Wyclif found certain scholars of his time ‘in full cry against the unlogical, imprecise language of the Bible and the liturgy’. No commentaries written in that spirit survive, but traces are abundant in contemporary writings of aggressive talk in the schools and disputatious questioning along these lines. The challenge was not in its essence a new one. It is an episode in a series of encounters which had taken place between secular learning and Christian learning from the beginning; and more recently between grammar and logic and the difficulties presented by the Bible’s language. But it was perhaps new in degree. These critics of Wyclif’s day, it seems, said that the Bible was not logical and found in that a reason to question its truth, rather than to look to their logic for faults, as had been the traditional way.

Twenty-Five years ago the title of this paper would have seemed to many a contradiction in terms; even now there may be some who will expect the scholar of my title to be a critic of Wyclif, erudite in the heresiarch’s manifold outpourings. The scholar was, however, himself a Wycliffite, indeed of the radical wing of that persuasion. His misfortune, from a modern viewpoint, is that he did not in his works reveal his name, and hence a cumbersome periphrasis is unavoidable. The writer reveals most about himself in the Tractatus de Oblacione Iugis Sacrificii, despite its title an English work of nearly 4000 lines, dealing primarily but not exclusively with the Eucharist: there it becomes clear that he must have been writing between March 1413, since Henry IV is spoken of as recently dead, and February 1414, since Arundel (þe grettist enmy þat Crist haþ in Ynglond) is still said to be archbishop of Canterbury, and that he had previously treated the subject of clerical temporalities in a sermon on the text Omnis plantacio qu[am] non plantauit pater meus celestis eradkabitur. The Tractatus survives in a single manuscript, now BL, Cotton Titus D. v, of the first half of the fifteenth century and clearly not the author’s original.