The English Reformation; How It Came About, and Why We Should Uphold It (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. JOHN WYCLIFFE. IT was inevitable that with the progress of the nation in other matters there should be a reaction against the universal corruption of the Church. England had now a Parliament, and the power of the purse was in the hands of the Commons. Great reforms had been made by Edward I. Laws had been passed to secure the public peace; to provide for the recovery of debts, and to check the alienation of lands to the Church. Towns had secured many of their liberties. They had their commercial guilds in all trades. Everywhere, the people were rising into importance. By the third quarter of the fourteenth century things had come to look ominous for the Church. The long reign of Edward III. (1327?1377) was drawing to a close disastrously. The cruel, frivolous, unreal splendour he had maintained had shown its hollowness on every side. A king who amidst all this halo of mock greatness tricked his Parliament, cheated his creditors, and ruined the merchants of England by using his position to command the markets as a rival trader, a king whose taxes for foreign wars, distasteful to his people, were oppressive, while the burdens for the maintenance of his table were even more so, could not permanently hide himself in the show of a false glory. Pestilences unequalled before or since bad wasted England in his reign, and had so raised the price of labour as to forceinto prominence the old struggle between the labourer and the serf on the one hand and the privileged classes on the other. Even the bishops, as great employers, had at last, like the monks already, sided against workmen and the peasants, and oppressive Acts of Parliament had aggravated the social war. Edward was now in his dotage and wholly under the influence of a worthless mistress. The Black Princ...