I

Constructed as an uncompromising dissection of the vices of English society and an urgent call to amendment of life, at one level ‘Redde rationem villicationis tue’ fits neatly into the pattern of public preaching at Paul's Cross that had already been established by the late fourteenth century. In use perhaps as early as 1241, this prominent platform had been the scene of many powerful sermons on this ancient theme. Addressed to the microcosm of the nation symbolically assembled beneath it, attended by the civic fathers and surrounded by ceremonial dignity, those preached on the Sundays before and during the holy season of Lent were accorded special importance.Footnote ⁴ Like other contemporary preachers who occupied this pulpit, Thomas Wimbledon used the occasion for a lofty display of theological and scriptural learning that revealed his mastery of the technique of scholastic oratory, a method of analytical organisation marked by elaborate rhetorical divisions and subdivisions.Footnote ⁵ Encased within this sophisticated framework was a stinging rebuke to the priesthood, nobility and common people reminiscent of surviving sermons by the academic Dominican Dr John Bromyard, the Benedictine monk and bishop of Rochester, Thomas Brinton, and the Durham subprior John Rypon,Footnote ⁶ together with an admonition to the members of each class that they would be required to give a precise account of their stewardship at the final tribunal. After emphasising the reciprocal responsibilities of the three estates, the first part proceeded to castigate the faults and shortcomings of each in turn. The pride, lust, gluttony, sloth, covetousness and general impiety of the laity came in for severe reproof, as did the injustices, extortions and oppressions perpetrated by the temporal lords charged with righteously governing them. But it was the great ‘abhominacions … scaterrid in þe chirche nowadayes’ that inspired Wimbledon's fiercest criticism. Deploring the corruption and worldliness of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the conspicuous lack of a spiritual vocation evinced by prelates and curates alike, he denounced the ‘laweles’ folk who, with Satan's assistance, had ‘entird into þe seyntewarie’ and infiltrated Christ's temple. Expending their resources on ‘ho[u]ndes’, ‘hawkes’ and ‘lecherous wommen’, clothing themselves like rich gentlemen, speaking as ‘unhonestly as cherlis’, and misusing ‘holy þyngis in here vanites and in here filþedis’, the clergy bore comparison with the ‘þe clay of Egipte’ which was ‘touз, stynkynge, and medlid wiþ blood’.Footnote ⁷ ‘[A]s a candel newe queynt þat stynkeþ al þe hous in stede of a lyзt lanterne, and as a smoke þat blendeþ mennys eiзen in place of clier fier’, Wimbledon declared uncompromisingly, such unfit ministers would certainly suffer ‘þe hardeste dom’.Footnote ⁸ He took seriously the duty God had imposed upon the priesthood ‘to kutte awey þe voide braunchis of synnis with þe swerd of [t]here tonge[s]’.Footnote ⁹

The second part of this Quinquagesima sermon took a distinctly prophetic turn. In it, Wimbledon detailed the ‘somoners’ that would call men and women both to their particular and the universal judgement. While sickness, age and death were the ‘sergyauntis’ the Lord sent to bring each individual to face his or her Maker, other ominous signs and tokens would warn that the last days of the world were at hand, among which he numbered natural disasters, political upheavals, the waxing of charity, the feebleness of faith and the proliferation of sin in all estates. Above all, though, the end would be presaged by the coming of AntiChrist. Here Wimbledon drew not merely on prophecies associated with the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot Joachim of Fiore and St Hildegard of Bingen but also on contemporary expositions of the apocalyptic vision of the opening of the seven seals recorded by St John the Divine in Revelation and of the twelfth chapter of the book of Daniel. He cited the work of an unknown ‘doctor’ on the latter who claimed that AntiChrist would manifest himself ‘in þe fourtenþe hundred зeer fro þe birþe of Crist, þe whiche noumbre of зeeris is now fulfillid not fully twelve зeer and an half lackynge’. Wimbledon would not commit himself to ‘any certeyn tyme of his comynge, siþ y have not þat knowlechynge’, but insisted that it behoved all to realise that his advent was nigh. In keeping with the tone of gloom and foreboding that pervaded his sermon as a whole, he concluded with one final premonition of the fire, brimstone and everlasting torment that would befall the wicked in hell.Footnote ¹⁰

Curiously, the precise status and identity of the author of this eloquent and trenchant discourse is shrouded in some uncertainty.Footnote ¹¹ More than one Thomas Wimbledon appears in the official records of this period. A man of this name was ordained an acolyte by William Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, in December 1381; the same or another individual was admitted to the priesthood in May 1382; and three years later a Thomas Wimbledon, designated as the chaplain of Sir John Sandes, was granted a preaching licence in this diocese.Footnote ¹² The latter should probably be separated from the Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, called ‘Wymbeldon’ or ‘Wymyldon’, listed in the bursars' accounts dating from the years 1386–8 and in a catalogue retrospectively compiled in the fifteenth or perhaps sixteenth century, where he is celebrated as ‘famosissimus predicator fuit in toto regno Anglie’.Footnote ¹³ The possibility that the elusive preacher of the Paul's Cross sermon held a private chaplaincy cannot be completely discounted, but both the intellectual attainments he displayed and his lament about the neglect of theology for the law in the universities suggest that he is more likely to have been a schoolman.Footnote ¹⁴ A somewhat confused Latin annotation attached to one manuscript copy of the text implies that the Thomas Wimbledon in question may have died on All Saints' Day 1391.Footnote ¹⁵

Such difficulties compound the problem of assessing the significance of this preacher's outlook and utterances. It cannot be ignored that the sermon was delivered at a time when radical ideas stemming from the teaching of the disgraced Oxford divine John Wyclif, who had died in retirement at Lutterworth in 1384, were circulating widely in that city and in London. Already denounced by an internal commission, Wyclif's provocative opinions on dominion, transubstantiation, the papacy and the mendicant friars were vehemently condemned by the Blackfriars council of 1382, less than a year after the Peasants' Revolt had raised the spectre of an intimate connection between sedition and heresy. The same decade witnessed much dissident preaching in a Wycliffite vein by his disciples, notably Nicholas Hereford, John Aston and Philip Repingdon, as well as the production of the widely copied Lollard sermon cycle.Footnote ¹⁶ Nor can we ignore evidence to the effect that Merton College itself (where Wyclif himself had been a junior fellow) remained something of a haven for heretical sentiment in the years before and after 1400.Footnote ¹⁷ However, this was also a period in which a more moderate current of reformist feeling, likewise emanating largely but not solely from an academic milieu, was giving public expression to very similar, and long-standing, concerns about clerical wealth and ecclesiastical abuse and corruption.Footnote ¹⁸ It is important to stress that, despite the purges of the university that punctuated the 1380s, the lines distinguishing tolerable criticism from intolerable deviance were still rather hazy and blurred. To echo Anne Hudson, between these two extremes there was a plurality and spectrum of opinion, in the mid-point of which radical orthodoxy and conservative Lollardy could look remarkably similar. These were not mutually exclusive creeds.Footnote ¹⁹ Their separation, and the identification of Lollardy as a heretical sect, may have been a consequence as much of reactionary shifts within the definition of orthodoxy as of its own increasingly extremist tendencies.Footnote ²⁰

At this point it may be appropriate to note that Wimbledon's sermon bears none of the doctrinal hallmarks of the Wycliffite challenge. With Hugh of St Victor, it may deplore the fact that prelates lavish cash upon rich trappings to make ‘ymagis gay’ and neglect the poor who ‘for defaute of cloþes beggeþ, and wiþ an empti wombe crieþ at þe dore’, but it goes no further down the treacherous road that led to wholesale denunciation of such stocks and stones as soul-destroying idols.Footnote ²¹ Silent on tell-tale topics like the eucharist and lordship and unmarked by a particularly astringent vein of anti-mendicant sentiment, its vigorous attack on the contemporary Church is no more than a slight exaggeration of many of the homiletic commonplaces of the age.Footnote ²² Free of explicit heretical teaching, this powerful critique of a corrupt society is nevertheless sympathetic to calls for institutional reform. Like the devotional compilation entitled the Poor caitif (composed around 1400), and the anonymous dialogue Dives and pauper (written after 1405), Wimbledon's sermon resists being thrust into the straitjacket of any particular standpoint. Occupying a grey area of ideological ambiguity, it illustrates the futility of seeking to draw firm distinctions in an era characterised primarily by intellectual fluidity and the perils of the black-and-white polarities around which so much historical analysis of it instinctively revolves.Footnote ²³

No less danger lies in alighting upon the apocalyptic aspects of Wimbledon's sermon as evidence of its Wycliffite credentials. Interest in Joachimite prophecy and feverish speculation regarding the chronology of AntiChrist's coming were both features of mainstream culture rather than discursive strands monopolised solely by the Lollards.Footnote ²⁴ Furthermore, unlike the author of the Opus arduum, a commentary on the Apocalypse written a year or two later, or the text known as the Lanterne of lyght composed before 1415, Wimbledon conspicuously refrained from identifying this diabolical creature with the papacy or the Church of Rome. There is no hint that he conceived of the contemporary ecclesiastical hierarchy as part of the bureaucracy of the beast. His exegesis fell essentially with the tradition of moral and allegorical rather than historical exegesis of these biblical predictions. It was consistent with a mode of eschatological interpretation that regarded them as representations of the ongoing and unceasing struggle between the flesh and the spirit as opposed to a synopsis of specific stages of human history or a particular individual or corporate body.Footnote ²⁵ Even so, the apocalyptic fervour of Wimbledon's sermon was surely a product of the same mood of urgency that engendered celebrated Wycliffite works on this subject. Like other preachers who dared to tackle the contentious issue of the appearance of AntiChrist, he was surely sailing close to the wind. In this regard it should not pass notice that when William Taylor, the Principal of St Edmund Hall, took up this contentious theme at Paul's Cross in November 1406, the authorities felt compelled to issue a rebuttal from the pulpit the following day, an humiliation that was but a prelude to Taylor's burning as a relapsed heretic in 1423.Footnote ²⁶ And there is at least one tantalising hint that Wimbledon's sermon may itself have been regarded with a degree of suspicion: could this be among the reasons why it was reputedly ‘exhibited’ to the archbishop of Canterbury, William Courtenay, a fervent opponent of Wycliffite thinking and the chief architect of the crusade against its influence in Oxford and London in the 1380s, and a transcript of it preserved with his episcopal register? When the Protestant historian and martyrologist John Foxe inspected this in the 1560s, it was ‘an old worne copye … almost halfe consumed with age’.Footnote ²⁷

No such manuscript now survives in the records of Courtenay's administration,Footnote ²⁸ but what may be commented with some confidence is that had Wimbledon's sermon been preached after the notorious Constitutions issued by Courtenay's successor Thomas Arundel in 1409 it would certainly have been in flagrant contravention of at least one of them. Designed to obstruct and restrain Lollard evangelism, these banned unlicensed preaching, seriously restricted vernacular translation of Scripture, and, significantly for the present discussion, prohibited priests from criticising the faults of the clerical estate before a mixed audience including laypeople.Footnote ²⁹ In the wake of their promulgation the meanings of earlier works, especially those that had hitherto hovered precariously on the boundary between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, underwent change and transmutation.Footnote ³⁰ Anne Hudson has observed that had William Langland's satiric poem Piers plowman been scrutinised by Arundel, he would surely have had to adjudge it heretical on the grounds that it flouted the same principle of decorum.Footnote ³¹Dives and pauper too appears to have acquired the taint of Lollardy: in a case of 1430 possession of this book was regarded by the bishop of Norwich as incriminating evidence of its owner's heresy. The fact that at almost exactly this date the abbot of St Albans paid for a copy of it to be made for his library merely underlines the continuing problems that surround attempts to pin definitive labels on any single text and the diversity and contradictions of the culture in which it circulated.Footnote ³² So too does a vernacular tractate on the Ten Commandments, once mistakenly attributed to Wyclif, which an official of the same archdeaconry ‘decreed necessarili and bi hovely cristis people to kunne in her modir tunge’. Fearless in its revelations about both lay and clerical defects and failings and insistent that AntiChrist's laws were rampant in the land, it is as vague as Wimbledon on the issue of the precise identity of this dreaded entity.Footnote ³³ Such examples remind us that official initiatives to restrain heresy and censor suspect literature were accompanied by efforts to tackle the challenge Lollardy presented by competing with it on its own terms. Arundel's authorisation of Nicholas Love's translation of the pseudo-Bonaventuran meditations on the life of Christ in 1410 is a case in point.Footnote ³⁴ The story of Bishop Reginald Pecock's imaginative but ill-fated experiments with annexing the English language for the cause of orthodox theology highlights the considerable risks that surrounded this kind of enterprise.Footnote ³⁵

There is much to suggest that Wimbledon's sermon can itself be seen as part of that ‘world of reforming orthdoxy which was thrust into the shadows along with the heretics by Arundel's legislation’.Footnote ³⁶ The Constitutions were, undoubtedly, a decisive turning point, the consequence of which was to narrow the parameters of acceptable opinion and to redefine much that had formerly been condoned or permitted as deviant. But Nicholas Watson may be guilty of exaggeration in describing this as ‘a premature Counter Reformation’ that unleashed ‘decades of religious repression’ and in attributing to it the stifling or suffocation of a vibrant tradition of vernacular theological writing that had flourished in the fourteenth century.Footnote ³⁷ It must be emphasised that, especially in the unofficial sphere of the written page, much ambiguity remained.Footnote ³⁸ The liminal and equivocal position occupied by ‘Redde rationem villicationis tue’ in this new environment is borne out by a brief glance at the codicological evidence. The manuscripts in which copies of the sermon survive reflect a climate in which not merely did ‘orthodox’ and ‘Wycliffite’ texts frequently coexist within the same collections, but in which processes of expropriation and adaptation took place in both directions. Instances of Lollards appropriating conventional devotional works and insinuating into them their own invidious opinions are well known, with the survival of interpolated versions of the Ancrene Riwle, of Archbishop John Thoresby's Lay folk's catechism, Richard Rolle's English psalter, and The prick of conscience testifying to this cunning process. On the other hand, it is increasingly apparent that conservative or cautious scribes also sought to ‘decontaminate’ Wycliffite writings by altering and expurgating offensive material. The Lollard sermon cycle was itself subjected to selective editing and modification on more than one occasion. It is not always easy to tell if such versions are the product of wary circumspection, the consequence of a canny determination to harness dissident spirituality for the Church's own use, or eclectic variants in the broad and complex spectrum of contemporary religious opinion.Footnote ³⁹ Above all they testify to the intractable difficulty of discriminating between ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’ in fifteenth-century England: the latter was not a different genus from the former so much as a species of it.

Accordingly, English copies of Wimbledon's Paul's Cross sermon can be found in mixed company.Footnote ⁴⁰ If it is juxtaposed with unexceptionable texts such as postils, prayers to the saints, exempla from the Gesta romanorum and homilies from John Mirk's Festial, it is also incorporated in anthologies of works with a quasi-scriptural and mildly reformist flavour. It travels alongside both versions of the Lollard sermon cycle (Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, ms 74) and overtly Wycliffite tracts on the inflammable topics of images, pilgrimages, ‘mawmetrie’ and ‘trewe’ and ‘false’ ‘myraclis’ (Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Eng. th. f. 39).Footnote ⁴¹ If it was copied by self-conscious disciples of the Oxford doctor, it may also have been preserved by secular priests in search of appropriate models and sources for their parish sermons. A pragmatic solution to the problems of limited access to books and restricted educational facilities, the practice of quarrying and rehearsing celebrated addresses delivered by the preachers of the past continued up to the Reformation period, as Bishop Edmund Bonner's injunction of 1542 forbidding the clergy of the diocese of London from repeating ‘sermons made by other men within this two or three hundred years’ reveals.Footnote ⁴² One fifteenth-century manuscript (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, ms 334) in which Wimbledon's sermon appears in Latin was owned by a contemporary clergyman by the name of Henry Groome;Footnote ⁴³ in another, now in Lincoln Cathedral Library (ms 50), it has been incorporated almost verbatim into the scribe's own vernacular homilies.Footnote ⁴⁴

‘Redde rationem villicationis tue’ emerges from this analysis as an ambidextrous text which straddled the porous and unstable boundary between ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’ that must be seen as a defining feature of this era. Like others of an equally amphibian character, it could simultaneously be regarded as innocent or incriminating. Copied into manuscripts of unimpeachable character it might be passed over as harmless, but intermingled with readily identifiable heretical writings it was liable to be sullied by association. As such it underlines the heterogeneity of late medieval religious culture and the contingent and contested nature of the process by which ‘tradition’ was constructed in fifteenth-century England.Footnote ⁴⁵ To expend energy and ink dissecting Wimbledon's sermon for tell-tale signs of ‘Wycliffite’ sympathy, reformist sentiment or prudent circumspection is to miss the point that this text attests above all to the pitfalls inherent in exercises in religious taxonomy. Nor is it necessary to engage in the recently revived debates about the coherence, not to say very existence of Lollardy, and its significance as a seedbed for and precursor of the Protestant heresy.Footnote ⁴⁶ In what follows I shall largely sidestep these contentious questions and focus instead on what the posthumous history of Wimbledon's celebrated Paul's Cross address reveals about the processes of myth-making engendered by the English Reformation itself.

II

The ambiguities of Thomas Wimbledon's sermon and its scribal history are critical to explaining why it was printed anonymously around 1541–2. As Anne Hudson and Margaret Aston have shown, the early decades of the Reformation saw the printing in England and on the continent of a number of Wycliffite tracts, all of them composed before 1420. Careful bibliographical detective work has uncovered details of the probable dates and places of publication of these texts and made some interesting conjectures and suggestions about the motives of those who revived, edited and disseminated them. The ‘post-mortem fame’ of these Lollard works was a direct function of the determination of early Protestants to find an historical precedent for the challenge they were mounting against the Church of Rome. Long before the Catholic taunt ‘where was your church before Luther?’ crystallised in this classic form, evangelicals began to recognise in Wyclif and his disciples a source of historical legitimacy and spiritual lineage. Both the troubles they had suffered at the hands of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the traces of defiance against the papal AntiChrist they had left behind in writing bolstered the claim that Protestantism was ‘no newe founde heresye’ but an ancient and venerable tradition and that its adherents were part of a small remnant or brotherhood of true believers that had remained unpolluted over several centuries by Roman Catholic corruptions.Footnote ⁴⁷ Thus, in 1528, an edition of the late fourteenth-century apocalyptic commentary Opus arduum appeared from a Wittenberg press carrying a commendation from Martin Luther himself, to whom the work, which had hitherto circulated widely in Czech and Hussite circles, had been sent by a colleague the previous year. Stressing its relevance to the current upheavals and schisms, Luther celebrated the author as ‘a witness preordained by God, so many years before us, for the confirmation of our doctrine’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Within a few years, printers in Antwerp and London began to issue a series of editions of old Lollard books surviving in manuscript, including the examinations of William Thorpe and Sir John Oldcastle, Jacke up lande, The lanterne of lyght, The praier and complaynte of the ploweman unto Christe, the work known as Wyclyffes wycket, and the general prologue to the Wycliffite translation of the Bible. Clearly implicated in this enterprise were John Gough, John Day and Robert Crowley; the alleged role of William Tyndale, Miles Coverdale, George Constantine and others as midwives is somewhat harder to substantiate. Embracing these ‘holy reliques’ and ‘preciouse Jewells’ as evidence of the genealogy of their own views, their editors believed that the Lord Himself had ‘wonderfully preserved’ these treasures ‘through all the storms and fires of persecution’ in order to bring them to light once again at the moment at which ‘true religion biginneth to floryshe’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Embedded in such statements was a conviction about the divine, even ‘miraculous’, origins of the art of mechanical printing that was to be articulated most memorably by John Foxe, who extolled it as an instrument given by God to dispel the mists of superstition and idolatry and ‘heap upon that proud kingdom’, the papacy, ‘a double confusion’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Conscious of the power of hoary antiquity, some publishers took pains to preserve the archaic language of these Lollard texts and presented them ungarnished and clothed in their original ‘barbarous wede’, occasionally supplemented by a glossary of obsolete words. Others, who amended it by way of concession to their readers, were nevertheless anxious to stress that the tracts were put forth without ‘thereto addynge ne yet therfrom mynysshyng’. Although no medieval scribal copies survive of some of these texts, notably Wyclyffes wycket, there is nothing to suggest that they were outrageous forgeries.Footnote ⁵¹

Historical research thus became the handmaiden of polemic and propaganda, an alliance that came to further fruition in the historiographical endeavours of the ex-Carmelite friar and former bishop of Ossory, John Bale, and his successor Foxe. Intent upon documenting the struggle through the ages between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, in The image of the two churches and the Actes and monuments, these writers constructed a view of the past that necessitated dividing late medieval society into two uneven groups: a benighted and persecuting majority and an enlightened but beleaguered minority. Anxious to bolster the ranks of Protestantism's precursors, they gathered into this category many individuals who might well have vociferously rejected any connection with the Lollard and Protestant heresies, but whose actions and utterances were sufficiently ambivalent to be harnessed and shaped for this purpose. By this means many medieval Catholics were subtly transmuted into proto-reformers.Footnote ⁵²

With this in mind we can now return to the publication history of Wimbledon's sermon, which begins towards the end of the reign of King Henry viii (see Appendix). The first extant imprint may be tentatively dated to 1541–2 and two more editions, which appeared after the accession of Edward vi, probably in the years 1548 and 1550, survive.Footnote ⁵³ Significantly, in these and subsequent editions, the author is unidentified. Other imprints may since have perished. The printers responsible for producing these books all had evangelical connections. John Mayler, originally a grocer by training, was to be accused under the Act of Six Articles for railing against the abominations of the mass and for ‘calling the blessed sacrament of the altar’ ‘the baken god’ in 1541. In conjunction with the stationer John Gough, in the early part of this decade he published a series of works by Thomas Becon, as well as an edition of Coverdale's translation of a prohibited tract by Heinrich Bullinger. Arrested during the purge of 1540, three years later Mayler was imprisoned in the Fleet for unlawful printing, together with Edward Whitchurch, Richard Grafton and Richard Kele, the printers to whom we owe the 1548 and 1550 editions of Wimbledon's sermon. Closely involved in the printing of the continental editions of the English Bible in the late 1530s, Whitchurch was later prominent in the production of the Edwardian prayer book and the Paraphrases of Erasmus. Excluded from the pardon issued by Mary i at her coronation, he ceased to print. Sometime after 1556 he married Margaret, niece of the Nuremberg reformer Andreas Osiander and widow of the martyred Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Whitchurch's one-time associate Richard Grafton, who was also a business partner of Richard Kele, played an even more notable role in the embryonic Protestant book trade. Prominent in the publication of vernacular Bibles and service books, in 1547 he was appointed official printer to the precocious boy king Edward vi.Footnote ⁵⁴

In the context of their other activities, it is clear that these men alighted upon Wimbledon's sermon as another Lollard tract. It too provided the Reformed movement with ‘the figleaf of historical continuity’ it so desperately needed.Footnote ⁵⁵ The title page of this anonymous octavo text proclaimed it as ‘a sermon no lesse fruteful then famous’, ‘in these oure latter dayes moost necessary to be knowen’, and once again it was insisted that nothing had been added or omitted to this antique text, ‘Save tholde Englysh ther of mended here and there’. The epistle ‘To the Christen reader’, written by the unidentified editor, celebrated it as evidence that even amidst the enormities of the medieval Church a godly remnant had not shrunk from denouncing sin and wickedness and calling all estates sharply to account:

The diligent reader would ‘perceyve the same quick spirite in the author therof, that thou now mervelest at in other of our tyme’, a spirit of plain-speaking that was far removed from the discourse of ‘the scrybes, and pharisees, which with theyr leaden, and blunt dartes could never touche the quicke thoughe they have occupyed, and worne the pulpyttes so many yeres’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Here was a work that challenged ingrained evangelical assumptions about the essentially unsound and unscriptural character of medieval Catholic preaching. Helen Spencer has argued that Protestant views were unduly coloured by the fact that the sermons which had been seized upon by William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde in the first age of English printing were self-evidently safe and orthodox books such as Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea, John Mirk's Festial and the anonymous Quattuor sermones. Earlier collections of a different complexion were not resurrected from the realm of manuscript and infused with new life by the advent of print. In the eyes of reformers, such sermons were simply designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the credulous laity and keep them in ignorance and awe of the prelacy and priesthood: they were filled with fabulous ‘narrations’, miracle stories and ‘old wyves tales’ at the expense of true gospel teaching. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century scholastic sermons delivered to more educated audiences were dismissed as elaborate discourses filled with duncical quibbles and sophistical quiddities that distorted and eclipsed the ‘simple verity’ of Scripture.Footnote ⁵⁷ Items that did not quite fit into either of these categories and defied what were fast becoming polemical commonplaces were consequently prone to be ascribed to Wyclif and his disciples. Works like Wimbledon's sermon also punctured the myth, most famously articulated by Hugh Latimer, that true preaching of God's word in the Middle Ages was as rare as the ‘strawberries that come but once a year and tarry not long, but are soon gone’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The polarising spectacles through which early and later Protestants came to view the world predisposed them to suppose that this and other ambiguous texts could only be the products of the reforming outlook of the members of a dissident sect. Hence the Tudor poet-preacher-printer Robert Crowley, who published three editions of Piers plowman in 1550, dated it to the years between 1350 and 1409, and more specifically to the reign of Edward iii, ‘In whose tyme it pleased God to open the eyes of many to se hys truth, geving them boldenes of herte, to open their mouthes and crye oute agaynste the worckes of darckenes.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Hence, too, the decision to print the elusive Thomas Wimbledon's Paul's Cross sermon.

John Bale's catalogue of major British writers, the Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum, first published abroad in 1548, adds a further dimension to the resurrection of this text. Tucked into his list of the writings of Wyclif, whom he exalted as the prophet, apostle and ‘morning star’ (stella matutina) of the Reformation, alongside many other misattributed works, we find ‘Redde rationem villicationis’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Its distinctly moralistic, biblical and apocalyptic flavour and its vigorous criticism of the medieval clerical estate evidently seduced Bale into believing that this too was the work of his hero. And yet the earliest editions of Wimbledon's sermon make no such ascription. If this was an assumption that was circulating in evangelical circles at the time, it is worth asking why Mayler, Whitchurch, Grafton, Kele and their unknown collaborators failed to mention it? Perhaps this omission was simply a function of ignorance, but recent work by Alec Ryrie on the last decade of Henry viii’s reign may offer another solution to this conundrum. Although this has conventionally been seen as a period of conservative reaction, Ryrie convincingly recasts it as an era in which both the regime and the reformers acted ‘to lower the temperature of their disagreements’ and in which a culture of pragmatic compromise and dissimulation reduced the potential for conflict and confrontation. Authors, editors and printers responded to this changing atmosphere by publishing works that cautiously pressed for continued reform while remaining carefully within the law. As well as continental Protestant books cloaked in pseudonyms and dressed in innocuous covers, they issued humanist, patristic and moderate Lollard texts which were unlikely to stir up trouble and attract hostile attention.Footnote ⁶¹ Free of virulent attacks upon contentious issues like purgatory, transubstantiation and the cult of saints, it may be suggested that Wimbledon's sermon suited the priorities of this phase of discreet and surreptitious reformism especially well. The ambidexterity that it had demonstrated in the previous century proved to be a positive asset at a time when the religious and political signals which evangelicals were receiving from the government were bewilderingly mixed.

The anonymity of the author was retained in the Edwardian and early Elizabethan editions, but by 1562–3, when Michael Lobley issued it annexed to a copy of the scriptural Commonplaces of the Scottish Protestant martyr Patrick Hamilton, its connection with the shining lights of the British Reformation and their forerunners had been firmly cemented.Footnote ⁶² An active evangelical who had been prosecuted by the authorities in the 1530s and ’40s for exporting banned books from Antwerp into England and troubled by Bishop Stokesley for speaking out against Catholic teaching on images and the dead, Lobley evidently shared the misapprehension that this Paul's Cross sermon was a Wycliffite effusion.Footnote ⁶³

This was perpetuated by John Foxe in the first edition of his Actes and monuments, published in 1563, who printed the text in full in between accounts of the Lollard burnings of 1413 and the Council of Constance at which the Oxford theologian's bones were ordered to be exhumed and burned as a symbol of his posthumous condemnation as heretic. ‘Whether it be of Wickleffes or Thorpe, or any of their posterity’, he commented, ‘it is uncertaine.’ ‘It semeth to be of Wickleffes doing, but whether it be or not, no doubt it savoureth of that time, and for the frute therof most worthy to come in amongst thother actes of these good men.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Foxe evidently derived his knowledge of the sermon from one of the early editions, the title page of which he quoted in full. It may be no coincidence that, despite dating it to 1388, he placed it in his narrative after the promulgation of Arundel's Constitutions in 1409, a decision that reinforced the impression of its heterodox message and character. Having seen a manuscript copy of the sermon in the interim, in the revised 1570 edition of his book, he corrected his earlier hesitant suggestion that the sermon had been delivered by John Wyclif himself, attributing it instead to ‘a certaine learned clerke, as I finde in an olde monument, named R. Wimbeldon’. Foxe concluded ‘by the auncientnes of the phrase’ that it had been preached in the late fourteenth century and explained that he had situated it alongside a narration of William Thorpe's trial for heresy in 1407, ‘for the apte coherence both of the spirit, and of the matter. Especiallye having before our eyes, the publique utilitie of the reader, to whom by the studious reading therof, might rise plentifull matter of true Christian informacion, both of the wholesome fearinge of God, and of the right guiding of every Christen mans life’.Footnote ⁶⁵

We may see this editorial arrangement as either another example of the subtle processes of paring, shaping, spinning, discriminating and discarding that marked Foxe's historical method, or more charitably as a further instance of Protestant wishful thinking and self-deception. While he has largely been cleared of the charge of wilfully inventing or falsifying evidence, as Patrick Collinson and Thomas Freeman have shown, he did engage in forms of evasion and equivocation and employ ‘touches of cosmetic surgery’ that transformed religious dissidents, many of whom had decidedly dubious opinions, into pristine precursors of the Protestant reformers. Rhetorical sleight of hand converted radical sectaries who had little in common with the followers of the New Gospel apart from being victims of persecution by the Church of Rome into their direct ancestors and brethren. Similarly subtle techniques of obfuscation led to the ‘airbrushing’ out of theologically dissident Protestant groups like the Freewillers whose presence reinforced Catholic claims about the schismatic and fissiparous character of the Reformation.Footnote ⁶⁶ Foxe also applied what K. B. McFarlane memorably called ‘several layers of rich brown Protestant varnish’ to Wyclif himself.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the case of Wimbledon, the alchemy has been effected by careful choice of language and a minor adjustment of the order in which the documents are presented. To situate this sermon amidst the events of Henry iv's reign rather than that of his predecessor Richard ii was to imply that it had been preached in a climate in which its content would have been regarded as explicitly heretical and its delivery an act of particular temerity.

Once again we run into the intractable problem of Thomas Wimbledon's ‘Lollard’ reputation. If Wimbledon was a follower of Wyclif, Foxe was guilty only of slight misrepresentation; if not, he was inadvertently constructing the preacher in the image of Wycliffite heretics whose views Wimbledon might well have repudiated. Yet, even to ask this question and to posit these alternatives may itself be misleading, a perpetuation of the very same preconceptions under which contemporary reformed writers laboured themselves. Unable to accommodate the concept that there were reformist voices within the medieval Church, they could only envisage these as operating outside it. In this regard, Wimbledon bears comparison with Bishop Reginald Pecock, who was likewise fated to be claimed by Foxe and others as a proto-Protestant. To quote Charles Brockwell, the irony of Pecock's memory was that ‘in death he became identified with the very heresy against which he had striven throughout his mature career’. Pecock too was forced by Bale, Foxe and later writers into the pigeonhole of a disciple of Wyclif and a man ‘Afflicted and Tormented by the False Bishops for His Godliness, and Profession of the Gospel’. Transmuted into a martyr, he too was marshalled into the ranks of those intrepid souls who had dared to defy the papal hierarchy. The enduring influence of the pious legend of Pecock as an early reformer lasted well into the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁸ So too, as we shall see later, did the suggestion that ‘Redde rationem villicationis tue’ was a relic of the great John Wyclif. The distorting confessional lens through which the Protestant historians of Stuart and Georgian England inspected this sermon persuaded them that it could only be a manifestation of Lollardy's provocative challenge to the ecclesiastical status quo.

This is a point to which we shall return towards the end of this paper. Firstly, though, we must consider the allegation, enshrined on the title pages of editions from at least the early 1560s onwards, that Wimbledon's sermon had been ‘founde out hyd in a wall’. What was the significance of this curious addition? The claim to have discovered a holy text concealed within an architectural structure had both biblical and medieval precedents. In 2 Kings xxii–xxiii, a book of the law uncovered by workers repairing the temple in Jerusalem on the orders of King Josiah is interpreted by the prophetess Huldah as a message of vengeance and doom against the wicked inhabitants of Judah.Footnote ⁶⁹ By the twelfth century the cryptic document hidden in a building had become a topos closely linked with the hagiographical device of inventio. Thus, in his mid-thirteenth-century compilation of the Gesta Abbatum Sancti Albani, Matthew Paris chronicled the finding of a mysterious ancient vita of St Albans in the concavity of a wall among the ruins of Roman Verulamium, during an excavation conducted at the behest of the pre-Conquest abbot Eadmar. Deciphered from the old British alphabet in which it is written by an aged priest, it had dissolved into dust as soon as a translation had been completed.Footnote ⁷⁰ Here we have a classic authenticating fiction, in which the serendipitous discovery of an antique book of mysterious origin provides the double sanction of the past and divine providence. By the later Middle Ages, this motif had become inextricably linked with the genre of ancient prophecy. The claim to have accidentally uncovered a set of enigmatic verses and sentences inscribed on a parchment or tablet in obscure places from craggy rocks to crumbling masonry to brass pots supplied a validating charter for unsettling predictions about future political, religious or social upheaval. Many variations on this theme can be documented in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: prophecies of a Galfridian, Sibylline and pseudo-Joachimite character were reported to have been found in ancient houses, abbeys, castles and convents, behind altars, in chests, under marble slabs and in old stone walls.Footnote ⁷¹ One was said to have been ‘copied oute of a boke wherin was Wycliffes wourkes, lying in a Tailors shopp at Harlowe in Essex’.Footnote ⁷² The advent of mechanical printing not merely gave a new lease of life to this archaeological topos; it simultaneously enhanced the cachet of the medium in which such predictions were most frequently encoded: manuscript. And in the context of the Dissolution of the monasteries and dispersal of books, to the prestige of these scribal relics was added an aura of secrecy and illicitness.

The incorporation of this formula into the title pages of the printed versions of Wimbledon's sermon may be interpreted as an attempt to increase its historical authority and to link it with the text of Scripture. It connected it with a passage from the Old Testament that described the reforming exploits of Josiah, the godly Old Testament king with whom the young Edward vi would become synonymous in the eyes of fervent Protestants.Footnote ⁷³ Just as the book discovered in the wall of the temple had contained revelations that served to spur on the former's efforts to reanimate the faith of the ancient Israelites and purge it of its idolatrous accretions, so too, it inferred, was the resurrection of ‘Redde rationem villicationis tue’ critical to the task of spiritual regeneration and renewal overseen by Edward and his half-sister Elizabeth. The retention of this detail in later editions may also have served to whet the appetite of the Elizabethan book-buying public, which displayed an almost insatiable thirst for medieval prophecies and prognostications. By the 1580s the proliferation of this motif in cheap print had familiarised it to an extent that was beginning to breed learned contempt. In his Defensative against the poyson of supposed prophecies, first published in 1583, the Catholic nobleman Henry Howard angrily dismissed the unearthing of a ‘dusty Volume out of an olde bench-hole’ as one of the ‘slye shifts’ used to imbue fabulous traditions and counterfeit predictions with spurious authenticity, a ‘moderne deceit’ designed ‘to beget the colour and grace of venerable Antiquity’.Footnote ⁷⁴ In his equally scathing and vigorous attack upon such fraudulent devices printed five years later, the physican John Harvey described the techniques used to infuse them with credibility: were they not

Already a byword for forgery in 1588, by the later Stuart period the theme would become the subject of sophisticated satire and comic spoof: Poor Robin's prophecy … found several years after his death, hid under an old close-stool-pan was ‘publish'd by his Executors’ in 1671 ‘to make some People Merry, and the rest Mad’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Against this backdrop, it seems clear that Wimbledon's sermon was gradually migrating out of the realm of Reformation polemic into the sphere of popular prophecy. Scholars like Francis Bacon might aver that such ephemera ought to be despised and serve for nothing ‘but for Winter Talke, by the Fireside’,Footnote ⁷⁷ but the fascination of the literate but uneducated populace for it was if anything increasing. Here its interest in the chronology of the Apocalypse as foretold by St Hildegard and Joachim of Fiore and its allegorical exposition of Daniel and Revelation probably added to its curiosity value.Footnote ⁷⁸ Fed by a stream of astrological predictions and prognostications, anxiety and speculation about the end of the world peaked in the 1580s, in the lead up to the ‘climacterical’ year of 1588. In such a context Wimbledon's sermon must have seemed to possess particular resonance and relevance. Its apocalyptic tone no doubt helped to fire and fuel the popular market for it.Footnote ⁷⁹

This suggestion finds some support if we look at the identity and priorities of the stationer-printers who supplied the continuing demand of Elizabethan and Jacobean readers for this antiquarian text. John Awdeley, who published at least four editions in octavo and sextodecimo formats in the 1570s, was a committed Protestant whose will was to be prefaced by a lengthy and distinctively reformed preamble. He was a key figure in the development of the trade in godly broadside ballads, some of which he appears to have written himself. His non-ballad output was predominantly religious in character, and included editions of works by Bullinger, Ridley and Latimer and edifying lives of some of the reformers, but he saw no contradiction in printing bawdy songs alongside earnest calls to repentance.Footnote ⁸⁰ After his death in 1575 his stock may have been taken over by John Charlewood. The first to identify the author of the sermon, Charlewood issued the subsequent editions of Wimbledon's work up until 1593, and published an eclectic range of works from Puritan treatises and ‘merry’ pamphlets to illicit Catholic books at the behest of his patron the earl of Arundel.Footnote ⁸¹ Charlewood's business was inherited by James Roberts, a specialist publisher of ballads, prognostications and almanacs who married his widow Alice, who in 1608 sold it to William Jaggard.Footnote ⁸² With the rest of this inherited stock, the copyright in Wimbledon's best-selling sermon was assigned to Thomas and Richard Cotes in 1627.Footnote ⁸³ After 1635 demand for this book seems to have run out of steam and no more editions appeared. By then it had travelled far from its Henrician origins as a pseudo-Wycliffite work and entered into a different publishing milieu. It would be wrong to suggest that profit neatly replaced zeal as the chief motivation for its publication – these two impulses always coexisted and intermingled. Nevertheless, the endurance of this text is a testament to the increasingly complex and competitive character of the contemporary printing industry.

Yet Wimbledon's sermon had not yet run its course. Interest in it revived in the early eighteenth century, when it was republished (‘verbatim after the old copy’) in 1738 under the title of The royal, clerical, and laical bayliffs cited by three som'ners, to give a reckoning of their bayliwickes, at the price of sixpence.Footnote ⁸⁴ A few years earlier, in 1732, it had appeared as the first item in a miscellaneous collection of scarce tracts ‘Only to be found in the Cabinets of the Curious’. Printed by subscription, Phoenix britannicus was intended to provide leisured and educated gentlemen with ‘instructive amusements’, all ‘entertaining Topics’ being admitted, ‘Profaneness, Obscenity, Scandal and Modern Party-Disputes alone excepted’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Not the least feature that recommended it for inclusion was its peculiar orthography, to which the editor, John Morgan, drew particular attention. Despite the amendments and concessions that had been made for the sake of sixteenth-century readers of the ‘old and rude English’ of the original manuscript, the printed text of Wimbledon's sermon had itself become archaic. Fossilised in the old-fashioned Gothic black-letter that was gradually eclipsed by modern Roman and italic fonts, its ‘ugly’ antique appearance likewise elicited comment.Footnote ⁸⁶ Two centuries had worn away the novelty of printing and turned the earliest products of the press into what Joseph Ames a decade later called ‘typographical antiquities’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The republication of ‘Redde rationem villicationis tue’ in Phoenix britannicus reflected the developing obsession of the gentry with collecting physical remnants of the past, one aspect of which was bibliophilia. Incunables and other rare volumes ‘printed at the first invention of that wonderfull art’ began to be revered almost as much as fragile manuscripts that had survived the ravages of the Dissolution. They too had to be preserved for posterity and rescued from oblivion.Footnote ⁸⁸ What little can be gleaned about the ownership of surviving copies of Wimbledon's sermon, in both script and print, is suggestive: one manuscript was part of the library of the omnivorous Samuel Pepys, while an edition of 1578 was a gift given to the Leeds antiquary Ralph Thoresby, who assembled a celebrated museum of rarities.Footnote ⁸⁹ Some evidently collected such books as relics of the ‘glorious Reformation’ itself, of the process by which ‘Britain roused herself from amidst various superstitions, and sat down on the seat of liberty’ – a process in which the mechanical press was credited with playing no small or insignificant part.Footnote ⁹⁰

But typographical eccentricity was not the only reason for the renewed fascination with Wimbledon's sermon in the early eighteenth century. The period also saw the revival of the legend that this searching and chiliastic critique of the faults of the three estates had been preached by John Wyclif himself. Casting doubt on the date of delivery of 1388 (which placed it after his death), the editor of Phoenix britannicus introduced it as ‘strongly presumed’ to have been written by the Oxford theologian, a theory enthusiastically endorsed by an anonymous reader in a letter printed after it:

He ingeniously explained away the problem of dating by suggesting that it ‘might, probably, have been altered by the Person who was ambitious of having so excellent a Discourse pass for his own’.Footnote ⁹¹ Wimbledon, then, had become a plagiarist.

Not dissimilar allegations had been made by John Lewis, the vicar of Margate, in his History of the life and sufferings of the great Lollard doctor, published in 1720. Following Bale, Lewis once again incorporated ‘Redde rationem villicationis tue’ in a list of Wyclif's writings. Noting the attribution to Thomas Wimbledon made in various manuscripts, he ventured to suggest that this was a pseudonym devised and applied by a later writer to disguise its true authorship from ecclesiastical officials: ‘It is therefore not improbable, that it is one of Wicliffes Tracts, and that, an account of the strict Prohibition of his Books, and the great Penalty incurred in having them, a feigned Name was put to it by the Owner.’Footnote ⁹² In this instance advances in historical methodology and critical scrutiny of a wider body of source material were not an antidote but a spur to the elaboration of a long-standing Protestant myth. An annotation added to one Cambridge University Library copy of the 1617 edition reveals that the claim that it had been ‘founde out hyd in a wall’ itself inspired fresh accretions to the fable: the reader glossed this with the words ‘because afterwards, all sermons of this nature were dangerous to be kept’.Footnote ⁹³ The fiction of its concealment, together with the long-running supposition that it was preached by Wyclif, may also explain why the copy of the first extant edition owned by William Sancroft, Master of Emmanuel College and archbishop of Canterbury between 1677 and 1690, is bound with eight early Reformation tracts by authors including William Tyndale, Heinrich Bullinger, John Calvin, Otto Brunfels,Thomas Lever and Thomas Cranmer.Footnote ⁹⁴ Other copies can be found bound with later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant sermons.Footnote ⁹⁵ The very scale of its survival in both manuscript and print may itself be no accident: regarded as part of the intellectual patrimony of the reformed Church of England, purported Lollard tracts were far more likely to be preserved by post-Reformation librarians and collectors than those perceived to come from the pens of ‘orthodox’ Catholics.Footnote ⁹⁶

Later historiography has persisted in reiterating the unproven claim that Thomas Wimbledon was a disciple of Wyclif. In 1920 Aylmer Vallance spoke of his address at Paul's Cross as ‘a Wycliffite sermon’ and as recently as 1978 Richard Bauckham referred to him as a ‘lollard preacher.Footnote ⁹⁷ Such labels testify to the lingering influence and enduring resilience of confessional paradigms that have conspired to distort the significance of the diversity of the late medieval Church, if not deny the existence within it of considerable fluidity of religious opinion. The long afterlife of ‘Redde rationem villicationis tue’ as a Lollard treatise also illustrates the extent to which this diversity and fluidity was eclipsed, first by the developments of the fifteenth century, and then by the dramatic historiographical rupture wrought by the Reformation. We may ultimately be unable to peel away the disfiguring coats of varnish that have been successively applied to Thomas Wimbledon and his Paul's Cross sermon, but the ways in which both have been harnessed and interpreted by scribes, printers, scholars and readers are no less, if not more revealing and intriguing. Posthumously re-invented in line with the preoccupations and assumptions of later generations, Wimbledon and his text have much to tell us about religion and culture in late medieval and early modern England.