“There is perhaps no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilised and free countries than the necessity of listening to sermons.” The Victorian Age of Trollope is more out of date and out of favour with many people than even the Middle Ages themselves; but the sermon, it is to be feared, is in no better odour to-day than when the Victorian novelist wrote his remark. The very “necessity” of hearing it has now disappeared. What is actually the first book to be written on the subject of English Medieval Preaching would seem to call, therefore, for a special word of explanation. To the average Englishman modern sermons may be dull. But the medieval variety, if it has ever occurred to his mind, is probably associated with “empty, ridiculous harangues, legendary tales, miracles, horrors, low jests, table-talk, fire-side scandal,” result in the main of a long Protestant tradition, which even reckons Paul's Cross and the Sermons on the Card among its triumphant inventions. If still left with a taste for devotional literature, therefore, he can hardly be expected to waste time upon “monkish superstitions,” when the works of Latimer and Jeremy Taylor, Donne and South already stand upon his bookshelves. Not John Wycliffe himself, “morning star of the Reformation,” if he rose from the dead, could induce Professor Hearnshaw to listen to his homilies.

English historians and archivists have certainly done little enough to make known what M. Lecoy de la Marche calls “the innumerable written monuments of the pulpit.”