For some time after the establishment of the Inquisition in 1243 the Church had been able to suppress, to a very large extent, the growing tendency of the age towards the acquirement of knowledge: by the rack, the stake, and the gibbet, by torture, by fire, and by the knife, she had relentlessly pursued her horrid and diabolical career, hoping by these means to preserve the faith and silence her enemies. To a large extent it is admitted she was successful; but in remote places the spirit of inquiry lived and grew in spite of her: Abelard, the first Freethinker, had well sown his seeds in France; Arnold of Brescia had left to his brethren in Italy a scheme of reform which was destined to take practical shape in the autumn of 1870; and Wicliffe had preached from his chair at Oxford doctrines which could not fail ere long to have their effect upon the intellect of England. This bold Yorkshireman did not scruple to publicly declare that the mendicant friars who were commissioned by the Pope to travel over England and grant absolution and indulgences to the people were a pack of thieves and sensualists, that the clergy were indulging in open wickedness, that the indulgences of the Pope were a manifest blasphemy, and that the priesthood had no right to deprive the people of the right to search the Bible. He even went so far as to speak of the Pope as “Antichrist, the proud worldly priest of Rome, and the most cursed of clippers and purse-kervers.” From the pulpit of his little church at Lutterworth he openly preached against the authority of the Pope in England, and declared that Christ had given no temporal lordship to the popes and no supremacy over kings. The Pope and the Sacred College very naturally resented this behaviour, and ordered copies of Wicliffe’s works to be sent forthwith to Rome for inspection, the result being that three bulls were drafted on May 22nd, 1377, and despatched to England, one being addressed to Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, and William Courtenay, Bishop of London, another being addressed to the King, and the third to the University of Oxford. These bulls expressed the surprise of his Holiness that such a fearful heresy had not been at once suppressed, and commanded that immediate steps should be taken for silencing the author of it. He was to be apprehended and shut up in prison until the further orders of the Pope arrived; and all proofs and evidence of his heresy were to be sent by special messenger to Rome without delay. These bulls, however, arrived too late to be of much use. Already Wicliffe had been brought to trial before the Bishop of London and his court at St. Paul’s, with a result not at all to the liking of his Holiness or any of his pious followers, as he very soon discovered.