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Wycliffe was an Oxford divine who had great faith in the teachings
of scripture and a great dislike of the priestly establishment which
in his  view
came between the ordinary worshipper and the Holy Word. Such views
inevitably brought him into conflict with the bishops and it was
only the patronage of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and Earl
of Leicester, which saved him from the severest penalties of ecclesiastical
law.
It was Gaunt who, in 1374 through his father Edward III, secured
Wycliffe the then fairly obscure living of Lutterworth, although
he remained in Oxford until two years prior to his death when he
came to Lutterworth. At Oxford he supported his secretary, John
Purvey, and the priests Swynderby and Waytestaff, to undertake the
great work of translating the Latin Bible into English. Wycliffe
came to Lutterworth after having a palsy or stroke; on 27 December
he suffered a second and died 31 December 1384.
Some forty years later, in a vain effort to stamp out the clamour
for reform which Wycliffe’s teachings had fuelled, the Council
of Constance ordered his bones to be dug up, publicly burnt, and
the ashes cast into the River Swift. Fuller elegantly describes
the result in his “Church History”: “ Then this
brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn
into the Narrow Seas; they into the Main Ocean. And thus the ashes
of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine which was dispersed the
entire world over”.
Wycliffe’s followers were known as “Lollards”,
a derisive name, from the Dutch word for  “mumbler”,
coined by the Irish Cistercian, Henry Crump. Even before Wycliffe’s
death there was an active Lollard cell in Leicester led by Philip
Repington, who later recanted and became a fiercely anti-heretical
Bishop of Lincoln. In the wake of Sir John Oldcastle’s rebellion
in 1414 the Lollards became an underground movement. Meanwhile Wycliffe’s
writings influenced the Bohemian reformer Hus, and Hus in turn influenced
Luther. Thus when antipapal Lutheran tracts began to be smuggled
into England around 1500, they found a ready readership amongst
the Lollards. Within a generation an English Bible had been officially
sanctioned and in 1559 the Church of England became permanently
established.
It was not until 1837 that a permanent memorial to Wycliffe’s
life and work was placed in Lutterworth church, where it can be
found under the east window in the south aisle. Sixty years later
a granite obelisk commemorating both Wycliffe and the Diamond Jubilee
of Queen Victoria was erected at the junction of the Coventry and
Bitteswell Roads.
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