Sunday, February 26, 2017

On the Day February 26 1401

The First Lollard to Burn

On the Day February 26 1401


Khen Lim

Related image

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. 
Related image
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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