Anglican Commemoration
Priest & Reformer
December 31 · d. 1384
also known as John Wycliffe, John Wickliffe, Ioannes Wyclif
John Wyclif, priest and Oxford theologian, was born in Yorkshire in the 1320s and died rector of Lutterworth in Leicestershire on December 31, 1384. He argued that the people should have God's law in the tongue they knew best, and the first English Bible was made under his inspiration and name. Thirty years after his death the Council of Constance condemned his memory; in 1428 his bones were burned and cast into the River Swift. Anglican calendars commemorate him on December 31.
John Wyclif was born in the 1320s in the north of England, where his family took its name from the village of Wycliffe on the River Tees. He went south to Oxford as a young man and stayed the better part of thirty years: a fellow of Merton, Master of Balliol, and at last, in 1372, a doctor of theology. He was a priest as well as a scholar, ordained in 1351, and in 1374 the crown gave him the parish of Lutterworth, which he kept to his dying day. That same year the king sent him to Bruges to negotiate with the pope's representatives, and from then on Wyclif stood near the great men of the realm, above all John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the most powerful magnate in England.
What Wyclif taught made him dangerous. He taught that all lordship is founded in God's grace; that the church is not the pope and his court but the whole company of those God has chosen; and he asked a question that sounds simple and was not. Christ and his apostles taught the people in the tongue the people knew best; why should men not do so now? His own circle put it in the English of the day: "crist & his apostlis tauȝten þe puple in þat tunge þat was moost knowun to þe puple; why shulden not men do nou so?"
The church tried to silence him three times, and three times it failed. In February 1377 the bishop of London summoned him to St Paul's; Wyclif came with the Duke of Lancaster at his side, and the hearing collapsed in a shouting match over whether he should even sit, the duke swearing, in the words a chronicle preserves, to "pull downe both the pryde of hym and of all the bishopps." That May Pope Gregory XI issued bulls condemning eighteen or nineteen articles from his writings, as they were counted; nothing much came of them. The next spring he was summoned to Lambeth, and that trial failed too: Joan of Kent, the boy king's mother, sent word forbidding the prelates to proceed, and the crowds of London pressed in on his side.
Then, around 1380, Wyclif went further than any protector could follow. He wrote that in the sacrament of the altar the bread remains bread, even while it is truly the body of Christ. His own university condemned the teaching; even Lancaster was shocked, and enjoined silence. Wyclif would not be silent. His written confession of 1381 held its ground line by line and ended with the most famous sentence he ever wrote: "I believe that in the end the truth will conquer," as Philip Schaff rendered his Latin. In May 1382 Archbishop Courtenay gathered a council at Blackfriars in London to condemn propositions drawn from his books, and while the doctors deliberated an earthquake shook the city; it has been called the Earthquake Council ever since.
John Foxe tells how, in an earlier illness at Oxford, the friars came to his bedside with four leading citizens to urge the dying man to retract what he had said against their order, and Wyclif raised himself in his bed and answered, "I shall not die, but live to declare the evil deeds of the friars." Foxe wrote nearly two hundred years later, but the words echo the Psalm, and they ring true to the man.
Old and unwell, Wyclif withdrew to Lutterworth around 1381 or 1382 and kept writing. When the pope himself summoned him to Rome, he answered by letter that he would gladly come if he could, but Christ had taught him more obedience to God than to man; and he offered the pope his counsel: "that the pope leave his worldly lordship to worldly lords, as Christ gave him." In the last days of December 1384, while at Mass in his own church, he was struck down; he never spoke again, and on December 31 he died, a priest at his post, and was buried in his own churchyard.
The story does not end in the churchyard. In 1415 the Council of Constance declared him "a notorious and obstinate heretic who died in heresy" and ordered that "his body and bones are to be exhumed, if they can be identified among the corpses of the faithful, and to be scattered far from a burial place of the church." In 1428 Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln and once Wyclif's own disciple, saw the sentence carried out: the bones were dug up, burned, and the ashes thrown into the little River Swift. Thomas Fuller, writing long after, saw what the fire could not do: "Thus this brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wicliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed the world over." He had said the truth would conquer in the end; the rivers carried his ashes to the sea, and the Scriptures went out in English to the whole world.
You probably own more Bibles than you can easily count, in a tongue you have spoken since the cradle. Wyclif's question was asked on behalf of people who had none: Christ and his apostles taught the people in the language they knew best, so why should anyone stand between the people and the word? For that conviction he held his ground when his university condemned him, when his protector fell away, and when the pope summoned him to Rome, answering only that he owed more obedience to God than to man, and trusting that in the end the truth would conquer. The scarce thing in his day was the text; the scarce thing in yours may be the attention. What word of God, plainly available to you in your own tongue, are you still leaving unread and unobeyed?
Nearly every narrative source for Wyclif's life is hostile. The single most important documentary witness, the Fasciculi Zizaniorum ("bundle of tares"), is a Carmelite compilation attributed to Thomas Netter and edited by W. W. Shirley in 1858; it preserves his trial documents and his own 1381 confession precisely in order to refute him. The chroniclers Thomas Walsingham of St Albans and Henry Knighton of Leicester are contemporary and vitriolic. The only genuinely disinterested spine is the Lincoln episcopal registers, which fix his benefices: Fillingham from 1361, Ludgershall from 1368, Lutterworth from 1374. The sympathetic tradition, from John Bale (1548) through Foxe (1563) to Fuller (1655), is late and depends on the hostile one; Wyclif's own enormous Latin corpus, which survives largely because Bohemian scribes copied it, is doctrinal rather than autobiographical.
The death date, December 31, 1384, is firm and is the feast. The birth year is not: 1324 is the conventional date, which the Dictionary of National Biography concedes "rests on conjecture"; Hudson and Kenny prefer the mid-1320s, and Conti argues for after 1331. Even the early career is entangled: records name a John Wyclif as fellow of Merton (1356), rector of Mayfield (1361), and warden of Canterbury Hall (1365 to 1367), and these may be one, two, or three men; the DNB calls the warden "the most famous question of identification." The Blackfriars condemnation is best printed simply as May 1382, the sources splitting between the 21st and the 28th.
The received title on the calendar is "Translator of the Bible into English," and the first English Bible does open in the accents of his movement: "IN the bigynnyng was the word, and the word was at God, and God was the word." But modern scholarship has revised the personal claim. As the current consensus is summarized, "it has since become generally accepted by scholars that Wycliffe showed little interest in vernacular use until the end of his life"; the Early Version (c. 1382) and Later Version (1388 to 1395) are the work of his Oxford circle, with Nicholas Hereford breaking off at Baruch 3:20 (a manuscript note marks the spot) and John Purvey credited with the revision and, probably, the General Prologue of the 1390s, though Anne Hudson has disputed the strength of even that evidence. The movement defended itself by pleading precedent, in the Prologue's own words, here in modernized spelling: "Bede translated the Bible, and expounded upon it much in Saxon... and not only Bede, but also King Alfred... translated in his last days the beginning of the Psalter into Saxon," just as "Jerome, who was a Latin man by birth, translated the Bible out of Hebrew and Greek into Latin." The claim of descent from Bede, Alfred, and is the school's own voice. Over 250 Wycliffite manuscripts survive, about twenty of them complete Bibles, despite Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions of 1408 forbidding anyone to translate, possess, or read an English Bible without episcopal approval, a ban in force until the Reformation.
The devotion that grew up around Wyclif is Protestant, literary, and institutional. Bohemia honored him first: the circle of Jan Hus copied, catalogued, and defended his works within a generation of his death, and the old honorific doctor evangelicus was in use in England and Bohemia alike. Foxe's Book of Martyrs made the burning of his bones the emblematic scene, fixed in the famous 1563 woodcut, and Fuller's sentence about the Swift, the Avon, the Severn, and the sea became the tradition's poetry about the event. At Lutterworth the parish church keeps a hexagonal oak pulpit said to be in part the one from which he preached, and the remnant of a cope supposed to have been his; the Victorian gazetteer that records them keeps its own careful "supposed," and so should we. An obelisk was raised in the town in 1897. His name has traveled farther than any relic: Wycliffe Hall in Oxford and Wycliffe College in Toronto, evangelical theological colleges both founded in 1877, and Wycliffe Bible Translators, founded in 1942 and now the Wycliffe Global Alliance, with member organisations in over sixty countries. A movement famously wary of relics gave its founder the honors it had left: a pulpit instead of a shrine, an obelisk instead of a tomb, and a Bible society instead of a feast-day procession.
The vernacular-Scripture sentence quoted in the Story is from the English De Officio Pastorali, chapter 15, in The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, edited by F. D. Matthew (EETS, 1880), pp. 429–430: https://archive.org/details/englishworksofwy00wycl/page/429/mode/2up. The 1381 Confessio is preserved in the Fasciculi Zizaniorum, edited by W. W. Shirley (Rolls Series, 1858), opening at p. 115 and closing at p. 132 ("Sed credo quod finaliter veritas vincet eos"): https://archive.org/details/fasciculizizanio00nett/page/132/mode/2up; the English rendering quoted is Philip Schaff's, History of the Christian Church, vol. VI: https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/hcc6/hcc6.iii.vi.iii.html. Gaunt's oath is chronicle-mediated, as preserved in the Dictionary of National Biography article on Wyclif: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Wycliffe,_John. The letter to Urban VI is printed in Tracts and Treatises of John de Wycliffe, edited by Robert Vaughan (1845), pp. 298–299: https://archive.org/details/tractstreatiseso00wycl/page/298/mode/2up. The sick-bed reply is Foxe's, from the abridged Book of Martyrs at CCEL: https://ccel.org/f/foxe/martyrs/fox107.htm. The Constance decrees, Sessions 8 and 15, are quoted verbatim from https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum16.htm. Fuller's river passage is given as printed in Schaff and at https://www.bible-researcher.com/wyclif.html; his 1655 edition was not consulted directly. John 1:1 is from the Later Version New Testament (Oxford, 1879), pp. 182–183: https://archive.org/details/newtestamentinen00wyclrich/page/182/mode/2up. The General Prologue's Bede, Alfred, and Jerome passage, chapter 15, is quoted in the modernized spelling at https://www.bible-researcher.com/wyclif2.html, verified independently at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Wycliffite_Prologue. The calendar entry is BCP 2019, kalendar, p. 712. The summary of the modern scholarly consensus quoted in the History ("it has since become generally accepted by scholars that Wycliffe showed little interest in vernacular use until the end of his life"), with the note of Anne Hudson's dissent, follows the Wikipedia article "Wycliffe's Bible": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wycliffe%27s_Bible. Luther's remark to Spalatin of February 1520 is quoted in Preserved Smith's translation, Luther's Correspondence and Other Contemporary Letters, vol. I, 1507 to 1521 (Lutheran Publication Society, 1913): https://archive.org/details/lutherscorrespon01luthuoft. Loserth's judgment on the dependence of Hus's De Ecclesia is from Wiclif and Hus, translated by M. J. Evans (Hodder and Stoughton, 1884): https://archive.org/details/wiclifhus00lose. Conti's dating of the birth after 1331, and the reading of the 1360 Balliol reference as the degree of master of arts rather than the office, follow Alessandro Conti, "John Wyclif," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/. Hudson's and Kenny's preference for the mid-1320s, and the honorific doctor evangelicus, follow their Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article, "Wyclif [Wycliffe], John [called Doctor Evangelicus]" (2004): https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30122.
The condemnation record is exact. The Council of Constance, in Session 8 (May 4, 1415), condemned forty-five of his articles, anathematized him, and ordered the exhumation; Session 15 (July 6, 1415), the day Jan Hus was burned, condemned 260 more and called Hus "a disciple not of Christ but rather of the heresiarch John Wyclif." The sentence on the bones was executed in 1428 (Foxe alone dates it 1425), and no rescinding of the condemnation was found. Yet the forerunner reading has real medieval roots: Hus's own treatise on the church is, in his editor Loserth's judgment, little more than an abridgment of Wyclif's De Ecclesia, and Martin Luther, reading Hus early in 1520, wrote in Preserved Smith's translation, "we are all Hussites without knowing it." Luther named Hus, not Wyclif; the chain's first link was forged by Constance itself. The epithet "Morning Star of the Reformation" is later still, coined by Bale in 1548, and some modern medievalists prefer to see him as a late scholastic on his own terms. William Tyndale translated from the original languages, not from Wyclif's Latin-based text, but for some 130 years the Wycliffite Bible was the only English Bible there was, and the law Tyndale broke was the law Wyclif's Bible had provoked.
He was never canonized; the modern commemorations are calendrical. The Church of England's Common Worship keeps December 31 as a Commemoration, "John Wyclif, Reformer, 1384"; the ACNA's BCP 2019 kalendar prints "John Wyclif, Priest and Translator of the Bible into English, 1384" for the same day; the Episcopal Church's Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2024 does not include him. He is perhaps the calendar's clearest case of a church keeping the memory of a man a general council condemned: both facts are documented, and the reader may hold both.
O God, our heavenly Father, you raised up your faithful servant John Wyclif to be a pastor in your Church and to feed your flock: Give abundantly to all pastors the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that they may minister in your household as true servants of Christ and stewards of your divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Pastor
Isaiah 6:1–8Psalm 71:16–23v1 Peter 5:1–11 or Acts 20:24–35Matthew 24:42–50