But Churchmen were angry, and called his followers Lollards or idle babblers.
After Wyclif's death his followers were gradually crushed out, and the Lollards disappear from our history.
You brought us word even now, it was decreed That Bruno and the cursed Emperor Were by the holy council both condemn'd For loathed Lollards and base schismatics: Then wherefore would you have me view that book?
What Lollards do attend our holiness, That we receive such great indignity?
"Pardieu!" said the knight, "this David Micheldene must be one of those
Lollards about whom Father Christopher of the priory had so much to say.
"I have come across Moravians and
Lollards in Bohemia and Hungary," said Genestas.
'The Vision Concerning Piers the Plowman.' Wiclif and the
Lollard Bible, about 1380.
Despite the play's temporal immediacy, only two scholars posit connections between it and possible historical referents (the heretical Antichrists of 'nowe'), and both overlook the most prevalent heretics during the play's earliest performance history (and the only heretics actually named in the text), the
Lollards. Karen Sawyer Marsalek, in an essay on 'false resurrections' in Chester's 'Antichrist' and Sha kespea re's 1 Henry IV, compellingly connects Antichrist's and Falstaff's faux resurrections, but she reads the Chester play in a mid-sixteenth-century context, suggesting that Antichrist's accusation against Enoch and Elijah as
Lollards is an earnest concession to a Reformation audience.
She points out that the only Bible copied in England after 1415 was the Wycliffite Bible, and she challenges the long-held idea that there was no concord between
Lollards and art.
Thus, while Rebecca Lundin concludes that "the
Lollards can be seen as precursors to numerous later adherents to the plain style," the term can be found in diverse contexts and used for different aims (145, n.
In what sometimes seems more historiography than history, he does not try to construct any particular meta-narrative about John Wyclif or
lollards. He discusses the
lollards in terms of the people, their practices, their writings, their beliefs, the opponents, their trials, and their afterlife.
Wycliffe and the
Lollards seemed "tailor-made for Protestant progenitor hunting." More than a century before Luther, they "celebrated popular access to the Bible in English [...] savagely denounced the Pope and the mendicant orders, and were skeptical about transubstantiation" (55).