By rehearsing clerical arguments against
disendowment to the extent that it does, even going so far as to conjure up the voices of imagined opponents, the Lambeth tract accommodates itself to the dialogic context of vernacular preaching and religious instruction in surprising ways.
For the Welsh nationalists among us there is his establishment of Cymru Fydd (Young Wales), his championing of all things Welsh including the language, the drive for Welsh home rule and the disestablishment and
disendowment of the Anglican Church in Wales.
Lollardy had its
disendowment bill (Selections 135-37).
With their calls for
disendowment and for lay access to a translated Bible, and their questioning of fundamental theologies such as transub-stantiation, the Wycliffites, in Hudson's parlance, represented "the English heresy" In Books Under Suspicion, the traditional binary of a proto-Protestant Wycliffite heresy jostling with institutional Orthodoxy is replaced by a much more rich, colorful and complex English theologico-political landscape.
Lollards got caught for challenging eucharistic teaching and calling for
disendowment. Some beguines eventually fell prey when bishops ceased to protect them.
Henry V opens with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely in close conversation regarding a bill of
disendowment that is related to a previous bill the Church barely succeeded in neutralizing.
On Wyclif's attitudes toward the papacy, see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 327-34, and toward clerical
disendowment, 334-51.
(1) He set forth his theory in his massive 1376 De civili dominio (2) which advocated a controversial reform program calling for total clerical
disendowment. Its radical nature was not lost on his fellow ecclesiastics, leading Pope Gregory XI to condemn 19 propositions drawn from the work in May 1377.
Its official manifesto still declared, "as means for the peaceable attainment of these [its social] objects the Social Democratic Federation advocates: Adult Suffrage, Annual Parliaments, Proportional Representation, Payment of Members and Official Expenses of Elections out of the Rates, Abolition of the House of Lords and Hereditary Authorities, Disestablishment and
Disendowment of all State Churches." [51]
The reference must be to Edward III and the Black Prince; hence the sermon dates from after 1377.(27) How much after is an open question, but the entire tenor of the preacher's lament is much like that found in other sermons of the Ricardian period and the early fifteenth century and would preclude a date after Agincourt.(28) The preacher's complaint at noblemen who advocate
disendowment of the Church, together with his mendicant partisanship in the ongoing controversy about the proprius sacerdos and the cycle's Dominican tone, and conversely the absence of any trace of Wyclif's doctrinal stand in matters of dominion, the Eucharist, auricular confession, and pilgrimages, rule out a Wycliffite orientation of the cycle.
the
disendowment of blacks obeyed the social and moral rules to
Though Langland is severe with the landed class, he never argues for its
disendowment.(89) Few may reap the material (we could say, earthly) benefits of a divinely ordained feudal order, but spiritual benefits await the many (who do well in the earthly order) in the afterlife.(90)