FITZRALPH AND WYCLIF

During the latter half of the fourteenth century the religious orders, and in particular the friars, were subjected to attacks both public and literary, to which an earlier parallel can only be found in the simultaneous assaults by a group of bishops and by the court circle of writers upon the monks in the last years of Henry II. In the previous onslaught, a number of prelates had sought to eject the monks from their cathedrals or to render them innocuous by the foundation of colleges of secular canons, while at the same time Gerald of Wales and Walter Map were accusing the whole monastic body of luxurious and immoral lives, and of avaricious and dishonest behaviour. Both these attacks had died away with the reign of John: the relations between monks and bishops had been firmly determined by Innocent III, while the extinction of literary humanism and the court culture had put an end to literary polemics. Henceforward for almost a century and a half criticism of the religious in this country had been personal and private only, save for faint echoes at Oxford of the quarrels between the secular masters of Paris and the mendicants. Of literary criticism during this period scarcely anything of weight has survived; the thirteenth century, as is well known, is a barren one in the annals of national literature when compared to the age of Latin culture which preceded it, and the epoch of English renaissance that followed.