William Courtenay, Bishop of London, succeeded Sudbury as Archbishop of Canterbury. Courtenay, a high-tempered, haughty, and resolute man, lost no time in bringing the powers of his new and high position to bear against the doctrines and adherents of Wycliffe. His pall from Rome having been delivered to him at Croydon on the 6th of May 1382, he summoned a synod to meet in the Grey Friars (mendicants) in London, on the 17th of May, to deliberate and determine on the measures to be taken for the suppression of certain stranger and dangerous opinions “widely prevalent among the nobility and commons of the realm.” During the sittings of this synod a great and terrible earthquake shook the place of meeting and the whole city. Many of the high dignitaries and learned doctors assembled, interpreting this event as a protest from heaven against the proceedings of the council, would fain have adjourned the meeting and its business. But the Archbishop, with ready wit, interpreting the omen to suit his own purpose, said, “the earth was throwing off its noxious vapors, that the Church might appear in her perfect purity,” With these words Courtenay allayed the fears of the more timid members of the synod, and the business went forward. Of four and twenty articles extracted from Wycliffe’s writings, ten were condemned as heretical, and the other fourteen were judged erroneous. It is unnecessary to say that among the articles condemned as heretical were the doctrines of Wycliffe concerning the Eucharist, and more particularly his denial of transubstantiation. Among the condemned tenets there are some which Wycliffe never held or affirmed in the sense put upon them by the “Earthquake Council.” Some of the determinations of this synod were so framed as to imply or insinuate that Wycliffe was implicated in the insurrection of the previous year, and that he was an enemy to temporal as well as to the ecclesiastical authority—in other words, that he was a traitor as well as heretic. An imposing procession, and a sermon by a Carmelite friar, served to give solemnity and publicity, pomp and circumstance, to the decrees of the synod.