"The Griffon flew forth on his way. The Pelican did sit and weep, And to himselfé he gan say, God would that any of Christ's sheep Had heard and ytaké keep Each a word that here said was, And would it write and well it keep, God would it were, all for his grace." "Plowman. I answered and said 'I wolde If for my travail any man would pay.' Plowman. I said, 'Tell me and thou may Why tellest thou mennés trespace?' "For Christ himself is likened to me, He feedeth his birds with his blood. And ben his fone under friendés face. After telling how the Phoenix was brought to destroy the Griffin, and how with the fall of the Griffin vanished all his following of "ravens, rooks, crows, and pie," the poet ends thus: "Therefore I pray every man Of my wyting 2 have me excused. I will not maintain his manace, "Wyteth the Pelican and not me, To Holy Church I will me bow. Each man to amend him Christ send space; He that is Almighty for His Grace." In these poems-written in 1394 and 1395-there is direct reference to the burning as well as the cursing of men charged with heresy. There was already persecution to the death; and the fifteenth century opened with a feeling widely spread among the English people, that many devout men, who in no particular swerved from the faith taught by the Church, were persecuted for a zeal that sought only to make teachers, more than they were, like Chaucer's poor Parson : That Cristes gospel gladly woldé preche; And such he was i-provéd ofté sithes. Of his offrynge, and eek of his substaunce. By his clennesse, how that his scheep schulde lyve. And lefte his scheep encombred in the myre, Him wolde he sny bbé scharply for the nones. obeyed authority, and trusted in the grace of God to amend those by whose evil lives it was discredited. From the beginning of the world there have been the two great types of human character which produce the forward movements of society by action and reaction on each other. Both desire good. Both know that we inherit every social good that we are born to from the labour, in successive generations, of the wisest of our forefathers. Both know that good institutions may, through human imperfection, and through change in the conditions of society, decay, and require renovation or even removal; and that we have in our turn to build for ourselves and aftercomers what the conditions of our later time may need. But some men are born to dwell especially upon the danger of rash change; others to dwell especially upon the importance of removing what has become useless, repairing or reconstructing what has fallen tion infinitely higher. But there were religious men who dreaded Lollards, believed that they endangered souls, and shared the opinion of the time that-heresy being an evil which brought many to eternal fire-if the temporal death of a few could check it, it should so be checked. They were doing the work of the enemy of man in sowing tares among the wheat, whatever their intentions; and such men, all the more dangerous when their good lives recommended them to thousands of souls, must be driven out of God's harvest-field. So good men might reason, and did reason, in those times. There were also disorderly men, who scorned religion itself, swelling the cry of Lollards who sought only Christian life within the Church; there were angry men who extended the denunciation of hypocrisy and pride in many Churchmen into scoff at all that represented the religious life of England. And as must happen to decay, and finding new means to new ends. Some men are in religion, politics, daily business, in action and opinion on all things-even to the arranging of the chairs and tables in their houses-by nature conservative; as others are by nature disposed for reform. Both are alike liberal; both have the same range of human belief and opinion, with difference only in the part of it on which most emphasis is laid; both seek to do their duty; and there are as many good and earnest men upon one side as on the other. From the struggle of the Lollards for reform of evils in the Church, there has come down to us chiefly a remembrance, upon one side, of the noble pleading for pure Christian life by Churchmen who were the true soul of the movement, and by poets who laid hold on its essential truths; and, on the other side, of the corruption that had spread with wealth and idleness through the religious orders, of the hard fight of the worldly man for material advancement, displayed by the Churchman to whom his religion was not real enough to save him from the smail ambitions of the world and give him an ambi in all human controversies, often among the best men on both sides, mists of human passion and emotion changed to sight the proportions of the matter in dispute. But still the story is the story of an English struggle to find out the right, and do it for the love of God. The question is all of Duty; and from a quiet, orthodox monk, who was no great genius, though he wrote verse, but was a good natural Englishman, we may learn how thousands of honest folk, who took no violent part in the strife, looked at each side of it. John Audelay or Awdlay, living in a Shropshire monastery at the beginning of the fifteenth century, wrote religious verse.1 He versified religious duty in short poems upon Bible texts, and, while piously orthodox, he discriminated between men who, seeking the advancement of the Church, objected to self 1 Printed in 1844 for the Percy Society as "The Poems of John Audelay. A Specimen of the Shropshire Dialect in the Fifteenth Century. Edited by James Orchard Halliwell," The prophecy of the prophetus all now it doth appear, That lewd men, the Law of God tha: should love and lere, And if the secular say a sooth, anon they ben y-shent, And lien upon the lewdmen, and sayn It is Lollere; Thus the people and the priestis ben of one assent, They dare none other do: PLAIN TRUTH. "Si veritatem dico quare non creditis mihi; qui ex Deo est, verba Dei audit; ideo non auditis quia ex Deo non estis."5 6 For I have touched the truth, I trow I shall be shent, As God have mercy of me, Sir John Audlay, I reck never who it hear, For at a fool ye may lere, If ye will take heed. To a poem of his on the nine virtues he thus adds his name: "I made this with good intent, My name it is the blind Awdelay." 7 Apert them for to pay, openly in the way that pleases them. 8 At my meeting, to my knowledge. 9" Thonke God of all" is on leaf 68 of a collection of Old English Poems made in a handwriting of the 15th century (Cotton. MSS.. Caligula, A. ii.), which includes Lydgate's "Churl and the Bird," with other of his pieces, and the old poems of Eglamor of Artois, Ypos, Isumbras, Chevalier Assigne, The Stations of Rome, &c. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps has included it in his volume edited for the Percy Society of the Select Minor Poems of John Lydgate. 10 For: of in original, throughout. |