It is more than doubtful whether Wycliffe appeared before the Archbishop at Oxford in 1382; and it is certain that no recantation ever proceeded from his lips or pen. In the absence of any adequate reason hitherto assigned for Wycliffe’s immunity or personal safety in a time so perilous, may the reason have been that, silenced in Oxford by the decree of the preceding year, Wycliffe left the university, and, retiring to his rectory of Lutterworth, enjoyed there the protection of the Bishop of Lincoln, John Bokingham? Within the very extensive diocese of Lincoln, we know that for a time Wycliffe’s “poor priests” enjoyed the episcopal protection. Is it too much to suppose that John Bokingham, who protected and gave episcopal sanction to Wycliffe’s preachers, extended his protection to Wycliffe himself? This “John Bokingham if this were the Bishop of Lincoln accounted of some very unlearned, was a doctor of divinity of Oxford, a great learned man in scholastical divinity, as divers works of his still extant may testify, and for my part, I think this bishop to be the man. The year 1397, the Pope bearing him some grudge, translated him perforce from Lincolne unto Lichfield, a bishopric not half so good. For curst heart he would not take it, but, as though he had rather have no bread than half a loaf, forsook both, and became a monk at Canterbury. He was one of the first founders of the bridge at Rochester.”[33] Our conjecture if probable or true to fact, would explain not a little that has hitherto perplexed the biographers of Wycliffe.