October 2005

Parish History Episode 54
Richard Wyche

As was mentioned in August’s “Signpost”, John Newton had, in 1410, become Rector of Houghton-le-Spring. He also became Master of
Sherburn Hospital, and held various other posts which gave him the benefit of good, regular incomes. He however undertook few duties in
these responsible posts, other than collecting the tithes and drawing any salaries pertaining to them. He spent most of his time and energy in service in the Chancellery of Durham Diocese, undertaking duties which should have been performed by the Bishop of Durham, Cardinal Langley. The Cardinal himself often needed to be absent from his diocese, as he had duties in London, where he was three times Lord Chancellor of England; and in England’s conquests abroad, serving on the battlefield at
Agincourt, and at the peace conference at Troyes; and also in the Papal service, in Rome, or at the Ecumenical Councils held at Pisa in 1409 and Constance in 1414. Though Langley certainly took an active interest in his diocese, and returned to Durham from time to time, many of his administrative duties had to be undertaken by such men as Rector Newton.

Much of the Rector’s work was probably routine and undemanding. But in 1413, an important development occurred. A Lollard conventicle had been uncovered in Newcastleupon- Tyne, and had apparently been active there for ten years. This was surprising news. Lollardry, unlawful everywhere in England, had been, up to now, predominantly a South Country religion. It had tended to flourish in particular regions. These included the London area, together with Kent, Essex and East Anglia - all districts relatively close to the mainland of Europe. The Chiltern Hills, to the North-West of
London, seems also to have been a stronghold of the movement. Westward of London, Lollard groups flourished along the great rivers of the South - the Thames, the Bristol Avon, the Wye, the Severn, and the Warwick-shire Avon.

The movement made headway among mining communities in the Forest of Dean andthe Mendip Hills. It was also, thanks to Swinderby’s preaching, strong along the Welsh Borders (but not over the Border, in Welsh speaking districts). Some Midland cities, notably Coventry and Leicester, had also proved hospitable to Lollardry. But it hardly affected the North of England. Previously, no Lollards had been known north of Wakefield in
Yorkshire. But now, a group had been discovered skulking in Newcastle. The city authorities had arrested a mixed bunch of men and women, and lodged them in the Keep of Newcastle’s eponymous castle. Newton rode
over to investigate, and found them mostly to be skilled workingmen (smiths, weavers, and the like) or the wives of workingmen. But one man
stood out. His accent was foreign to Tyneside, and he appeared to be a clerk in holy orders, though unbeneficed.

He came in fact from Herefordshire. He was a disciple of Swinderby, a Lollard “hedge-priest” if ever there was one. His name was Richard Wyche.

Wyche, together with other leaders of the Newcastle conventicle, was taken back to Durham, and placed in secure accommodation in the Castle there, so that Newton and others could begin their interrogation.

The procedure seems to have been highly successful. None of the prisoners stood up to implied threats of torture. They all confessed their complicity in heresy, and surrendered copies of forbidden literature, including handwritten Gospels in English (One such Gospel belonged to an illiterate man. Presumably, he had kept it as a sort of holy charm. Or perhaps he had intended to learn to read.). Each of the defendants pleaded that he had been led astray by others of the accused. They all, including Wyche, abjured their heresies.

Satisfied at having done a good job, Newton let them all go. He had, he hoped, wiped out incipient heresy in the North Country. They had learned their lessons. Their Bibles had been confiscated. They wouldn’t repeat their offence in a hurry.

But Newton did not comprehend the wickedness of mankind. The confession and recantation of Richard Wyche may have satisfied Newton, but we know that it was insincere. Within a year he was writing letters in
Latin to Prague, explaining that his mission on Tyneside had come to grief, that the lackeys of the Bishop of Durham had penetrated their cell,
had arrested everyone, and that the whole enterprise had come to grief. His letters can still be seen in what were the Royal Archives of Bohemia.

If such correspondence had fallen into the hands of John Newton, Wyche would have been quickly sent to the stake as a relapsed heretic. But he was not to be caught for many long years. Throughout the reigns of the three Kings of England of the House of Lancaster, all named Henry (the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Henries), the Lollard movement survived, and
suffered continual persecution. It was not a very fierce persecution by the standards of some Tudor monarchs, particularly Mary I and Elizabeth I: about three martyrs a year were burned at the stake.

Most of those arrested were permitted to renounce their beliefs, and then set at liberty. An authorised Life of Jesus was produced in English, which it was hoped would satisfy the demand for knowledge about Christ, and would make the Lollard Bible superfluous. But copies of the Bible continued to be copied out in secret, and circulated clandestinely. Dozens of copies still survive, despite the arrival, in Tudor times, of better translations, mass-produced through the invention of printing, and therefore comparatively cheap. Those few copies extant to-day are probably the survivors of thousands which once existed in middle-class homes up and down the country. Many of the owners probably had no other connection with heresy than the possession of one copy of a
proscribed book - the Bible in English. They just wanted to refer to it from time to time, to check up on a passage, to see if they had understood the Latin text that they had heard read out at the Mass on Sunday.

Such clandestine ownership of Bibles does not in itself indicate that most Englishmen were alienated from their traditional religion. More traditional types of spirituality survived, alongside the newer practice of reading the
Bible at home.

For instance, schools and chantry chapels (places where priests sang Mass for the souls of the founders of the chapel) were multiplying all
over England. In the Southern and Eastern counties, from the far South-West to the Norfolk Broads, new churches were also being built, in the style now known as “Perpendicular”, characterised by greater height than that usually seen in earlier churches, by long, thin columns of stone, by larger windows admitting more light, squarer in shape and less pointed
than traditional Gothic, and by magnificent fanvaulting spreading across the ceilings. Such churches are almost entirely absent from the North. Presumably there was less wealth up here to finance such developments, and such wealth as there was tended to be used for the building of castles rather than churches.

Images of the saints also proliferated in all churches, old or new: images in stone, in alabaster, in wood, in tapestry, or as mosaics on the walls, or in the stained-glass windows. Pilgrimages were also increasingly popular. Tens of thousands of pilgrims made their way to the Shrines of Thomas Becket at Canterbury (as Chaucer recounts, in his “Canterbury Tales”) or
to that of Our Lady at Walsingham.

Such crowds also of course attracted pickpockets and all sorts of rogues and vagabonds. It was not unknown for them to attract Lollard preachers. The irrepressible Richard Wyche once turned up to address a crowd of pilgrims at Walsingham. He described Mary, the Mother of Jesus, as “the Witch of Walsingham”, almost a pun on his own name. He managed to escape before the sheriff had him arrested.

Such exploits seem almost as silly as Robin Hood’s legendary tormenting of the Sheriff of Nottingham. But he could not be lucky for ever. In 1440, when he must have been about sixty years old, he was captured near London, tried and condemned, taken to Smithfield, and burned alive at the stake.

Naturally, his despatches to Prague now ceased. But he was not the only Englishman who looked for succour from the East. A fugitive priest called Peter Payne was, by the time of Wyche’s martyrdom, acting as a sort of Lollard ambassador both to the Kingdom of Bohemia and to Constantinople. He received plenty of blessings from the Hussites of Bohemia, but little practical help. From Constantinople, he did not even receive a blessing.

The Byzantine Empire now consisted of only three fragments of territory, none of them the size of an English county. In 1453, the Turks would finally give the coup de grace, and destroy this empire which had defied them, and their Arab and Persian predecessors, for a thousand years. But the last patriarchs before the Fall of Constantinople - prelates seen as
arrogant and effete, and long despised by the vulgar Christians of the West - had by now become, in their own estimation at least, the Judges of the West.

The Patriarchs of Constantinople had first become used, during the Great Schism in the West, to receiving ambassadors from the rival Papal Courts at Rome and at Avignon, each ambassador being anxious to receive
recognition from the East that his master was the true pope. Then, similar embassies began arriving from Prague, with these clerics attempting to persuade the Patriarch that their Church was every bit as legitimate a
development as were the Churches of other Slavonic nations, such as those of the Serbs, the Bulgarians and the Russians, all of whom were in Communion with Constantinople.

Seeing in the Czechs an ally against their common enemy, Rome, the Greeks were willing to grant their new friends all sorts of liturgical freedoms that they would never have tolerated in the Balkans or in Russia. But the Archbishops of Prague never acknowledged the supremacy of Constantinople, and the Patriarchs realised that the Czech Liturgy was not really simply a new development of the Slavonic Rite.

But then Peter Payne, known to the Greeks as Petros Angelikos, Peter the Englishman, presented himself at Constantinople, an emissary from the furthest West, a doctor of St. Edmund Hall in Oxford (degraded), and a priest of the English Church (unfrocked). He explained that while the Church in England was, traditionally, subject to the Roman Pope, he himself, along with many others, had renounced Rome, and looked instead to Prague and the ancient Church at Constantinople, and that the English, if given encouragement, would all embrace Greek Orthodoxy.

The Patriarch received him politely (as another possible future ally against Rome), but was obviously dubious about Peter Payne’s claim to represent the English Church.

Such long-distance contacts were, anyway, obviously of little real importance at that time. What was perhaps more significant was the way
that, at a time of great popular piety (the pilgrimages to Walsingham and elsewhere, the multiplying images of the saints, the “Perpendicular” churches), men like Richard Wyche were being burned alive at the stake.
The Christian religion had once been a means of grace. But now, it seemed, Christians had been reduced to slaughtering each other, by as
cruel means as possible, because of disagreements over doctrine, or church policy, or even because they disagreed over what language should be used for writing the Scriptures.

The schism between Rome and Avignon was at last coming to an end. But the Devil, it seemed, still had a trick or two to play. He could foment new doctrines and new schisms, and new hatreds could be implanted within the hearts of Christian men, driving them into devilishly cruel behaviour against one other.

Dick Toy

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