The Parliament had assembled at Gloucester, disaffected and exacting. The Commons asked to examine the accounts, which was granted to them as a favor. John de Montfort had recently taken refuge in England, banished from his dominions by King Charles V., who committed the imprudent act of officially annexing the duchy of Brittany to France. This declaration immediately rallied all the different factions against him. {339} John de Montfort was recalled; the States-general of Brittany wrote to the King of France, asking him to authorize them to retain their independent ruler. At the same time an English army, under the command of the Earl of Buckingham, landed at Calais and ravaged the provinces of Artois, Picardy, and Champagne without ever encountering the necessity of a serious combat. The English were arriving in Brittany when King Charles V. died (1378), and the Bretons, reassured by the weakness of the young King Charles VI., began to look coldly upon their English allies. De Montfort negotiated with the French council of regency, and Buckingham was only indebted for his safety to the valor of his troops and to the provisions which he had brought. He retired in the spring of 1379. Great events were in preparation in England. For some years a double movement, religious and social, had begun secretly to agitate the English people. A priest, John Wycliffe, born towards 1324, in Yorkshire, had attracted attention at the university of Oxford by his rare faculties, and had commenced, in the year 1356, to denounce the abuses of the papal authority; he had then attacked the mendicant monks, accusing the Church in general of greed and corruption. Summoned to appear before the Bishop of London, in the last year of the reign of Edward III., to answer for his opinions, he had been supported by the Duke of Lancaster and his friend Lord Percy; both had even insulted the bishop, which had brought about an insurrection in the city. Wycliffe had retracted some of his ideas, he had explained others; and, thanks to his powerful protectors, he had obtained the living of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, where he spent the remainder of his life, surrounded by priests, whom he brought up in truly apostolic poverty, and who subsequently spread his opinions among the people. {340} Wycliffe is the first of the Reformers, or rather, their precursor. His doctrines acted more powerfully abroad than in his own country; it is to his books that were due the first germs of the Reformation in Bohemia; for England, his greatest work was the translation of the Bible into the vernacular. The most important of his ideas was the appeal to the private judgment of the faithful upon the very text of the Holy Scriptures. Wycliffe had shaken the traditions of submission to the clergy; he had at the same time preached a dangerous doctrine. "All possessions," he said, "come of grace, and may be forfeited by sin." The poor