For shouts Boniface cared little. In the midst of the tumult he caused the sentences of excommunication which he had fulminated to be legally executed in the chapel of his house. But bravado like this soon died before the universal resentment, and "the handsome Archbishop" fled again to Lyons. How helpless the successor of Augustine really was was shown by a daring outrage perpetrated in his absence. Master Eustace, his official, had thrown into prison the Prior of St. Thomas's Hospital for some contempt of court; and the Prior's diocesan, the Bishop of Winchester, a prelate as foreign and lawless as Boniface himself, took up the injury as his own. A party of his knights appeared before the house at Lambeth, tore the gates from their hinges, set Master Eustace on horseback, and carried him off to the episcopal prison at Farnham. At last Boniface bowed to submission, surrendered the points at issue, recalled his excommunications, and was suffered to return. He had learnt his lesson well enough to remain from that time a quiet, inactive man, with a dash of continental frugality and wit about him. Whether he built the chapel or no, he would probably have said of it as he said of the Great Hall at Canterbury, "My predecessors built, and I discharge the debt for their building. It seems to me that the true builder is the man that pays the bill."
But Boniface never learnt to be an Englishman. When under the guidance of Earl Simon of Montfort the barons wrested the observance of their Charter from the King the Primate of England found shelter in a fresh exile. The Church had in fact ceased to be national. The figure of the first Reformer, as he stands on the chapel floor, is in itself the fittest comment on the age in which the chapel was built, an age when the interests of popular liberty and of intellectual freedom had sheered off from the church which had so long been their protector. With them the moral and spiritual life of the people sheered off too. The vast ecclesiastical fabric rested in the days of Archbishop Sudbury solely on its wealth and its tradition. Suddenly a single man summed up in himself the national, the mental, the moral power it had lost, and struck at the double base on which it rested. Wyclif, the keenest intellect of his day, national and English to the very core, declared its tradition corrupt and its wealth antichrist. The two forces that above all had built up the system of mediæval Christianity, the subtlety of the schoolman, the enthusiasm of the penniless preacher, united to strike it down.