Poverty, Reform, and Holistic Solutions: Situating the poor in the disendowment programme of John Wyclif

ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1963-1024
ISSN: Print 2754-4575
ISSN: Online 2754-4583
DOI: 10.57686/256204/37

© 2024 Hannah Kirby Wood
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY)

Introduction

In 1407 or 1410, a petition addressed to the King and to the ‘noble lords’ of Parliament began to circulate amongst the English Lollards, followers of a heretical movement born from the teachings of the Oxford theologian turned agitator, John Wyclif (c.1330–84).¹ The Lollard Disendowment Bill was striking in its provision of an explicit blueprint for the redistribution of temporalities (i.e. secular properties and possessions) that encompassed every social stratum, including the poor of England whom it viewed as having been deprived of their rightful patrimony by years of ecclesiastical misappropriation. The Bill made significant allotments for poor relief, namely the establishment of one hundred almshouses and the granting of one hundred marks with land to each house.² Disendowment was presented in the document as a socially conscious policy, one that sought in part to address the problem so often observed by social commentators, legislators, and reformists alike: that of the poor and the mitigation of their condition.

The central motion of the Lollard Disendowment Bill — that the secular branch ought to confiscate and redistribute ecclesiastical temporalities — is directly traceable to the theory of disendowment developed by Wyclif and propagated in his writings from 1375 until his death in 1384. Anne Hudson has argued that the Bill represented the fullest attempt on the part of Wyclif’s followers to translate his ideas into policy, its authors expanding upon Wyclif’s theoretical framework with concrete logistics.³ How closely the Bill’s proposed measures of implementation actually reflected Wyclif’s programme of disendowment is, however, another matter. While certain hallmarks of Wyclif’s programme — notably the transfer of the property into the king’s possession and the earmarking of funds for the defense of the realm — are easily identifiable throughout the document, the precedents within Wyclif’s works for poor relief as laid out in the Bill are less clear-cut. The ambiguity surrounding Wyclif’s practical concern for the poor not only complicates the linear narrative between Wyclif’s programme of disendowment and this marked attempt at enactment, but also introduces the question of whether the benefits of disendowment as envisioned by Wyclif were as socially inclusive as this later interpretation of his policy might suggest.

By bringing Wyclif’s allusions to the involuntary poor in his late-career works (c.1375–1384) into sharper focus, this article examines how England’s poor factored into Wyclif’s theory of disendowment, and by extension, to what extent Wyclif’s reformist vision was concerned with rectifying their plight.⁴ While the social issue of poverty and its significance in the context of Lollard thought has received considerable attention from scholars, the place of the poor in Wyclif’s writings remains comparatively under-theorised.⁵ It is a gap that begs to be filled: with Wyclif’s reformist ideas often characterized as ‘academic’, foundational to but removed from the lived religion of the Lollards and later reformers, examining Wyclif’s concern for the poor allows us to better conceptualize the relationship between theological exercise and social action in his thought. The most thorough and recent attempt to do so was made by David Aers in his 2003 article ‘John Wyclif: Poverty and the Poor’, itself a response to Margaret Aston’s 1983 essay ‘“Caim’s Castles”: Poverty, Politics, and Disendowment’.⁶ Where Aston over-aggrandised the role of the poor by positioning apostolic poverty and the poor as central to Wyclif’s vision of a reformed Church in which no man starved while another prospered beyond measure, Aers correctly pointed out that explicit attention to the poor is overshadowed by Wyclif’s apparent privileging of the lay lords through financial incentives. Disputing Aston’s thesis that poverty was central to Wyclif’s thought, Aers argued that the act of foregrounding the poor as justification for reform was largely strategic; the true objective of Wyclif’s policy of disendowment, Aers suggested, was the enrichment of the lay elites, and the complex and often conflicting threads of discourse concerning the poor functioned primarily as rhetorical talking points employed to further this agenda.⁷ Aers’s conclusions contribute to what has become the prevalent interpretation of Wyclif’s social policy, articulated by scholars such as Michael Wilks and Steven Justice, which positions appeals on behalf of the poor as a rhetorical tactic used to justify what is a fundamentally aristocratic enterprise.⁸

Using Aston and Aers as points of departure, this article attempts to carve out a path between their opposing conclusions by demonstrating that concern for the poor in Wyclif’s programme of disendowment, while not the primary impetus for the plan’s enactment, ought not be considered mere pretense. Instead, just as he fleshes out the benefits of disendowment for the king, elites, and the Church itself, Wyclif considers how the poor — those experiencing lack and/or oppression, whose varied needs he both recognises and accounts for — might also be helped through his proposed solutions.⁹ While the poor occupy a different place in Wyclif’s programme of disendowment than the lay lords, acting as neither agents of change nor controllers of resources, their position as receptors of change is afforded no less importance in a policy designed to initiate a positive causal sequence.

In order to fully grasp the ways in which the poor are integrated into Wyclif’s vision, it is necessary to acknowledge two central premises when approaching his programme of disendowment. The first, downplayed by both Aston and Aers, is that Wyclif’s reformist vision was inherently holistic, to be enacted within the framework of the political, if not ecclesiological, status quo to the benefit of society at large; as such, the pivotal role imagined for the lay lords and the financial gains they stood to incur do not inherently negate the position of the poor as beneficiaries. The second is that the macroeconomic structures of disendowment with which Aers is concerned ought not overshadow the programme’s immediately actionable elements —both material and spiritual — and their tangible bearing on the poor. Wyclif’s preoccupation with expounding mechanisms of reform means that the poor can be harder to situate; by accepting these aforementioned premises, however, locating concern for the poor in Wyclif’s programme becomes an easier task, one no longer complicated by Wyclif’s interest in the lay lords’ intervention and remuneration.

This article begins by examining the proposed implementation of disendowment, the part of Wyclif’s policy that is heaviest in its use of the poor as justification and lightest in its treatment of the poor as actors. Acknowledging the issues that the process of disendowment has presented for scholars such Aers, this article then moves to reframe these ‘problematic’ elements — namely, the agency and financial betterment of the lay lords — as constituent rather than dominant features of Wyclif’s reformist vision, bringing the poor back into focus in the process. Finally, pushing back against suspicions of disingenuous rhetoric regarding the poor, it highlights how Wyclif’s genuine concern for the poor is reinforced by his attention to the varied realities of involuntary poverty and encouragement of concrete actions that would improve the poor’s material and spiritual well-being.

Disendowment, Bona Pauperum, and the Secular Lords

Wyclif’s theory of disendowment, a topic that would occupy much of his theological output in the later years of his life, was first and most extensively articulated in his De civili dominio (c.1366–67). The central principle of Wyclif’s theory, the concept of ‘dominion by grace’, specified that only the righteous were capable of true possession, with any abuses resulting in the termination of God’s gifts and the loss of civil dominion.¹⁰ Under this precept, any ‘wicked’ clergymen — a broad term for Wyclif, who saw the clerical order as being rife with abuse — had no right to their tithes or endowments. Reinforcing this precept was a second principle that informed the theory of disendowment, namely that the religious vocation was irreconcilable with the possession of material goods, as temporalities served only to distract and corrupt the clergy from its spiritual mission. As civil dominion resulted from the Fall, and was thus inherently a matter guarded by human sanctions of civil law, temporalities were rightfully the domain of the secular arm. The Church had originally been endowed so as to ensure that the poor would be provided for, and yet endowment had resulted instead in the enrichment of the clergy.¹¹ As the Church had failed in its duty, the temporalities of the Church should be transferred to the laity, who were in actuality the rightful owners under the precepts of civil dominion. According to Wyclif’s reckoning, the duties of distribution fell to the king, the secular authority and vicar of God, who was divinely ordained to protect God’s law within the realm.¹² Granting the king control of the goods formerly held by the Church would ensure resource allocation in the best interests of the realm. Wyclif envisioned the appropriation of Church goods by the state to be the ideal arrangement for both entities: the Church would benefit through the spiritual betterment of its members who had been corrupted by possessions, and the economic exigencies of the state and its subjects would be answered by the availability of previously inaccessible wealth.

The heart of the matter of disendowment — the temporalities held by the Church — is inextricably linked to the involuntary poor in Wyclif’s writings. The most recurrent reference to the lay poor found in Wyclif’s works is his use of the term bona pauperum or ‘goods of the poor’ to represent ecclesiastical property, or more specifically, ecclesiastical property that had been misused.¹³ The Church’s squandering and hoarding superfluous goods and wealth, Wyclif argues in De civili dominio, not only deprives the poor of what is rightfully theirs, but injures them in the process: unjustly cheated of their share of the Church’s patrimony, the poor are left to suffer as the alms owed to them are distributed internally.¹⁴ By grounding his theory of disendowment on the idea that the clergy have effectively appropriated goods that belong to the poor, and by reinforcing this understanding by consistently employing terminology that emphasised this possession, Wyclif centres the involuntary poor within the narrative of disendowment. As he highlights the multitude of abuses in which bona pauperum are spent against their intended purpose, the lay poor are either explicitly or implicitly identified as an aggrieved party, their rightful ownership of the temporalities of the Church an omnipresent animus spurring the confiscation of ecclesiastical wealth.

The emphasis placed on the poor in Wyclif’s moral justification of disendowment seems to support a thesis of their centrality to Wyclif’s thought, as Aston put forward; nevertheless, while their violation at the hands of the Church may serve as a call to action, Wyclif does not grant the poor an active role in process of rectification. As Jeremy Catto has noted, Wyclif’s vision of an ideal Christian society hinged upon the concept of authority;¹⁵ in the case of disendowment, the justification for confiscating ecclesiastical wealth could only be maintained if the jurisdiction for doing so was granted to the appropriate authority. In keeping with this principle, Wyclif imagined the process of disendowment being executed within existing hierarchical structures. Under the guidance of the king, and with the intentions of correcting the ministers of the Church — bound as they were by Magna Carta, as Wyclif points out in De civili dominio, to watch over the liberties of the clergy — it was the lay lords who were to be the executors of the repossession of ecclesiastical wealth.¹⁶ The delegation of this responsibility to the secular lords as representatives of the king is the natural conclusion of Wyclif’s understanding of kingship, in which the duty of overseeing the use of civil possessions in the interest of the common good (res possessas ad utilitatem reipublicae custodire) falls to the monarch, and, by pragmatic extension, to his ministers.¹⁷ Wyclif augments the argument of jurisdiction, which he painstakingly expounds within the framework of civil law and postlapsarian theology, with a positive assessment of capability. In the cases where the clergy have failed in their duty to ‘prudently administer, conserve, and distribute the goods of the poor’ (ad procurandum, conservandum, et errogandum prudenter bona pauperum),¹⁸ Wyclif suggests that the responsibility of distribution should be passed over to the laity, who might perform the task more virtuously and with a greater understanding of the exigencies of active life than demonstrated by their contemplative religious counterparts.¹⁹ In framing the reallocation of temporalities as a rectification of almsgiving, Wyclif thus establishes that the role of the lay agents of disendowment should involve redress on behalf of the poor.

When we survey the ‘broad strokes’ of Wyclif’s programme of disendowment, namely its impetus and its objective, the poor emerge as integral — albeit passive — figures. The picture is complicated, however, when we move beyond Wyclif’s framework to examine the particulars of enactment; in other words, what form this policy of confiscating and redistributing ecclesiastical wealth would take. It seems natural to conclude that a policy centred on confiscating stolen and misappropriated goods would be executed with the intention of restoring said goods to the injured party. In such a scenario, bona pauperum would be removed from the Church and subsequently granted to their rightful owners, the poor, with the secular lords acting as ministering intermediaries.²⁰ However, it becomes clear in Wyclif’s later political tracts, particularly Dialogus sive speculum ecclesie militantis (1379), De blasphemia (1381), and Trialogus (1382/3), that restitution would be granted not to those to whom superfluous temporalities rightfully belonged, but rather to those who gifted them to the Church in the first place.²¹ Wyclif argues that the folly of endowment has resulted in the impoverishment of the lay lords, a divine punishment for granting the Church temporal goods; as such, the effect of disendowment would not be immediate restitution to the poor but rather enrichment of the lay lords as compensation for their losses.²² In taking possession of the Church’s temporalities, the secular lords would then be in a position to administer these goods in a way that ensured the common utility of the realm; an important nuance to note, of course, is that they themselves were candidates for recompense.

Despite the frequent allusions Wyclif makes to the misallocation of the poor’s patrimony by the Church, his strictly hierarchical model of disendowment nevertheless appears to privilege the enrichment of the lay lords over direct financial relief of the exploited poor. It is this facet of Wyclif’s theory of disendowment that has elicited the most debate regarding the true beneficiaries of this radical policy. The enrichment of lay lords occasioned through Wyclif’s theory of disendowment has led some scholars to dismiss any claims that care for the poor was implicit in its schema. Michael J. Wilks has claimed that Wyclif’s reinforcement and, indeed, fortification of the mechanics of theocratic monarchy rendered his theories ‘diametrically opposed to any system of popular rights’;²³ in her analysis of Wycliffite sermons, Kate Crassons has argued that the plan of reform centred on disendowment privileges the lay lords, to whom the definition of poverty is extended in that they are portrayed as victims of clerical robbery, resulting in the occlusion of the true poor and their hardships.²⁴ Wyclif’s commitment to the hierarchical societal structure, idealised in his writings as a system in which all classes would work for the benefit of each other, has been interpreted as blatant privileging of the aristocracy fuelled by a hope that they would respect their societal roles and extend benevolence to their subjects.

I suggest, however, that Wyclif’s policy of disendowment does not only engage with but is rather contingent upon a unified theory of social organisation in which the proper working of any one social stratum stood to benefit the others. While the obligation to exhibit charity in the ministration of God’s gifts extends to all Christians, as Wyclif himself points out, the secular role of the second estate (the lay lords) further binds its members to act in the interest of others.²⁵ Wyclif elaborates the demands the medieval tripartite society places on the secular lords in his religio-political tract on kingship De officio regis of 1379. The king is bound to protect his ‘poor liege laity’ (pauperes suos laicos legios) from threats that might cause them injury, be it foreign invasion or abuses on the part of the Church.²⁶ The lay lords, the enactors of the king’s interests, are similarly bound by duty to the third estate, to whom they provide the promise of defense in exchange for labour rendered.²⁷ The harmonious relations between these individual three estates, or to use Wyclif’s term, ‘hierarchies’ (yerarchia), ensures the prosperity of the realm.²⁸ This interpretation of the traditional tripartite societal structure fits neatly with Wyclif’s conception of a Christian society modelled on the ecclesia primitiva, which represented a community of faithful united.²⁹ Within this community, the aim of the individual should be the well-being of the whole;³⁰ as the clergy had ceased to function in the interest of the common good, the secular lords were expected to restore the health of the kingdom, the ‘whole’, by redistributing the misappropriated goods between its parts. For disendowment to function as a righteous and justifiable action, those tasked with its enactment had to operate in accordance with their social duties; otherwise, the transfer of ecclesiastical wealth to the lay lords would represent little more than a transfer of corruptive power from the Church to the secular branch. The fulfilment of the lay lords’ responsibilities to both the second and third estates must therefore be considered a condition of disendowment, not simply a hoped-for effect. Within this framework, the poor are both implicitly and explicitly accommodated as beneficiaries of Wyclif’s programme. The picture of disendowment that Wyclif paints, then, is of an operation firmly conducted within the parameters of good Christian faith and practice, to which benevolence is intrinsic rather than aspirational. The question that remains is what form this benevolence would take.

Mechanisms of Restitution: Taxation Alleviation and Poor Relief

The most obvious place to look for the poor within Wyclif’s programme of disendowment would be in references to traditional methods of poor relief, namely charitable donations and almsgiving. The writings of Wyclif are replete with discussion surrounding the distribution of alms; as I have already highlighted in the previous section, the confiscation of Church property was framed as a ‘rectification of almsgiving’ (rectificacione elemosine) by the secular lords since the clergy had failed in their duties to the poor.³¹ While a rectification of almsgiving might suggest redirecting alms towards those slighted under the clergy’s management, the possibilities increase when we consider what Wyclif meant by ‘alms’ and ‘almsgiving’. Wyclif took the unconventional position that the tithes collected by the Church were pure alms, which parishioners could withhold at will if they perceived the clergy to be sinful or shirking their duties of spiritual ministrations. Thus, when Wyclif speaks of the secular lords rectifying almsgiving, he could mean a number of things. Certainly the secular lords taking over almsgiving duties to ensure distribution to the poor is one way that almsgiving might be rectified; on the other hand, the repossession of alms given in perpetuity (endowment) or the withholding of tithes might be another way in which the broken system of almsgiving to the Church is put right. The matter is complicated by the fact that Wyclif remains relatively quiet about using the confiscated wealth of the Church for poor relief. Petitions like that found in De blasphemia, in which Wyclif argues that the Commons should be exempt from taxes until the clergy is disendowed and the bona pauperum are charitably expended on the indigent (bona pauperum caritative exponenda ad eorum egenciam), are few and far between.³² Of course, it would be foolish to discount the possibility that charitable almsgiving was so engrained in the medieval religious psyche that explicitly noting the lords’ intention to give alms, especially in light of the constant references to the exploited poor, the importance of charity, and the lords’ duty to assist the subjects of the realm, might have been redundant or unnecessary. Nonetheless, the details that Wyclif does divulge regarding the enactment of the policy of disendowment make it clear that he imagined the benefits for the poor largely taking a different form than direct poor relief.

Wyclif’s later works expand upon the framework of disendowment laid in De civili dominio by outlining how English society at large would profit from the enrichment of the lay lords. The system he envisions hinges on the presence of positive ripple effects from one level of society to another: if a powerful few were granted significant material benefits, the less wealthy would eventually reap these benefits through decreased economic pressures.³³ Wyclif outlines this process in several of his later works, namely his Dialogus sive speculum ecclesie militantis of 1379 and De blasphemia of 1381. The lay lords, he argues, have in recent times been forced to plunder the poor and destitute (rapere pauperes et egenos) because their own wealth is tied up supporting corrupt clerics and friars through ecclesiastical endowments and undeserved alms.³⁴ In freeing the lay lords from the burden of supporting the excesses of the Church and in endowing them with wealth, he argues, all three estates would benefit. The clergy would be released from their temporal concerns so as to focus on their religious duties; the lords would regain the dominion ‘seized’ from them by the Church and would no longer be forced (necessitantur) to oppress their tenants, rendering them more merciful masters; and with the lords once again in possession of the newly confiscated wealth, the lower classes, including the poor, would be relieved from cruel management and financial oppression.³⁵

These positive changes envisioned by Wyclif were largely linked to the alleviation of the taxation burden by the re-appropriation of ecclesiastical resources. The ongoing war with France had placed England in dire financial straits. With the royal treasury depleted and the population exhausted from excessive taxation, focus was turned on the Church as a possible source of revenue. Wyclif was outspoken in his endorsement of confiscating the temporalities of the Church to use for the defense of the realm. The king, Wyclif argued, possessed authority over all temporal matters and institutions within his realm, including the physical Church and its possessions. Therefore, when required to defend England in instances of war or invasion, the king had the right — indeed, the responsibility — to appropriate Church goods if they were needed to assist defensive efforts.³⁶ In De blasphemia, Wyclif goes so far as to present a figure of lost revenue, noting that more than £100 000 is lost annually to the clutches of the Church, money that could help the realm prosper if it was possessed by the king.³⁷ The fact that the king and his government continue to burden the poor with taxes while leaving the properties of the Church untouched, he notes, is unconscionable.³⁸ By divesting the Church of its wealth and granting it instead to the secular lords to distribute effectively, the war efforts could be funded through appropriated temporalities, instead of through taxation of a beleaguered population.

The 1381 Rebellion, while not attributable to Wyclif’s teachings as some contemporaries suggested, was employed by him as an example of how the endowment of the Church spawned unrest in the lower orders of society. De blasphemia, likely written shortly after the events of the rebellion, conveys a message of anger at the state of affairs and urgency in regard to corrective measures that needed to be taken. Wyclif suggests that revolts such as that of 1381 are the result of an unequal distribution of goods; while the Church enjoys sizeable holdings, the hands of the laity are forced by relative destitution.³⁹ While acknowledging that the peasants acted cruelly and illegally in the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury and others, Wyclif makes no attempts to conceal his belief that the blame for the revolt extends beyond the over-taxed and impoverished lower orders who sought justice through rebellion. Such actions could have easily been avoided, he argues, if the secular lords had stripped the clergy of their temporal possessions to pay the tax, or better yet, if the clergy had voluntarily given up their goods to do so with the understanding that superfluous resources were common to all.⁴⁰ Instead, the introduction of poll taxes in 1377 and 1380 placed this financial onus on those members of society who had previously been exempt from taxation, looping smallholders, wage-earners, and children as young as fourteen into the taxable population and excluding only ‘genuine beggars’.⁴¹ The tyranny — in this case, economic — that the king and the lords exerted over the lower classes was an ‘intolerable error’ (error intollerabilis); it was imperative that they stop extorting their tenants through taxation, as such a practice was a guarantee of ‘clamorous wrongdoing’ (iniuria clamorosa) — presumably, revolt.⁴² This statement is immediately followed by an exhortation to the kings and lords to perform their duty and confiscate the temporalities of the Church, confirming that the tacit addendum to Wyclif’s appeal on behalf of the people is that extortion is unnecessary when there is a more viable option.

Under Wyclif’s policy of disendowment, the primary benefit afforded to the poor through the divestment of Church wealth is tax relief — contingent on the lords employing the confiscated wealth in the defense of the realm — and less oppressive management. While the mechanisms of such a system of redistribution or taxation are not expounded, readers of Wyclif’s works might assume that Wyclif envisioned that the newly enriched lay lords would use the appropriated resources to support the Crown, all the while able to maintain a level of wealth as befit their station; as such, there would be no need to burden the poorer population with capitation, nor would the lay lords have to depend on harsh financial measures —amercements, high rents, etc. — that targeted this population to stabilise their own positions.

The question that is implicit when situating the poor within Wyclif’s theory of disendowment is whether a policy that benefitted the lay lords and a policy that benefitted the poor were by nature mutually exclusive. For several historians, including those mentioned above, the answer would appear to be ‘yes’. This assertion is perhaps informed by hindsight, as scholars are privileged with the opportunity for retrospective analysis; namely, that the ‘trickle down economics’ of disendowment was not to be successful, as evidenced in the sixteenth-century dissolution of the monasteries that saw the promotion of the self-interest of the lay lords above all else.⁴³ These lessons of history, paired with Wyclif’s emphasis on the agency of the secular lords and ambiguity regarding the tangible effects of disendowment on the lay poor, suggest that the poor were at best a secondary concern and, at worst, a rhetorical device employed to support a programme directed at the enrichment of the ruling classes.

There is, however, a fundamental flaw in the logic that underpins those assessments that use the historical failings of disendowment or point to contemporary economic realities as evidence that Wyclif’s policy did not account for the poor. The problem lies in the conflation of intention with practical applicability. Wyclif’s policy of disendowment ultimately boils down to a vague and stratified programme founded on good intentions of assistance; he is clear that the poor should have the wherewithal to serve God, yet he fails to incorporate sureties that would guarantee the improvement of the poor’s material circumstances.⁴⁴ In practice, as the aforementioned historians have noted, the vagueness of Wyclif’s plan regarding poor relief and the amount of power vested in the lay lords would likely create a situation ripe for abuse if actually enacted. Wyclif, however, circumvents the possibility of shifted corruption, because the delicate theological justification behind his theory of disendowment depends on the supposition of a consummate Christian society acting in accordance with caritas, the crucial foundation of rightful dominion.⁴⁵ As Anne Hudson has suggested, it is somewhat characteristic of Wyclif’s ideas to ‘remain remote from the realm of actuality’, resting on principles and preconditions that would be near impossible to guarantee in practice but that hold water within Wyclif’s philosophy.⁴⁶ Within this abstracted arena, operating within the framework of Christian caritative precepts and societal ideals and assuming a pursuit of the common good, concern for the lay lords and concern for the poor can comfortably co-exist.

It is clear, then, that there can be no discussion of the poor as beneficiaries of disendowment without acknowledgement of the lay lords’ remuneration through the confiscation of Church wealth — the former depends on the latter, and both are necessary to fulfil Wyclif’s vision of disendowment as a universally beneficial enterprise. However, setting aside the perceived impracticality of this entanglement of the poor’s plight with the enrichment of the lay lords, which I have already characterised above as something of a straw man, the question of rhetorical usage lingers: even if the poor were to reap the benefits of disendowment, does Wyclif’s more robust plan for the remuneration of the lay lords not suggest that the poor are only being mentioned strategically in order to justify a programme in which they are marginalised in practice? Aers voices such a suspicion in his conceptualisation of ‘poverty’ and ‘the poor’ as a three-pronged discursive fork in Wyclif’s writings. Of particular note are his suggested rhetorical uses for the second and third prongs, which pertain to the poor themselves:

One prong is the life of Christ. The second prong is the ‘poor ten­ants’ who took direct action in 1381. The third prong is the poor whom everyone considered to be ‘deserving,’ those listed in Luke 14:13 (the maimed, the lame, the blind). The first prong was used to discredit modern disciples of Christ in the regular orders, the episcopacy, and the priesthood, especially, one presumes, priests with benefices and funds like Wyclif’s own. (This prong had to be carefully administered to protect lay people from its point.) The second prong could be used with the first prong to support Wyclif’s disendowment thesis: had the Church been disendowed the lay ruling classes need not have imposed the poll tax and so their political security would have been strengthened. The third prong could be used to attack religious orders as counterfeit poor who deprived the real, legitimate poor of their due. All prongs were ordered to the disendowment of the Church under lay control and to the immense benefit of lay elites.⁴⁷

Although Aers concedes that Wyclif did not completely discount the poor from the imagined economic effects of disendowment, he stops short of subscribing to the idea that Wyclif was motivated by interests of the poor as well as those of the lay lords: in addition to the inevitable failure of trickle-down policies, he is unable to look past the perceived rhetorical utility of mobilising the trials of the poor for the benefit of the elite. It is a fair impression to come away with when confining one’s analysis to the process and structures of ‘big picture’ disendowment; however, to glean the fullest and most accurate picture of the weight held by the poor in Wyclif’s programme, it is necessary to examine closely the constituent and often overlooked elements of this bigger picture — how Wyclif defines the poor, the spiritual dimension of disendowment, and the everyday actions of reform that position the poor as direct beneficiaries.

Broadened Definitions

The perspicuity of Wyclif’s interpretation of poverty and how it might be addressed is hidden in plain sight, occluded somewhat by his participation in a discursive tradition in which ‘the poor’ (pauperes) often have a distinctly tropological function. Within the antifraternal discourse that proliferated in theological circles and popular satire during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in the face of the Franciscan poverty controversy, references to a generalised social group of ‘the poor’ served as a rhetorical device, often used in juxtaposition to the debauched friars as a means of highlighting or rejecting fraternal avarice.⁴⁸ These works tend not to cast light upon or demonstrate any insight into the conditions of involuntary poverty; rather, the poor are set up as the passive victims of the friars’ greed, their indigence placed in opposition to the detailed excesses of the mendicant orders. Building upon the well-established trope in which the hoarding of ‘communal’ goods is depicted as stealing from the poor, the friars are frequently described in antifraternal literature as thieves (fures) and robbers (latrones) who take what does not belong to them, a reference to their amassing of alms at the expense of the truly indigent.⁴⁹ These labels are often used in conjunction with the verbs such as ‘spoliare’ (to plunder, rob), ‘seducare’ (to seduce, to acquire deceitfully) or their vernacular equivalents, emphasising the friars’ tendency to rob both the wealthy of their money and the poor of the charitable gifts upon which they depended. Such rhetoric was employed, for example, by two major Oxford-based theologians roughly contemporary to Wyclif, Richard FitzRalph and Uthred of Boldon, with whose work Wyclif was closely familiar.⁵⁰ FitzRalph asserts in his Defensio curatorum that the able-bodied mendicancy practiced by the friars is synonymous with stealing the goods of one’s neighbour, namely the involuntary poor who must beg for their livelihood.⁵¹ In this same work he upholds the traditional definition of ‘the poor’, glossing his position on mendicancy with the stipulation that alms should only be given to the ‘feble, blynde, and halt’ who are unable to work.⁵² Uthred echoes the anti-mendicant sentiments of FitzRalph in his work Contra querelas fratrum, the product of a polemical feud with the friars at Oxford. In this tract he highlights the deceitful character of the mendicants, who pretend to be paupers but steal the alms that belong to the true poor of Christ.⁵³

These commonplace accusations of theft and fraud also permeate the works of Wyclif, who extends such criticisms beyond the mendicant orders to the entirety of the institutional Church. He frequently refers to the clerics, friars, and even desperate secular lords as robbing (spoliare) the poor of their goods, emphasising the corrupt state of the Church and the illicitness of its actions.⁵⁴ In his venomous attack against the friars in Book IV of Trialogus, he notes how this type of robbery is exacerbated in its contrariness to Scripture: ‘when the poor, the blind, the needy, and the weak should have such alms, as is clear in Luke 14[:23], it is obvious that a healthy beggar, drawing these alms away from them, injures these paupers; what is a more abominable theft?’⁵⁵ So rampant is this sin that it has come to define the pastoral office, as Wyclif suggests in his treatise of the same name (De officio pastorali) which makes numerous allusions to fraud and spoliation at the parochial level. Like FitzRalph and Uthred, Wyclif’s invocation of the poor in the same breath as his condemnation of the Church positions the former as a foil for the latter, an effective rhetorical device in itself. However, despite Wyclif’s employment of same language and invocation of similar images, he differs from FitzRalph and Uthred — and indeed, the tendencies of this literary tradition — in two key ways: first, in his socially attuned definition of involuntary poverty, which transforms the poor from amorphous stock figures into a diverse and nuanced social group; and second, in his proposal of concrete corrective measures that would improve the plight of the poor. In Wyclif’s writings, the poor are not reduced to rhetorical flourishes used to justify reform as they are in the works of FitzRalph and Uthred, but are rather part of the impetus to change and the suggested solution.

Wyclif’s willingness to probe and address the different iterations of poverty within society demonstrates a level of social consciousness, a recognition that poverty existed beyond the limited definitions so often regurgitated by decretists and lawmakers. For Wyclif, the title of ‘poor’ (pauperes) was not reserved fordestitute members of society; instead, it was used as relative term indicating a lack of something that might reasonably be expected, be it money, resources, or even agency. The myriad medieval definitions of poverty are evident in Wyclif’s works, in which he employs the term pauperes and its lexical cousins to refer at times to the indigent and incapacitated, at others to labourers or smallholders, occasionally even as reference to the entire third estate. This oscillation between definitions does not indicate an attempt on Wyclif’s part to conveniently lump together disparate groups of society to serve a rhetorical purpose, but rather represents an acknowledgement of various demographics adversely affected by the status quo, consistent with medieval conceptions of poverty as a spectrum. Although some measures proposed by Wyclif within his disendowment programme are targeted at certain groups of the poor while excluding others — for example, the alleviation of taxation burdens, which would have little to no direct effect on beggars or the abject poor, who were exempt from taxes levied on both property and individuals — their implementation would contribute to Wyclif’s vision of a society better equipped to ensure that all members were cared for. Wyclif’s attention to various iterations of poverty reveals a sensitivity to the plight of those who suffer unduly or are dispossessed.

The nuance in Wyclif’s understanding of poverty is evident in his eschewal of the traditional conflation of poverty with disability. While the ‘traditional’ poor are referenced in Wyclif’s writings, such allusions are usually only made within scriptural quotation or paraphrase. Wyclif cites the exhortation from Luke 14:13 on several occasions, which stipulates that riches should be shared with ‘pauperes debiles claudos et caecos’, a phrase that Wyclif renders as ‘the blind poor, the crippled poor, and the weak poor’ (pauperes caecos, pauperes claudos, et pauperes debiles).⁵⁶ The semantic shift in Wyclif’s wording introduces a distinction between these three categories — the blind, crippled, and weak — and the poor, demonstrating that they are not necessarily synonymous, but rather complementary. He notes that ‘Christ does not teach to give alms to the worldly rich, though they may be blind, crippled, or weak; he does, however, teach to give alms moderately to such three types who are poor.’⁵⁷ The quality of being poor, then, is distinct from these categories, although they are often connected. Wyclif seems to equate poverty with indigence or a state of misery, no matter its cause. Elaborating again on the same passage from Luke, Wyclif raises a possible objection by noting that it could be argued that able-bodied (potentes) men who are not lame or blind can be deserving of alms if they have fallen into ‘corporeal misery’ (ad corporalem miseriam).⁵⁸ He accepts that such men are welcome at the proverbial banquet table on account of their weakness and bodily need.⁵⁹

Wyclif makes an even sharper deviation from the traditional definition of poverty in his acknowledgment of the working poor, especially in his works written shortly before and after the 1381 Revolt. The tenentes pauperes hard-pressed by the lay lords, of whom Wyclif speaks at length in Dialogus and De blasphemia, are a social group characterised as ‘poor’ without exhibiting the conventional traits of biblical poverty; they are clearly not the blind, disabled, ill, or elderly, nor are they beggars dependent on alms. In his De blasphemia and Trialogus, grounded more firmly in economic tensions and palpable social unrest than his earlier theological treatises, Wyclif variably interchanges the term pauperes with vulgares, tenentes, and comunitas to describe those people being robbed and oppressed under the current status quo. Steven Justice views the conflation of these terms, ‘words that in fact have different connotative meanings’, as rhetorical slipperiness that allows him frame all those who are not lords or clergy as rural workers and members of Christ’s poor, whom the king and lords have a duty to defend through religious and pseudo-manorial obligation.⁶⁰ I would suggest, however, that Wyclif’s comprehensive conception of who might be considered ‘poor’ does not have to be read as strategic, but rather can be read as reflective of the realities to which he is responding in these works. The tenentes pauperes to whom Wyclif refers are likely those whose landholdings placed them at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale: smallholders and cottars who, despite their elevated economic position in relation to day labourers or beggars, still encountered precarity and were beholden to landlords and subject to taxation — largely the same people, as it happens, who drove the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.⁶¹ Although the demographic effects of the Black Death generally resulted in the improved economic position of peasants, the decades following the plague saw these effects countered by the introduction of poll taxes and concerted efforts on the part of landlords to re-establish conditions more in line with the pre-1350 status quo by maintaining high rents, doubling down on amercements, and using manor courts to enforce service obligations: practices, in short, that align with Wyclif’s assessment of tenant maltreatment that could present significant financial pressures for those already straddling the line of subsistence.⁶² Wyclif’s concern with existing poverty and continuing impoverishment as a byproduct of endowment, expressed at length in both De blasphemia and Trialogus, squares neatly with the inclusion of a wider group of ‘poor’ who have demonstrably suffered from a system economically hamstrung by clerical wealth. No longer confined to the socially handicapped ‘deserving’ poor, the pauper of Wyclif’s later writings is also the common man, able-bodied and fulfilling his social role, who nevertheless suffers due to circumstances outside of his control.

Instead of reading the social expansiveness of Wyclif’s ‘poor’ as conveniently vague, designed to justify the lay lords’ actions by casting England’s commons as suffering dependents whom they are duty-bound to protect, it can be read as firmly in alignment with Wyclif’s holistic and reactionary reformist vision. The best indication that Wyclif’s broadened conception of the poor is not purely politically expedient is his willingness to ‘put his money where his mouth is’ — that is, to propose varied solutions through disendowment that would correct ills and injustices and different levels. There is no reason to suggest that Wyclif’s idea of taxation alleviation, fleshed out in De blasphemia, did not seem to him a valid way to address the contemporary concerns of the tenentes pauperes who had buckled under fiscal pressures — after all, these were not the type of poor who were necessarily candidates for charitable handouts. Something that is often overlooked in this discussion, however, is that those members of the poor who did need to make recourse to almsgivers and community support are also accounted for in Wyclif’s programme at the level of immediate personal action. In the small-scale but collectively significant policies designed to be enacted by any individual, Wyclif ensures that the charitable and spiritual needs of the poor are no longer neglected on account of the greed of a money-mongering Church.

Corrective Measures: Material and Spiritual

Although his frequent recourse to formulaic language and accusations might suggest otherwise, one of the clearest places in which Wyclif lays out the direct rerouting of resources from the Church to the hands of the poor is in his late-career antifraternal writings (1379–84).⁶³ Aston has suggested that Wyclif’s anti-mendicant stance might be read as an ‘impassioned plea on behalf of the miseries of the poor’, a call for Christians to rectify their actions that had resulted in the enrichment of friars at the expense of those in need.⁶⁴ While much ink has been spilled on the root causes and trajectory of Wyclif’s antifraternalism, illuminating a complex web of doctrinal and personal motivations, Sean Otto has recently argued convincingly that the beating heart of this position is Wyclif’s ‘very real pastoral concerns’ that placed him at odds with the theology and practices of the friars.⁶⁵ Those who emerge in Wyclif’s writings as the most ‘imperiled’ by the mendicant orders — to use Otto’s turn of phrase — are the poor, whose plight Wyclif considers to be inextricably linked to the friars’ abuses.⁶⁶ Instead of recycling empty complaints that position the poor as convenient victims, Wyclif uses well-established accusations such as the friars’ thievery from the poor as a springboard for suggestions of concrete corrective actions.

If Wyclif’s theory and mechanisms for disendowment exist in the abstract, situated within an idealised Christian landscape and contingent upon the mobilisation of Crown and aristocrats, the friars represent an outlet for immediate and real action on the part of the average Englishman — a step towards the betterment of Christian society by espousing charity and correcting patterns of almsgiving so as to favour the poor instead of the friars.⁶⁷ Reminding his audience that alms must always be given discriminately, Wyclif emphasises that friars do not count among the worthy objects of the poor, blind, lame, and infirm, and therefore must not be granted alms in their current state.⁶⁸ Furthermore, Wyclif strips the act of almsgiving to friars of its spiritual beneficence; instead of performing an act of bodily mercy, the almsgiver becomes complicit in the friars actions and thus acts contrary to the law of Christ.⁶⁹ Wyclif attempts to exclude the friars from the spiritual contract embedded in charitable giving, in which the act of almsgiving constitutes bodily edification on the part of the receiver and spiritual edification on the part of the giver. By denying the giver this benefit and saddling him with a share of the friars’ sins, Wyclif positions the poor as the only object of charity capable of fulfilling this contract within the current status quo. The poor are simultaneously posed as the heart of the friars’ failings and as the key to their expiation as Christians. The proper practice of evangelical poverty would have inspired the friars to take and use only what was needed so as to allow superfluities to be redistributed to those in need, with the understanding that to use more than required of one’s station was to throw the three parts of society and the Church into imbalance.⁷⁰ Instead, they had demonstrated themselves not to be compelled by God’s love — the true gauge of evangelical poverty — but rather by avarice.⁷¹ Not only do they take more than their share, but they make no efforts to redistribute their resources; as Wyclif notes, unlike St. Paul who begged for the poor, they neither solicit alms for them nor work to earn money that could later be donated to them.⁷² If they truly internalised and promoted the evangelical counsel of sharing one’s possessions with the poor — as they encouraged the laity to do for them — then they too should partake in this act of charity by rejecting luxuries and ‘by distributing the goods of the poor, which they had stolen through fraudulence, to the poor, blind, crippled, and weak, by making amends for those things unjustly taken and by guarding against committing future injuries’.⁷³ In the case of both layman who errs in his charity and friar who profits through the auspices of poverty, the poor are presented by Wyclif as the key component of societal and ecclesiastical correction and atonement.

Wyclif’s concern for the material wellbeing of the poor was imbricated with his concern for their spiritual wellbeing. The ecclesiastical office he envisaged existed only to carry out spiritual service, which entailed communicating the teachings of Scripture to the congregation and attending to their souls through confession and the sacraments.⁷⁴ This mission had been hindered, however, by the introduction of temporal goods into the Church, which encouraged preoccupation with worldly affairs and engendered greed within its ministers. Wyclif believed that the avarice of the clergy had led not only to robbery of the poor but also neglect of their souls, as pastoral duties became incentivised by potential reward. The accumulation of wealth, Wyclif argues in De officio pastorali, has become a precept of the Church, with prelates essentially ordering the local clergy to ‘plunder your poor sheep and simple people of so much money, or else I will excommunicate you to the highest degree and will bar them from entering the church and from divine service’.⁷⁵ Wyclif perceived the clerics, monks, and friars as privileging the wealthy, in hopes that they would receive alms, charitable bequests, and even personal compensation in exchange for their ministry. The poor, who had nothing substantial to offer — already, as Wyclif notes, gifting their meagre personal effects to the parish churches and mendicants — were thus excluded from pastoral care.

Much of Wyclif’s criticism regarding the commodification of pastoral duties was directed against the mendicant orders, who had in the last century assumed the pastoral role in many communities — or, as many argued, usurped the pastoral privileges of the clergy. The accusations against the friars ranged from their tendency to privilege burial over baptism as it came with a fee, to their preference of hearing only confessions of the rich and granting them easy penance.⁷⁶ These charges were echoed by Wyclif, who saw in the friars’ pastoral habits a perversion of the Church’s mission to minister to the poor. He accused the mendicants of allowing greed to dictate their preaching habits, claiming that the friars choose their audience to maximise their profit. Their lack of interest in preaching to the very poor (pusillo populo et paupere), who presented no potential for temporal gain, precluded this segment of the population from hearing the word of God.⁷⁷ More alarming was the economy of exchange implicit in the act of absolution. While rich men ‘go to confession laughing’ (ridendo adire confessores), sure that their sins will be forgiven for a small fee, the poor have no hope of receiving absolution.⁷⁸

Wyclif’s criticisms in this vein concerned not only the mendicant orders, but other groups of religious. His treatise De officio pastorali focuses on the failings of bishops, curates, and parish priests, examining how the corruption of the Church manifests at the ground level. Nowhere is the relationship between the pastor and his flock more immediate than in the parochial context, and consequently, nowhere is the curate’s responsibility for the souls in his care greater. This vocation, Wyclif argues, demands a commitment to pastoral care above that required by any other Church official.⁷⁹ There is a sense of reciprocity implicit in this relationship: the parishioners provide for the bodily needs of the curates through payment of tithes and charitable collection, with the understanding that the curate will attend to their spiritual wellbeing. The curate, Wyclif notes, ought to be mindful that they receive their income from the gifts of ‘widows and poor subjects’. By depending on the collections of the indigent, the curates incur the responsibility of ‘answering individually for each one of those on the day of judgment’.⁸⁰ However, even as the fattening of their benefices weighed on poor parishioners, leaving an ‘austere condition of miserable poverty’ in its wake, the curates failed to uphold their side of this tacit contract.⁸¹ The hospitality owed to the itinerant poor (pauperes peregrinos) by resident parish clergy was forsaken in favour of entertaining ‘secular lords and tyrants’ with sumptuous feasts, resulting in a mere illusion of charity that in reality engorged the rich and left those for whom ‘simple board would be a banquet’ (lauticia de simplici cibario) without aid.⁸² The parish priests and, even more so, the religious orders are similarly admonished for accepting money in exchange for prayers and masses to benefit the living and the dead. Wyclif claims that an ‘insidious fiction’ (subdola ficcio) has been invented in which the prayers of priests and monks are privileged over the prayers of the layman, resulting in a system that encourages prayer for hire.⁸³ This practice deceives both lords and poor alike, as the prayers of monks and other religious hold no more power than those of faithful labourers (fideles laboratores). By convincing the poor to pay for prayers when their own would have proven just as effective, the clergy and monks are guilty of defrauding the poor.⁸⁴

It is in the context of examining the faults of the parish clergy that Wyclif proposes the withholding of tithes as a corrective measure. Wyclif accepts that tithes are necessary in that they sustain the clergy bodily, providing them with a moderate livelihood so that they might minister to their parish.⁸⁵ In receiving tithes in lieu of labouring for sustenance, the clergy are free to devote their time to the care of souls. The obligation to pay these tithes is, however, contingent on whether the curate is carrying out his pastoral duties; those who fail in such duties as preaching and care of the souls are consequently deprived of the title under God’s law by which they can rightfully claim tithes.⁸⁶ If the faithful determine that a curate is neglecting his pastoral office, they are permitted to withhold tithes and offerings.⁸⁷ Subsequently, the funds that would have been collected as tithes should instead be put to pious use (pios usus) elsewhere.⁸⁸ The potential benefits afforded to the poor through this policy are twofold: not only are they are released from any obligation to financially support curates who exploit or spurn them, but also, touted as the rightful beneficiaries of tithes once the basic needs of the clergy have been met, they are the natural recipients of those funds redirected for ‘pious use’. Wyclif warns that the withholding of tithes ought not be carried out lightly, but should penalise only serious transgressions of office on the part of the curate.⁸⁹ However, when viewed alongside the top-down disendowment model, the policy of withholding tithes appears to answer to the prevalent system of medieval poor relief that operated at community level, often between neighbours. Wyclif’s position seems to encourage a degree of invigilation in order to ensure the spiritual needs of all parishioners, including the poor, are being met by the local clergy, all while providing agency to the third estate to enact change through penalisation (withholding tithes) and rectification (distributing said funds as alms) of injurious practices.

Situating the poor in Wyclif’s works reveals a recurring theme of concern for the plight of the indigent that transcends rhetoric or dependence on tropes of Christian charity. There is substance to Wyclif’s treatment of the poor, based on an understanding of poverty that goes beyond the widely accepted basic definition and touches upon those who have suffered oppression, exploitation, and privation: the second-hand social effects, Wyclif posits, of an endowed and covetous Church. This expanded view of poverty could be seen as a by-product of Wyclif’s understanding of the Church as a single animated body; the excesses of the prima pars of the Church have disturbed the balance of the whole, casting the secunda and tercia partes into relative impoverishment. The integrality of all three parts of the Church to its whole is reflected in the wide scope of the envisioned effects of Wyclif’s reforms. This centrality is reinforced by the sheer frequency with which the poor are referenced, drawing them out of the margins and into the light and confirming their inclusion in Wyclif’s reformist vision.

Conclusion — An Assessment of Centrality and Benefit

The recurring presence of the poor in Wyclif’s theology provides fertile ground for the assessment of their role in Wyclif’s theory of disendowment. If not primary agents in Wyclif’s policies of reform, the poor are certainly intended beneficiaries, whose perceived needs are constantly weighed and whose welfare is examined in relation to the status quo and Wyclif’s proposed changes. If Aston’s thesis of the poor’s centrality is overly rosy, failing to fully account for the role of the elite and the substantial benefits they stood to gain, then Aers’s thesis of ‘de-centring’— the rhetorical foregrounding of poverty in the abstract and the simultaneous marginalization of the poor in practice — is perhaps too cynical;⁹⁰ while one must accept a number of qualifications when arguing for the integrality of the poor, as Aers suggests, I would argue that these qualifications need not be weighed as heavily as he and others have done.

Wyclif’s allegiance to the idea of tripartite reciprocity between the king and lords, the clergy, and the commons and his conviction that benefits would funnel down through this traditional social hierarchy has elicited the most debate regarding the true beneficiaries of his policy of disendowment. The enrichment of the lay lords and the vague trickle-down effects envisioned for the poor do indeed represent a major qualification that ought to be thoroughly and objectively unpacked. The problems this policy presented must be acknowledged from the outset. Wyclif’s plan was imperfect and ill-conceived in parts, proving particularly short-sighted in its focus on the act of disendowment and its hesitation to explore the after-effects in detail. It is easy to read this policy as an act of deference to his aristocratic patrons and allies, imbued with a blind faith that the lay lords whom he paints as immaculate agents of ecclesiastical reform will direct at least some of their gains towards charitable pursuits. This interpretation is, however, at odds with the preoccupation with the poor exhibited in Wyclif’s theology. They are afforded significant consideration as Wyclif unfolds his agenda for widespread reform over numerous works; indeed, even as disendowment remains a hypothetical future initiative, Wyclif encourages actions that in the here-and-now would divert resources earmarked for the Church to the hands of the poor, whether it be through charitable donations withheld from friars or tithes withheld from corrupt priests and given instead as alms. As such, the poor in Wyclif’s theory of disendowment cannot be regarded simply as a convenient justification for the enactment of this policy, but rather as a faction of society whose plight, along with that of other social groups, could be improved if such changes were made. It is clear that Wyclif believed that when functioning correctly under Christian precepts and within a set of moral parameters, the distinct roles of the three orders could be fulfilled in a way that maximised the utility of the common good.

The second qualification that must be made concerns this notion of common utility and its realisation in the case of the poor. Wyclif’s theory of disendowment is unabashedly ‘big picture,’ focused on large-scale effects while the leaving the mechanisms of such changes underexplored. This is evident in his discussion of the redistribution of the bona pauperum at the hands of the lay lords, in which he largely fails to specify how this ministration would take place or exactly to whom it would be directed. Without any tangible framework in place for efforts of redistribution, it is difficult to pinpoint how exactly the poor would reap the monetary benefits of this policy. This haziness surrounding avenues of poor relief in the aftermath of disendowment might be mistaken for disinterest or apathy on Wyclif’s part; after all, the explicit enrichment of the lay lords is not countered with any mention of the direct enrichment of the peasantry or the poor. The underlying assumption here is problematic, however, as it conflates the concept of ‘benefit’ with fiscal betterment by means of direct restitution. While almsgiving is certainly factored into Wyclif’s idea of poor relief, the primary advantage he imagines does not involve putting money in the hands of the poor, but rather distributing it in a way that indirectly improves their living conditions and lightens pecuniary obligations. The poor will suffer less exploitation at the hands of the Church and less oppression under increasingly benevolent masters; they may not be directly enriched, their need may not be wholly eradicated, but they will benefit by virtue of improved living conditions which, in their ideal realisation, would alleviate financial burden and allow a greater degree of resource retention. The incentive of late medieval charity was not to eradicate poverty — such a task was essentially unfathomable — but rather to alleviate the misery and wretchedness that went hand in hand with indigence.⁹¹ The benefits to the poor proposed through Wyclif’s policy of disendowment can be seen as responding to the same basic objective.

Wyclif’s eagerness to enact radical ecclesiastical reform should not be equated with eagerness to enact social reform or overhaul the social order, despite the implicit social repercussions of the former. For Wyclif the societal structure of the secular world was a necessary constant; while he might express qualms or suggest changes regarding the way certain offices or aspects of society operated, the structural integrity of society was generally assumed and accepted. Inherent to this reckoning of society was the notion of hierarchy and acceptance that different social stations necessitated different things as befitted their status. It should come as no surprise, then, that Wyclif’s theory of monetary redistribution would not necessarily operate under a policy of equalisation. Following this logic, the financial privileging of the lay lords should not be interpreted as evidence that poor were less important or only facetiously accounted for in Wyclif’s programme of disendowment; in Wyclif’s estimation, only by meeting the needs of the lay lords could the needs of the poor be met in turn. Benefits to the lay lords do not, therefore, preclude benefits to the poor — especially when the notion of ‘benefit’ is understood as a concept broader than monetary enrichment.

* * * *

Let us return to this paper’s point of departure, the early fifteenth-century iteration of Wyclif’s theory of disendowment: The Lollard Disendowment Bill. The concrete methods of poor relief outlined in the Bill stand in contrast to Wyclif’s nebulous vision of almsgiving and redistribution of ecclesiastical wealth. Where the primary benefits to the poor under Wyclif’s programme are largely indirect, affecting the poor’s way of life by alleviating a degree of fiscal and feudal pressures, the Lollard Bill outwardly subscribes to more traditional channels of direct relief. However, the concern demonstrated for the poor by the authors of the Lollard Bill, while manifested in a more tangible way, is not so different in essence than that exhibited by Wyclif’s vision of a post-disendowment society; in fact, I would argue that the former makes explicit the ideas implicit in the latter. The adherence to the hierarchical societal structure and the anticipation of a ‘ripple effect’, both of which have cast doubt over the legitimacy of Wyclif’s concern for the poor, are present even in the Lollard programme. Preceding the calls for the establishment and endowment of almshouses, the Lollard authors outline how the incomes seized from various abbeys should be allotted to the king’s treasury and used to endow ‘xv erles, xv m¹ knyhtes and squyers moo thenne be now sufficyauntly rentyd’.⁹² The harm caused by the endowment of the church has affected all levels of society, so the remedy should likewise look to healing each estate in a way that best and most holistically benefits the realm. This sentiment is reflected in the closing remarks of the Lollard Bill, which state:

Of euery estate they [the clergy] take luste and ese and putte fro hem the travaylle and takyth profytes that shulden kome to trewe men, the which lyf and evyll ensample of hem hath be so longe vicious that alle the comen peple, bothe lordes and symple comvnes, beth now so vicious and enfecte thurth boldeship of here synne that vnneth eny man dedith God ne the devyll.⁹³

Thirty-odd years earlier, Wyclif may have expressed the same perspective, eager to see the realisation of a society in which all walks of life were freed from avaricious exploitation and granted the material ‘wherewithal to serve God’, relative to the exigencies of their station — be they England’s ‘noble lords’ or humblest paupers.

1 The bill is reproduced in full or quoted in several chronicles, although these texts variably date it to 1407 or 1410. For further discussion of dating, see ‘The Lollard Disendowment Bill’, in Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp.203–05.

2 Ibid., pp.135–37.

3 Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp.339–40.

4 The exact dating of Wyclif’s works is complicated by a patchy manuscript tradition and evidence that suggests Wyclif revised his earlier works between 1381 and his death in 1384. Nevertheless, as Stephen Lahey notes, scholars can still sketch a ‘consistent intellectual biography’ while remaining cognisant of possible reshaping and revisions (Stephen E. Lahey, John Wyclif [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], p.8). The writings considered in this chapter include the ten works that comprise Wyclif’s Summa Theologie, the sermon cycle, and shorter free-standing treatises, all of which were composed between 1375 and 1384 and reflect the politico-ecclesiological considerations that characterised the later phase of Wyclif’s career. On Wyclif’s intellectual trajectory and revisions, see Anne Hudson, ‘The Development of Wyclif’s Summa Theologie’, in John Wyclif: logica, politica, teologia, ed. Mariateresa Fumagalli and Stefano Simonetta (Florence: SISMEL edizioni del Galluzzo, 2003), pp.57–70 and. Lahey, John Wyclif, pp.3–31. Approximate dates given in this paper will be taken from Williel R. Thomson, The Latin Writings of John Wyclyf: An Annotated Catalog (Toronto: PIMS, 1983).

5 Noteworthy studies of Wycliffite treatments of poverty include David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing, 1360–1430 (London: Routledge, 1988); Anne Hudson, ‘Poor preachers, poor men: Views of Poverty in Wyclif and his Followers,’ in Häresie und vorzeitige reformation im spätmittelalter, ed. František Šmahel and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1998), pp.41–53; Stephen E. Lahey, Philosophy and Politics in the Thought of John Wyclif (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.133–40; Helen Barr, ‘Wycliffite Representations of the Third Estate’, in Lollards and their Influence in Late Medieval England, ed. Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick G. Pitard (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), pp.197–216; and Kate Crassons, The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2010).

6 David Aers, ‘John Wyclif: Poverty and the Poor’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 17 (2003): p.55; Margaret Aston, ‘“Caim’s Castles”: Poverty, Politics, and Disendowment’, in Church Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Barry Dobson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), pp.46–81.

7 Aston, ‘“Caim’s Castles”’, pp.62, 65; Aers, ‘John Wyclif,’ pp.68–9.

8 Wilks, Michael J. ‘Predestination, Property, and Power: Wyclif’s Theory of Dominion and Grace.’ In Wyclif: Political Ideas and Practice. Papers By Michael Wilks., ed. Anne Hudson (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000 [1965]), pp.31–32; Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp.75–89.

9 See below, pp.29–33 for an extended examination of Wyclif’s definitions of “the poor” and the varied terminology he uses to denote certain subgroups. It is worth noting that Wyclif consistently differentiates between involuntary and evangelical poverty; see Lahey, Philosophy and Politics, 136–40 for a discussion of this distinction.

10 John Wyclif, Tractatus de civili dominio, v.1–4, ed. Reginald Lane Poole, Johann Loserth, and F.D. Matthew (London: Wyclif Society, Trübner & Co, 1885–1904), I.1. Henceforth referenced as DCD.

11 DCD III.14.217.

12 DCD I.19.34; I.37.265–269. See. Lahey, Philosophy and Politics, pp.171–199 for a full discussion of Wyclif’s theory of kingship underpinning the role of the king in disendowment.

13 The synonymy between the goods of the Church and the goods of the poor and the principle of the latter is clearly set out in Wyclif, Sermones, 4 vols., ed. Johann Loserth (London: Wyclif Society, Trübner & Co., 1888–89), II.55.407.

14 DCD II.10.102.

15 J.I. Catto, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford, 1356-1430’, in The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. II: Late Medieval Oxford, ed. J.I. Catto and T.A.R. Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p.202.

16 DCD II.5.45.

17 DCD I.19.132.

18 DCD I.42.340.

19 Ibid. On the prudent administration of temporal goods by the laity, DCD II.4.31–32.

20 Wyclif vaguely alludes to this idea of righteous restitution in DOR 4.69–70, ‘Sed tales curati per abusum temporalium nedum iniuriant regi et regno sed pauperibus quos spoliant bonis suis. Ergo rex debet eos in hoc defendere et non restat defensio nisi secuta fuerit restitucio’. [But such curates, through the abuse of temporalities, injure not only the king and kingdom, but also the poor whose goods they plunder. Therefore the king ought to defend them in this matter, and the defense must continue unless restitution follows.]

21 John Wyclif, Tractatus de Blasphemia, ed. Michael Henry Dziewicki (London: Wyclif Society, Trübner & Co., 1893), 13.199. Henceforth referenced as DB.

22 John Wyclif, Dialogus sive Speculum ecclesie militantis, ed. Alfred W. Pollard (London: Wyclif Society, Trübner & Co, 1886), p.36. Henceforth referenced as Dialogus. See also John Wyclif, Trialogus, Trialogus, ed. Gotthardus Lechler, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869), iv.18.307.

23 Wilks, ‘Predestination, Property, and Power’, p.32.

24 Crassons, The Claims of Poverty, pp.141–42.

25 DCD I.11.77 for Wyclif’s elaboration on the Christian’s duty to act in the service of others, as lord and servant.

26 John Wyclif, Tractatus de Officio Regis, ed. Alfred W. Pollard and Charles Sayle (London: Wyclif Society, Trübner & Co., 1887), 4.69–70. Henceforth referenced as DOR.

27 DOR 2.59.

28 Ibid.

29 DCD I.43.359.

30 DCD II.17.235.

31 DOR 3.64–65.

32 DB 17.271.

33 Aers, ‘John Wyclif’, p.62.

34 DB 17.266, 269. See also John Wyclif, ‘Speculum secularium dominorum,’ in Opera minora, ed. Johann Loserth (London: Wyclif Society, Trübner & Co., 1883), iii.82–83.

35 Dialogus 36.85; ‘De Servitute Civili et Dominio Seculari’, in Opera minora,) ii.150.

36 DOR 7.185.

37 DB 18.274.

38 DOR 7.159. In reference to the friars in particular: Trialogus, iv.35.369.

39 DB 6.83.

40 DB 13.190.

41 See Carolyn Fenwick, The Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379, and 1381, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1998) for taxation schedules; Samuel Cohn, Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp.160–61.

42 DB 13.198.

43 Aers, ‘John Wyclif’, p.68.

44 DB 2.32.

45 Wyclif develops his claim that caritas is a precondition for Grace and therefore civil dominion across DCD I. For a succinct explanation, see. Lahey, Philosophy and Politics in the Thought of John Wyclif, pp.105–106.

46 Hudson, ‘Poor preachers, poor men,’ p. 49.

47 Aers, ‘John Wyclif,’ pp.68–69. Italics my own.

<48 Constant J. Mews and Anna Welch, eds. Introduction to Poverty and Devotion in Mendicant Cultures (London: Routledge, 2016), p.3.

49 See, for example, St. John Crysostom, who argued that ‘Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life’. Anne M. Scott, ‘Experiences of Poverty’, in Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France, ed. Anne M. Scott (London: Routledge, 2012). William of Saint-Amour (1200–1272), one of the most virulent early critics of the friars, employs such language in his Collectiones to describe the faults of the friars, likening them to thieves and robbers who take what is not theirs and ‘kill through spiritual seduction’. Penn Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp.60–61.

50 Wyclif makes many references to the FitzRalph, the Bishop of Armagh (Armacanus episcopus) (c.1300–1360) in his writings, particularly when addressing the Armenian question in De veritate sacrae scripturae. Uthred (d.1397) was based at Oxford at the same time as Wyclif, and vocally spoke out against him; historians are divided as to whether portions of Wyclif works answered to a missing treatise of Uthred. See Geoffrey L. Dipple, ‘Uthred and the friars: apostolic poverty and clerical dominion between FitzRalph and Wyclif’, Traditio 49 (1994), pp.238–39, n.7.

51 Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition, p.139.

52 Richard FitzRalph, Defensio curatorum, trans. John Trevisa, in Dialogus inter militem, Richard FitzRalph’s sermon: ‘Defensio curatorum’ and Methodius: Þe bygynnyng of Þe world and Þe ende of worldes, ed. A.J. Perry (Oxford: EETS, 1971), p.88.

53 Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition, p.111.

54 Supplementum Trialogi viii.445, iii.421; DCD II.3.24; DOR 4.69–70, among others.

55 Trialogus iv.28.343–344, ‘Cum pauperes caeci egeni debiles de lege Dei debent habere tales eleemosinas, ut patet Lucae xiv, patet quod valide mendicans, ab illis haec subtrahens, injuriatur illis pauperibus; sed quae rapina nefandior?’

56 Sermones II.25.186; IV.13.105; Trialogus iv.17.305.

57 Trialogus iv.17.305, ‘Christus non docet eleemosinare divites mundo, licet sint caeci, claudi, debiles, docet autem eleemosinare tres tales pauperes moderate’. This distinction is shared by FitzRalph in De pauperie salvatoris. although he uses it to reinforce traditional views of the deserving poor, failing to examine or include those poor who are not blind, crippled, or weak. See R.O. Brock, ‘An Edition of Richard FitzRalph’s De Pauperie Salvatoris, Books V, VI, and VII’ (Ph.D. Diss., University of Colorado Boulder, 1953), VI.i.76–78. The Wycliffite adoption of Wyclif’s use of ‘poor’ as a qualifying adjective beside caecos, claudos, and debiles has been noted by Jill Havens in ‘Shading the Grey Area: Determining Heresy in Middle English Texts’ in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson, ed. Helen Barr and Ann M. Hutchison (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), p.344.

58 Sermones IV.13.107.

59 Ibid.

60 Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp.85–86.

61 Tenentes as a term for tenant farmers and those engaged in small-scale agricultural enterprise has been recorded by Christopher Dyer in Standards of living in the later Middle Ages: social change in England c.1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10; Edward Miller and John Hatcher, Medieval England – rural society and economic change 1086–1348 (New York: Routledge, 1978), chapter 5; Christopher Dyer, ‘The Social and Economic Background to the Rural Revolt of 1381,’ in The English Rising of 1381, ed. Rodney Hilton and T. H. Aston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp.15–30.

62 Dyer, Standards of living in the later Middle Ages, 147; H. Kitsikopoulos, ‘The Impact of the Black Death on Peasant Economy in England, 1350–1500,’ The Journal of Peasant Studies, 29, 2 (2002): pp.82–83.

63 Wyclif’s relationship with the friars began to sour definitively in 1379 over his stance on transubstantiation, condemned by representatives of the mendicant orders at the Blackfriars Council of 1382. The antifraternalism of these later works is more precise, vitriolic, and expansive than the milder criticisms of the friars found in Wyclif’s earlier works.

64 Aston, ‘Caim’s Castles,’ pp.62, 65.

65 Sean Otto, ‘Anti-fraternalism and the Sources of John Wyclif’s Sermones,’ in Before and After Wyclif: Sources and Textual Influences, ed. Luigi Campi and Stegano Simonetta (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), p.154.

66 Ian Christopher Levy similarly suggests that a central qualm of Wyclif’s is that the friars represent an ‘affront to charity’ that proves injurious to the destitute. Ian Christopher Levy, ‘Wyclif and the Christian Life,’ A Companion to John Wyclif, Late Medieval Theologian, ed. Ian Christopher Levy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 299–300.

67 The centralising of charity in fourteenth-century rhetoric as a lens through which criticism of clerics and friars could be conceived is examined in Wendy Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp.89–119.

68 Sermones II.46.338; III.57.499–500.

69 Wyclif, ‘Purgatorium sectae Christi,’ v.303; ix.312. See Fiona Somerset, ‘Before and After Wyclif: Consent to Another’s Sins,’ in Europe After Wyclif, ed. J. Patrick Hornbeck II and Michael Van Dussen (Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2016), pp.135–72.

70 See above, p.10.

71 Wyclif, ‘De septem donis spiritus sancti,’ chapter vi; ‘De fundatione sectarum,’ xiii.62–65; ‘De quattuor sectis novellis,’ i.241–42; Sermones, IV.13.109.

72 Sermones II.7.48–50; III.14.113

73 DB 15.236.

74 Takashi Shogimen, ‘Wyclif’s Ecclesiology and Political Thought’, in A Companion to John Wyclif, ed. Ian Christopher Levy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), p.234.

75 John Wyclif, Tractatus de officio pastorali, ed. Gotthardus Victor Lechler (Leipzig: A. Edelmann, 1863), 7.14, ‘Unde prelati dicunt in effectu hodie: ‘spolia tu pauperes oues et simplices de tanta pecunia, alioquin excommunicabo te in vertice, et ipsos suspendam ab ingressu ecclesie et diuinis’. Henceforth referred to as DOP.

76 See Langland, Piers Plowman, C.III.48–54 and C.XI.64–78.

77 Sermones II.8.58–59.

78 Wyclif, ‘Super Matthei XXIII’, in Opera minora, ii.318–319.

79 DOP 16.25.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid. ‘ubi ergo est arccior condicio miserie paupertatis?’

82 DOP 4.11, ‘Nunc autem nostri prelati peruertuntur in partem diaboli non suscipientes taliter tales [pauperes peregrinos] hospicio, sed plus seculares dominos et tyrannos, qui non egerent tali elemosina, sed inhumanis lauticiis communiter sunt repleti, et tamen de bonis pauperum sunt sumptuose sine consciencia saciati.’ [For now our prelates are perverted on the part of the devil, not receiving such people {poor pilgrims} in hospitality, but rather receiving secular lords and tyrants who do not need such alms yet are communally stuffed with absurd banquets, and nevertheless are, without conscience, sumptuously gratified by means of the goods of the poor.]

83 Dialogus 23.46.

84 Ibid.

85 Ibid., 32.79; DOP 7.14–15.

86 John Wyclif, Opus Evangelicum, ed. Johann Loserth (London: Wyclif Society, Trübner & Co., 1896), III.15.54.

87 DOP 8.15.

88 John Wyclif, ‘De octo questionibus pulcris’, in Opera minora, viii.15.

89 Wyclif, ‘De octo questionibus pulcris’, in Opera minora, viii.14.

90 Aers, ‘John Wyclif,’ p.58.

91 This interpretation of medieval charity has been largely accepted by scholars, especially when considered alongside the perceived importance of almsgiving for the soul, a Christian act which required the presence of poverty to be enacted. See Brodman, Charity and Religion, pp.36–37; Alan Kreider, English Chantries (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2012), p.66; Anne M. Scott, Piers Plowman and the Poor (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), p.38.

92 ‘Lollard Disendowment Bill’, p.136.

93 Lollard Disendowment Bill’, p.137.