Heresy in Transition by Laursen John Christian; Nederman Cary J.; Hunter Ian & John Christian Laursen & Cary J. Nederman

Author:Laursen, John Christian; Nederman, Cary J.; Hunter, Ian & John Christian Laursen & Cary J. Nederman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2005-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Heresy Hunting and Clerical Reform: William Warham, John Colet, and the Lollards of Kent, 1511-1512

Craig D'Alton

Introduction

Between 28 April 15 11 and 5 June 1512 fifty-three men and women were accused of Lollardy, the popular form of the Wycliffite heresy, in the English diocese of Canterbury. Five of these were handed over to the secular authorities to be burned. Forty-five others had penances imposed upon them.1 Canterbury was only one of many English dioceses which saw attacks on Lollards during the first years of the reign of Henry VIII. Between 1510 and 1512 London, Lincoln, Coventry and Lichfield all saw major anti-Lollard campaigns.2 Other less systematic prosecutions occurred in Rochester, Winchester, Salisbury, Norwich and Hereford.

In 1965, John Thomson wrote that the large number of Lollard trials in England in the decade preceding the first rumblings of Lutheranism constituted 'incontestable proof that the ecclesiastical authorities were seriously concerned with the problem of heresy.'3 Thomson was right, and his work has led to further and more detailed explorations of Lollard trials and texts. Regional studies of Reformation and pre-Reformation religion have included analyses of Lollard 'resurgence', and Margaret Aston and Anne Hudson among others, including most recently Kantik Ghosh have examined the intellectual basis of what had long been regarded to be a non-intellectual movement.4

Without question, the first years of the reign of Henry VIII witnessed heresy prosecutions on a scale not seen in England for almost a century. Yet whilst there is little to link the anti-heresy proceedings in most dioceses with any other episcopal actions, in Canterbury the Lollard trials formed only one part of a much larger program of diocesan activity. In the same year in which he attacked Lollards, Archbishop Warham also mounted a full-scale visitation of his diocese. The archbishop regarded the reforming of heretics and the reforming of wayward clergy to be two parts of the same task of pastoral discipline, and his 1511-12 actions in Kent were a direct response to the calls for ecclesiastical reform at the Canterbury Convocation of 1510. In 1512, as the trials and visitations drew to their end, John Colet, at Warham's behest, preached his famous reformist sermon to the Convocation of Canterbury, providing a retrospective rhetorical justification for combining the reform of heretics with the reform of the clergy. Colet's sermon, deeply grounded in reformist traditions with roots in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), was perhaps intended to be a spur to action. Yet rather than being prophetic, Colet simply gave definition to an idea that had already run its course. By the end of 1512, the renewed Lollard persecution had come to a halt, and Warham's desire for a province-wide clergy reform program was all but dead. This chapter re-reads Colet's text in the light of the actions of the archbishop for whom he composed it, and argues that, far from being a 'Fore-runner of the Reformation', Colet's sermon was designed as much to promote the enforcing of doctrinal orthodoxy amongst the laity as the reforming of the moral life of the clergy.

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