There was a good deal of _heresy_, so called, in England long before Luther's voice had been heard in Germany. Men maintained that the tithes were exactions of covetous priests, and were not sanctioned by the law of God; they protested against the hierarchical constitution of the mediæval Church; they read the Scriptures, and attended services in the vernacular; and they scoffed at the authority of the Church and attacked some of its doctrines. Lollardy had never died out in England, and Lollardy was simply the English form of that passive protest against the mediæval Church which under various names had maintained itself in France, Germany, and Bohemia for centuries in spite of persecution. Foxe's _Acts and Monuments_ show that there was a fairly active repression of so-called heresy in England before Luther's days, and his accounts are confirmed by the State Papers of the period. In 1511, Andreas Ammonius, the Latin secretary of Henry VIII., writing to Erasmus, says that wood has grown scarce and dear because so much was needed to burn heretics, "and yet their numbers grow." Yet Dr. James Gairdner declares that only a solitary pair had suffered during that year at the stake![365] Early in 1512 the Archbishop of Canterbury summoned a meeting of convocation for the express purpose of arresting the spread of heresy;[366] in that same year Erasmus was told by More that the _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_ were popular everywhere throughout England;[367] and a commission was given to the Bishop of Coventry and others to inquire about Lollards in Wales and other parts;[368] and as late as 1521 the Bishop of London arrested five hundred Lollards.[369] In 1530, Henry VIII. himself, always curious about theology and anxious to know about the books which interested his subjects, sent to Oxford for a copy of the Articles on which Wiclif had been condemned.[370] Anyone who scoffed at relics or pilgrimages was thought to be a Wiclifite.[371] In 1531, divinity students were required to take an oath to renounce the doctrines of Wiclif, Hus, and Luther;[372] and in 1533, More, writing to Erasmus, calls Tyndale and his sympathisers Wiclifites.[373] Henry VIII. was engaged as early as 1518 in composing a book against heresy and vindicating the claims of the Roman See, which in its first inception could scarcely be directed against Luther, and probably dealt with the views of home heretics.[374] Some modern historians are inclined to find a strong English revolt against Rome native to the soil and borrowing little or nothing from Luther, which they believe to have been the initial force at work in shaping the English Reformation. Mr. Pollard points out that in many particulars this Reformation followed the lines laid down by Wiclif. Its leaders, like Wiclif, denounced the Papal Supremacy on the ground of the political injury it did to the English people; declaimed against the sloth, immorality, and wealth of the English ecclesiastics; advocated a