When Wyclif, and Wycliffites, appealed to the lay power to disendow the clergy, in one sense their strategy was nothing new. In the late fourteenth century it was not an innovation for argument couched in a high-intellectual idiom and propounded by the highly educated to tell power what it wanted to hear, and the practice has not fallen into disuse since. Around the time of Wyclif in late medieval England, however, this strategy takes on a particularly interesting form: for a short time, in between the beginnings of an extensive translation of Latin learning into the vernacular from the mid-fourteenth century onward and the growing legitimation of English as an ‘official’ written language of government and administration during the reign of Henry V, this strategy of argument requires what is temporarily a highly controversial sort of translation.