Specimens of English Prose Writers Author:George Burnett Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WICLIFFE. John Wicliffe, the memorable English Reformer, was born in the parish of Wicliffe, near Richmond, in Yorkshire. He was educated at Oxford, where he ... more »obtained distinguished academical honours, having been elevated successively to the Mastership of Baliol College, to the Wardenship of Canterbury Hall, and to the Professorship of Divinity in that University. This last promotion he obtained in 1372. In his professorial capacity, he found his province invaded, and the privileges of the University violated, by the pretensions of the Mendicants; and at first only gratified his just resentment by throwing out some censures upon the several orders of friars; in which, however, he could not forbear touching upon the usurpations of the pope, their great patron and abettor. For this he was deprived of the wardenship of his college by the archbishop of Canterbury, who substituted a monk in his place; upon which he appealed to the pope, who, by way of rebuke for the freedom withwhich he had treated the monastic orders, confirmed the archiepiscopal sentence. Wicliffe, now more exasperated than ever, gave full scope to his indignation, and attacked without distinction, both in his sermons and other pieces, not only the whole body of the monks, but the encroachments and tyranny of the church of Rome, with other ecclesiastical corruptions. In the year 1365, we find the name of Wicliffe first mentioned in the annals of our country. It was on occasion of the demand of pope Urban V. for the payment of the arrears of the tribute of one thousand marks per annum, imposed upon the country by king John; and the payment of which had been neglected since the year 1333. Wicliffe seized this opportunity to write against the papal demand, in opposition to an English monk, who had published in its...« less