After three years aborad Wycliffe returned to England was was appointed Rector of St. Mary’s church in Lutterworth. From his new pulpit Wycliffe continued to speak against the abuses of the church and the incosistencies to be found in its teachings. It wasn’t long before his outspoken ways garnered the attention of the Papacy.
He was first summoned by the Bishop of London to St. Paul’s Catherdral to be tried by an ecclesiastical court. Fortunately for Wycliffe the hearings didn’t get very far. Thousands of of Englishmen crowded the streets around St. Paul’s pressing into the aisles of the cathedral. A day after the proceedings were opened a riot broke out and the ecclesiastical court was forced to call of the hearings and release Wycliffe.
Shortly after this incident the Pope issed three Papal bulls against Wycliffe demandinfg that England arrest the heretic. However before the papacy could take any meaningful action against Wycliffe, Pope Gregory IX died leaving the church embroiled in one of the most embrassing episodes in its long and varied history. Three rival popes were soon squabbling over the Papal throne and Wycliffe was forgotten in the melee.
One of the primary reasons that Wycliffe was able to return to his parish in relative safety was because England had no formal apparatus in place to suppress heresy at the time. Hersey was rare in England. Englishmen thought of heretics as the Albigenses of Languedoc or the Waldenses of the Italian alps. No one really thought there could ever be English heretic. It turned out they were wrong.
Wycliffe’s views were embraced by popular preachers and teachers who discussed his doctrines in small groups known as schools. Soon these followers were given a name - Lollards, a word derived from the Low Dutch word lollen or lallen meaning ‘to sing’. Soon there was an informal network of Oxford scholars who began to preach the gospel.
Lollardism flourished in the towns and trading routes between them. It was primarily the faith of the merchant and the artisan rather than the farmer or the agricultural worker. It was small but strong, growing in places like London, Bristol, Coventry and Leicester.
