The First Lollard to Burn
On the Day February 26 1401
Khen Lim
William Sawtrey (Image source: Look and Learn)
When William Sawtrey, a Roman Catholic priest was charged and
then thrown into prison for heresy before being freed in 1399, he did so only
because he abjured the increasingly popular but illegal Lollard movement, but
then once he returned to his normal life, he was filled with remorse, feeling
strongly that, by his actions to save his own skin, he had, in fact, betrayed
Christ.
Sawtrey was one of many laymen and Catholic priests who had
embraced John Wycliffe’s teachings of Christ. It was Wycliffe who began a
movement he called Lollardy where his believers – called Lollards – would
spread across the hamlets and villages to teach the Word of God that proved
divergent from what the Roman Catholic Church espoused.
Wycliffe taught people
like Sawtrey that the Church had simply corrupted the teaching of the Bible and
summarily, banned the distribution and availability of any vernacular Scripture
for personal consumption lest the people discover the corruption and revolt
against the bishopric and papal authorities. With that in mind, Wycliffe
created the first known Bible translation in common English in order that his
people could access and read it, and come to know the Word of God in the way
that Christ – and not the Church – desired.
For Sawtrey, April 30 1399 was the beginning of the Church’s
repressive countenance against any teaching it deemed heretical. On that day,
he was arraigned and then despatched to Henry le Despenser (1342-1406), the
bishop of Norwich in North Elmham. It was le Despenser who ordered that Sawtrey
by cross-examined for heresy for a period of two days. By the time the
examination was over, Sawtrey was said to have rejected free will and
demonstrated a disbelief in the veneration of images or the usefulness of
profligate pilgrimages.
With all the heresy charges proven, he was transferred to an
Episcopal prison where upon his release, he renounced his Lollard beliefs
privately at first and then publicly in Lynn on May 25 where he was the priest
at St Margaret’s (as well as in Tilney in Norfolk). In fact on the following
day at St John’s Hospital, he swore on the Gospels before the presence of le
Despenser that he would never indulge in the preaching of Lollardy and would
not seek to hear confessions without obtaining a licence from the bishop.
After his abjuration saw the end of his parsonage in Lynn and
Norfolk, Sawtrey left to find residence in London, probably hoping to distance
himself from le Despenser. Soon, he found work as a parish priest at St Osyth’s
where he reverted to issues that would raise the ire of the Church once again.
Once again, he became vocal about the Lollard concerns regarding wrongful
distribution of the Church’s wealth, the social intent of the priesthood over
the devotion and other similar views. Rather than facing le Despenser, Sawtrey
was this time brought before the Archbishop Thomas Arundel at St Paul’s on
February 12 1401. There, he was ordered to provide an account of what he had
been teaching.
At that time, England had just passed a law that paved the way
for burning at the stake for anyone proven to be a heretic. Called de heretic comburendo (tr. Statute of
Heresies), the new statute empowered government authorities to burn heretics
for rejecting Catholicism or for accepting the beliefs only to revert to
earlier heresies. With this new political power in hand, Arundel questioned
Sawtrey with unprecedented fierceness.
Even so, Sawtrey was resolute. After his early sense of
wrongly renunciation, he did not buckle this time. Rather in answering the
Archbishop’s question, he replied, “Instead of adoring the cross on which
Christ suffered, I adore Christ who suffered on it.” In reinforcing his Lollard
credentials, he was now at odds with the principle of bowing before crucifixes,
a serious accusation that state prosecutors levelled at him as a result.
Sawtrey went on to criticise the time spent reciting certain prayers when it
would have served Christ more constructively by simply preaching the Word. As
for the profligacy of the many costly pilgrimages to ‘save one’s soul,’ the
money saved, he said, could have been better used in helping the poor, infirmed
and needy. Sawtrey also preached that adoration of mankind was more importance
than that of angels.
Amidst all the charges of heresy, perhaps the one that sealed
his fate and doomed him to die was his stance on the Holy Masses, which Arundel
spent three long hours extracting his interpretation. To Sawtrey, the post-consecrated
Bread of the Eucharist remains physically, bread, even if we view it
sacramentally as the bread of life. Catholic teaching on consubstantiation, on
the other hand, till this day insists that it truly becomes the flesh of
Christ.
The insistence of the unchanged nature of bread even after consecration
was what finally got him well and truly indicted but none of this seemed to
faze Sawtrey for he essentially responded to every charge against him by way of
Scripture. Even as Arundel tried coaxing him to deny Wycliffe’s teachings or at
the very least, acquiesce to the Church’s viewpoint, Sawtrey saw no other way
than to refuse them.
Six days later, on February 18, the once-Catholic priest made
his appeal before the King and Parliament after receiving a copy of the charges
of heresy laid against him. Before the august house, Sawtrey extracted verses
from the apostles John and Paul as well as from Augustine but to no avail. Just
as they resisted embracing his reasoning, he in turn rejected their overtures
to recapitulate on his standpoint.
On February 23, the same charges were made
against him and one by one, through seven consecutive stages, Sawtrey was
stripped from his priesthood and subsequently relegated to a doorkeeper. In the
process, he was removed of every clerical responsibility including his vestment
and even his tonsure.
On this day, six-hundred and sixteen years ago, in 1401, William
Sawtrey was officially condemned as a relapsed heretic under the new
legislation that called for him to be burned at the stake. From the seven steps
of degradation that he was forced to endure in complete humiliation, he was
then handed over to the secular authorities to face his execution. He was chained
and then burned to death at St Paul’s Cross in Smithfield in March 1401 in
front of a crowd of public onlookers.
His death made him the first of Wycliffe’s Lollards to die for
what he believed in. His martyrdom stirred discontent not just with the Lollard
supports but also among the lower classes but also at Oxford University in
which Wycliffe’s teachings were well received. Among those who were outraged by
Sawtrey’s execution was John Oldcastle, a knight and captain for the Prince of
Wales.
In seeing injustice done against an innocent priest via the new and
odious Statute of Heresy, Oldcastle resolved to offer protection by hiding
Lollard preachers from authorities. In the meantime, he gathered other fellow
knights who were similarly partial to Lollardy and appealed before King Henry
IV (1367-1413) and have him repeal the law and proposed that the money flagrantly
wasted by the Church could be better utilised by the state armoury, almshouses
and tertiary institutions.
John Wycliffe preaching (Image source: Look and Learn)
With Lollardy making headlines, sympathisers at
Oxford University found themselves at the centre of a fiery debate of which
there was no recusing. Despite all the unwanted attention, they continued to
translate Wycliffe’s work while they relentlessly raise the question of why
Bible translations were even considered unlawful when they served to inform the
people of God’s Word.
No matter the effort, the King was ignorant of Oldcastle and the
knights’ pleas and persecution of Wycliffe’s believers persisted. Not only were
the knights discredited by the Church-leaning authorities, the venerable Oxford
University itself was condemned and brought to shame. However, though
discouraging it must have been, none of this stopped the Lollards from preaching
their faith albeit via underground networks that ran unnoticed by the Church
authorities.
Further reading
- Feiling, Keith (1948) A History of England (London, U.K.:
MacMillan). Available to read at https://archive.org/details/AHistoryOfEngland_822
- MacFarlane, K. B. (1966) John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English
Nonconformity (London, U.K.: The English Universities Press Ltd.).
Available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/John-Wycliffe-Beginnings-English-Nonconformity/dp/B000RNY7QS
- Sawtrey, William in Stephen,
Sir Leslie and Lee, Sir Sidney, editors (1998) The Dictionary of National Biography (London: Oxford University
Press). Available at https://www.amazon.com/dictionary-national-biography-Leslie-Stephen/dp/0198651031
- Trevelyan, George Macaulay
(1904) England in the Age of Wycliffe,
New Edition (London, U.K.: Longmans, Green and Co.). Available at https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://www.amazon.de/England-Wycliffe-George-Macaulay-Trevelyan/dp/B009DLHK5A&prev=search
or alternatively, at https://books.google.com.my/books?id=tlEJAAAAIAAJ&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=y
- White, Michael (Apr 2011) William Sawtrey, The First Lollard Martyr
in Look and Learn History Picture Library (London, U.K.: Look and Learn Ltd.).
Available online at http://www.lookandlearn.com/blog/6828/william-sawtrey-the-first-lollard-martyr/
- William Sawtrey in
Biblical Training. Available online at https://www.biblicaltraining.org/library/william-sawtrey
- William Sawtrey in
Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911. Available at http://www.theodora.com/encyclopedia/s/william_sawtrey.html
- Wood, Douglas C. (Oct
1984) The Evangelical Doctor: John Wycliffe
and the Lollards (Darlington, U.K.: Evangelical Press). Available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Evangelical-Doctor-John-Wycliffe-Lollards/dp/0852341881
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