(1382 onwards)

From the time of St Birinus the Church in the Thames Valley had been free from serious religious dissent for more than 700 years. This situation was changed by an Oxford scholar and priest, John Wycliffe, who was born in the year 1330.

Wycliffe questioned almost every aspect of Catholic doctrine and practice. Most significantly, he argued that the Bible is the sole authority for the doctrine and practice of the Church. This contrasted with the Catholic position that the Bible should be interpreted in the light of Church tradition stretching back unbroken to the time of the Apostles.

By 1382 Wycliffe's ideas had been condemned by the Church. But he was not excommunicated and was allowed to spend his last years as parish priest of Lutterworth in Leicestershire.

Wycliffe was a man of ideas rather than of actions. However, he attracted supporters of a more practical bent, particularly among the increasing numbers of literate, self-employed craftsmen and traders. He also drew discreet support from some of the gentry and nobility.

The Wycliffites formed a secret underground church and circulated handwritten copies of an unauthorised translation of the New Testament into English. Because of their need for secrecy they were said to whisper to each other. Hence they became known as Lollards, from an Old Dutch word for mumblers.

In 1389, about five years after Wycliffe's death, three Lollards were brought from Leicester to Dorchester-on-Thames to make their submission to the Church authorities. Two of them were alleged to have burned a statue of St Catherine. All three recanted.

A dozen years later the Lollards were seen as such a threat that Parliament passed anti-heresy legislation. The Act 'De Haeretico Comburendo' of 1401 introduced death by burning as the penalty for heretics who refused to recant. A period of up to forty days was allowed for recantation, and most of the Wycliffite leaders were persuaded to conform to Catholicism. Some Lollards, however, continued to operate underground in a loosely organised but often deep-rooted way. This they did for well over a century until the Reformation.

As Wycliffe had been based at Oxford it is not surprising that his ideas made some headway in the Thames Valley. One district where the Lollards became particularly well established was the Buckinghamshire Chilterns around High Wycombe, in places such as Little Missenden, Marlow, Chesham, Denham, Hughenden, Chenies and Drayton Beauchamp. In Amersham a Lollard named Richard Sanders was so influential that neighbours who informed on him were deprived of their livelihoods.

Another area where Wycliffite ideas took hold was the lower Cherwell valley north-north-west of Oxford. In the early fifteenth century William Brown, a glover from Woodstock, organised Lollards in Bladon, Hanborough, Kidlington, Kirtlington and Upper Heyford. They included a fuller, a tailor, a cooper, a carpenter, a miller and a mason.

The strength of Lollardy in these areas left two legacies after the Reformation. The first was that Catholicism tended to be particularly weak in these places. The second was a tendency on the part of the inhabitants to adopt the 'general' form of the Baptist faith, which rejected predestination, rather than the more Calvinistic 'particular' form. The underlying persistence of Lollard ideas in these communities probably owes much to their secret espousal by influential families, who outwardly conformed to Catholicism, and after the Reformation, to Anglicanism.

The legacy of a third Thames Valley Wycliffite stronghold was rather different. In the Vale of White Horse Lollards are known to have been active in Buscot, Faringdon, Abingdon, Hanney, Wantage, Steventon, East Ginge and the Hendreds. But it was in the Vale that the last Lollard rebellion was crushed in 1431. (Another rising had been suppressed seventeen years earlier.)

The rebels mustered at East Hendred and were defeated at Abingdon. Although 68 years later there were cases in Faringdon and Wantage, the defeat at Abingdon seems largely to have eradicated Lollardy from the Vale of White Horse. Indeed, in that area there was a relatively strong Catholic survival after the Reformation, especially in East Hendred. The influence of leading local families was certainly crucial to this survival, just as it seems to have been for the Lollards and their descendants.