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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.