Not much doth Joan say of her mother to me: I think she names her more to others. Methinks I see what she was--a good woman as women go (and some of them go ill), with a little surface cleverness, that she reckoned to run deeper than it did, and inclined to despise her lord by reason his wit lay further down, and came not up in glittering bubbles to the top. I dare reckon she looked well to his bodily comforts and such, and was a better wife than he might have had: very likely, a better than poor Alianora La Despenser would have made, had God ordered it thus. Methinks, from all I hear, that he hath passed behind the jasper walls: and I pray God I may meet him there. They wed not, nor be given in marriage, being equal unto the angels: but surely the angels love. Strange talk it was that Joan held with me yesterday. I marvel what it may portend. She says, of late years many priests have put forth writings, wherein they say that the Church is greatly fallen away from the verity of Scripture, and that all through the ages good men have said the same (as was the case with the blessed Robert de Grosteste, Bishop of Lincoln, over two hundred years gone, and with the holy Thomas de Bradwardine, Archbishop of Canterbury, and with Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole, whose holy meditations on the Psalter are in our library, and I have oft read therein): but now is there further stir, as though some reforming of the Church should arise, such as Bishop Grosteste did earnestly desire. Joan says her lord is earnest for these new opinions, and eager to promote them: and that he saith that both in the Church and in matters politic, men sleep and nap for a season, during which slow decay goes on apace, and then all at once do they wake up, and set to work to mend matters. During the reign of this present King, saith he, the world and the Church have had a long nap; and now are they just awake, and looking round to see how matters are all over dust and ivy, which lack cleansing away. Divers, both clerks and laymen, are thus bestirring themselves: the foremost of whom is my Lord of Lancaster, the King's son [John of Gaunt], among the lay folk, and among the clergy, one Father Wycliffe [Note 1], that was head of a College at Oxenford, and is now Rector of Lutterworth in Leicestershire. He saith (that is, Father Wycliffe) that all things are thus gone to corruption by reason of lack of the salt preservative to be found in Holy Scripture. Many years back, did King Alfred our forefather set forth much of the said Scriptures in the English tongue; as much, indeed, as he had time, for his death hindered it, else had all the holy hooks been rendered into our English tongue. But now, by reason of years, the English that was in his day is gone clean out of mind, and man cannot understand the same: so there is great need for another rendering that man may understand now. And this Father Wycliffe hopes to effect, if God grant him grace.