Nevertheless the Lollards were looked upon as heretics by the authorities of the Church, and in 1377, Wyclif was cited to appear before the Primate and Bishop Courtnay in St. Paul's Cathedral. He went thither accompanied by his patrons, John of Gaunt and the Earl Marshal (Lord Henry Percy), when the latter, in consideration of the age and feebleness of the venerable reformer, desired him to be seated, "which," says Foxe, "eftsoons cast the Bishop of London into a furious chafe," which resulted in an altercation, the abrupt breaking up of the assembly, and the rush of the London mob, with whom the Duke of Lancaster was not then popular, to his palace of the Savoy, where they murdered a priest, but were dispersed by the Lord Mayor. After the murder of Archbishop Sudbury and the elevation of Courtnay to the primacy, he called a synod together at the House of the Preaching Friars, London, at which the new bishop (Braybrooke) attended. Soon after their assembling, a shock of an earthquake occurred, which alarmed the ecclesiastics, but Courtnay adroitly turned it to account, saying that earthquakes were but the expulsion of noxious vapours from the earth, and it was a sign that Heaven looked with approval on their efforts to expel noxious doctrines from the Church, and the meeting very speedily pronounced fourteen of Wyclif's tenets erroneous or heretical. This was, however, but the seed-time of religious liberty; the seeds, nevertheless, in spite of opposition, fructified under Henry VIII. and his daughter Elizabeth, grew apace under the Commonwealth, and the harvest was reaped after the expulsion of the second James. Intellectually, too, Braybrooke was the contemporary of the transition from ignorance to learning. Chaucer, in his _Canterbury Pilgrims_, and Gower in his _Confessio Amantis_, were laying the foundation of our modern language and literature; and Faust, Gutenberg, and Schœffer were establishing their printing presses in Germany, to be introduced into England by Caxton in the next century, to aid in the diffusion of knowledge, and in the liberation of the people from political and spiritual thraldom. When Braybrooke, half a millennium ago, was elevated to the episcopal bench, London was a comparatively small city, encircled by two miles of walls, gates, and ditch, with but one bridge over the Thames—that built by Peter of Colechurch, with its movable centre for the passage of vessels. The Tower was the Court and king's residence; with Baynard's Castle, in Thames Street; the magnificent Palace of the Savoy, the Monastery of the Knights Hospitallers, in Clerkenwell, and many another noble edifice lay in ruins, demolished by the Wat Tyler insurgents; the city was crowded with monasteries and churches; and the streets presented a mingled crowd of nobles, monks, friars, priests, and merchant burghers.