The fall of Pecock was more abject, and less relieved. About 1449 he had written—not printed, of course—“The Repressor.” He had in design to defend the clergy from the aspersions, as he conceived them, of the “Bible-man” or Lollards. With this view he vindicated the use of images, the going on pilgrimages, and the retention of the various ranks of the hierarchy in their full directive authority. In 1450 he remained in sufficient esteem—though indeed his treatise was not much circulated for four or five years—to be transferred to the see of Chichester. From that time, however, his good fortune deserted him. The Duke of York conceived it well to cover his strides towards the crown, with the redress of grievances; and the disgrace of Pecock’s patrons, the Duke of Suffolk and the Bishop of Norwich, together with the personal dislike the king contracted towards him, made Chichester a safe object of attack. While all things were thus working for the good man’s evil, the council met at Westminster in the autumn of 1457, whence by general acclamation Pecock was expelled. He was cited to appear before Archbishop Bourchier on November 11, and the character of his offence became more definitised. He had held cheap the authority of the old doctors, he had denied that the Apostles’ Creed was made by the Apostles, and at the same time he had magnified the office of reason—rather than singly of the Scriptures, or rather than singly of the Church—as an ultimate test. Accordingly, to this citation he appeared, armed with nine of his books, into which it must be confessed were introduced some newly conceived passages and some erasures. A committee of Bishops, to whom the matter was then referred, reported adversely; and after further disputation the archbishop offered Pecock his choice of making a public abjuration of his errors, or of being first degraded, and then delivered over to the secular arm “as the food of fire, and fuel for the burning.” He chose the abjuration: a preliminary confession was forthwith made, a written confession was added at Lambeth on the 3rd of December, and on the next day, Sunday, arrayed in his episcopal habit, in the presence of 20,000 persons, he knelt at the feet of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishops of London, Rochester, Durham, and of his “own pure and free will, and without any man’s coercion or dread,” made his recantation. In this he had declared that he presumed of his own natural wit to prefer the judgment of reason before the Testaments and the authority of the Church; had published many perilous doctrines and books containing enumerated heresies; and now considered himself grievously to have sinned and wickedly to have deceived the people of God, but returned to the unity of the mother Holy Church and renounced both the rehearsed heresies and all other “spices,” or kinds of heresy, and exhorted all men not to trust in his books, neither to keep or read them in any