[Sidenote: All these evils borne under protest.]
It is not to be supposed that these encroachments of a foreign power were accepted without a murmur or remonstrance on the part of the people of England; on the contrary, there was a constant undercurrent of discontent, which found occasional expression in some official or popular protest. Such, on the one hand, was the statute of _praemunire_, passed in the reign of Richard II. (A.D. 1389), to prohibit Papal interference with Church patronage and decisions in ecclesiastical causes; and, on the other, the irregular proceedings of Wickliffe and the Lollards, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which, though they eventually degenerated into seditious agitation, had their rise in a feeling of opposition to Romish abuses and usurpations. This feeling was increased by the fearful state of profligacy into which Rome, and indeed all Italy, was plunged during the fifteenth century, which effectually destroyed the character formerly enjoyed by the Roman Church, whilst it could not but affect the spiritual health of the other Churches over which Rome exercised so wide an influence. Wiser and calmer men than Wickliffe saw the need of some reformation, though they questioned, and, as the event showed, rightly, the wisdom and the justice of the steps he took towards his object. Wickliffe's teaching in the fourteenth century had, in fact, little or nothing to do with the real Reformation of two hundred years later, except that some of his dangerous theories on political matters took deeper root than did his { 150} religious peculiarities, and bore fruit in much of the unprincipled licence which was an unhappy, though by no means an essential, feature of the Reformation era.
[Sidenote: English longings for reformation.]
England, in common with the other nations of Europe, was willing to hope for great benefit from the councils of the Church held in the fifteenth century; and, at each of them, we find English Clergy making grave and urgent protests against the abuses which they saw around them, and pleading for a return to purer and better ways. Thus, at the Council of Pisa, A.D. 1400, one of the English Bishops who attended it presented a memorial which complained of the evils resulting from the want of episcopal control over the monasteries, from the practice of appeals to Rome, and from the ease with which dispensations for non-residence and pluralities were obtained[3]. Again, at the Council of Constance (A.D. 1415) a sermon was preached by Dr. Abendon, an Oxford professor, which painted in very strong language the worldliness and covetousness of the non-resident Bishops and Clergy; and these protests were followed up by an official appeal to the Pope for a reformation, on the part of the Kings of France and England, A.D. 1425, as well as by official instructions given to the English deputation despatched to the Council of Basle (A.D. 1431), to use their influence for the same end.