But there is no record of him thereabout: if indeed he were born upon that lift of the Tees bank, the proprietors thereof--who through many generations were stanch Romanists--would have shown no honor to the arch-heretic; and it is noteworthy that within a chapel attached to the Wyclif manor-house, mass was said and the Pope reverenced, down to a very recent time. John Wyclif, in the great crowd of his writings, whether English or Latin, told no story of himself or of his young days. We have only clear sight of him when he has reached full manhood--when he has come to the mastership of Balliol Hall, and to eloquent advocacy of the rights and dignities of England, as against the Papal demand for tribute. On this service he goes up to London, and is heard there--maybe in Parliament; certainly is heard with such approval that he is, only a few years thereafter--sent with a commission, to treat with ambassadors from the Pope, at the old city of Bruges. This was a rich city--called the Venice of the North--and princes and nobles from all Europe were to be met there; its great town-house even then lifted high into the air that Belfry of Bruges which has become in our day the nestling-place of song. But Wyclif was not overawed by any splendors of scene or association. He insisted doggedly upon the rights of Englishmen as against Papal pretensions. John of Gaunt, a son of the king, stood by Wyclif; not only befriending him there, but afterward when Papish bulls were thundered against him, and when he was summoned up to London--as befell in due time--to answer for his misdeeds; and when the populace, who had caught a liking for the stalwart independence of the man, crowded through the streets (tall Will Langlande very probably among them), to stand between the Reformer and the judges of the Church. He did not believe in Ecclesiastic hierarchies; and it is quite certain that he was as little liked by the abbots and the bishops and the fat vicars, as by the Pope. I have said he was befriended by John of Gaunt: and this is a name which it is worth while for students of English history to remember; not only because he was a brother of the famous Black Prince (and a better man than he, though he did not fight so many battles), but because he was also a good friend of the poet Chaucer--as we shall find. It will perhaps help one to keep him in mind, if I refer to that glimpse we get of him in the early scenes of Shakespeare’s tragedy of Richard II., where he makes a play upon his name: O, how that name befits my composition! Old Gaunt, indeed! and gaunt in being old. Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast And who abstains from meat, that is not gaunt? A good effigy of this John, in his robes, is on the glass of a window in All-Souls’ College, Oxford.