can be found on Threads @kirkhamsandycf and Twitter @Catofthepigeons.