Inventing the Lollard Past : The Afterlife of a Medieval Sermon in Early Modern England

Inventing the Lollard Past : The Afterlife of a Medieval Sermon in Early Modern England

By Alexandra Walsham

Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 58, No. 4 (2007)

Abstract: This essay explores the evolving significance of a famous fourteenth-century Paul’s Cross sermon by Thomas Wimbledon in late medieval and early modern England and its transmission from manuscript to print. It highlights the ideological ambiguity of the text against the backdrop of the academic Wycliffite challenge and shows how it illuminates the permeability of the boundary between heterodoxy and orthodoxy in the fifteenth century. It then examines how the sermon was revived and published in the mid-Tudor period as a Lollard tract as part of an effort to supply the new Protestant religion with an historical pedigree and how it subsequently entered into the popular stock of commercial publishers. The afterlife of Wimbledon’s celebrated sermon sheds fresh light on the ongoing process of inventing and re-inventing the pre-Reformation past.

Introduction: The subject of this essay is a celebrated sermon delivered by a certain Thomas Wimbledon at the famous outdoor pulpit, Paul’s Cross, on Quinquagesima Sunday, in the year 1387 or 1388. Adopting as its text Luke xvi.2, ‘Redde rationem villicationis tue’, rendered in the vernacular as ‘zilde rekenynge of Þy bailie[wick] ’, this was a searching critique of the abuses of the traditional three estates of society, clergy, knights and labourers; an earnest exhortation to people to repent and prepare for vengeance; and a solemn warning of the imminence of the day of judgement and the end of the world. Preserved in whole or part in at least eighteen fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts, the sermon was evidently widely transcribed in the late medieval period. More surprisingly, this was a specimen of pre-Reformation preaching that was also familiar to early modern readers. First printed in the reign of Henry VIII, around 1541–2, the text was continuously republished up to 1635, some twenty separate imprints still surviving. From the early 1560s onwards the title page carried the claim that this antique sermon had been ‘founde out hyd in a wall’. Becoming part of the stock in trade of a succession of commercial publishers, Wimbledon’s rousing oration to Ricardian London was nothing less than a Tudor and Stuart bestseller.

My aim here is to explore the afterlife of this text – to trace the varied fortunes of a discourse which successfully made the transition from speech to script to print and which bridges the distorting disciplinary divide scholars have constructed between the ‘medieval’ and ‘ early modern’ periods. First I will suggest that close study of this sermon sheds light not only upon the diversity of opinion and upon the permeability of the boundaries between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in late medieval England; it also helps to illuminate the process by which these categories evolved, shifted and crystallised in the course of the fifteenth century. Secondly, such an analysis may add a further dimension to our understanding of the manner in which evangelicals and Protestants selectively preserved and harnessed the past and its physical artefacts to supply the Reformation with an historical pedigree and imprimatur. It provides an interesting footnote to the polemical and antiquarian endeavours to recover and revive Wycliffite writings discussed in pioneering essays and articles by Margaret Aston and Anne Hudson. Thirdly, the story of Wimbledon’s sermon casts a revealing sidelight on the emergence of the culture of print and on the role that the medium of typographical reproduction played in fostering and transforming historical consciousness.

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Tags: England, Religious Life