But while what was good in the Lollard spirit survived, the Lollards themselves, with the death of Wycliffe and of John of Gaunt, his great friend and protector, fell upon evil times. Their revolution by force had almost succeeded. For a short time they were masters of the field. But with the passing of the immediate terror of the Peasant Revolt, the conservative forces of the state rallied to the protection of that social order, whose very existence the Lollards had, by their ferocious extravagance and frantic communism, seemed to threaten. The wiser contemporaries of this movement agreed to abandon its provocations and to consign it to oblivion or misconception. At Oxford, the Government threatened to suppress the University itself unless the Lollards were displaced. And Oxford, to outward appearance, submitted. Its Lollard chancellor was dismissed. The "poore priestes" and preachers were silenced, or departed to spread the new Gospel of the "Bible-men" across the sea. Some recanted and became bishops, cardinals, persecutors. But many remained obscure or silent and cautious. Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking of Oxford, said that there were wild vines in the University, and therefore little grapes; that tares were constantly sown among the pure wheat, and that the whole University was leavened with heresy. "You cannot meet," said a monkish historian, "five people talking together but three of them are Lollards." At Cambridge, on the 16th September 1401, holding a visitation in the Congregation House, the Archbishop had privately put to the Chancellor and the Doctors ten questions with regard to the discipline of the University. One question was significant: "_Were there any_," the Archbishop asked, "_suspected of Lollardism?_" The terrible and infamous statute, "De Heretico Comburendo," had been passed in the previous year, and but a few months before the first victim of that enactment had been burnt at the stake.