Lewis Sergeant, John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers… (1893)
“ In natural or religious lordship he finds the grand peculiarity that the lord paramount is the only absolute lord, of whom each individual holds directly, and to whom alone every individual owes his service. ”
Lewis Sergeant, John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers… (1893)
“ First and foremost amongst these causes must be reckoned the obsolescence and gradual decay of the feudal system, owing not so much to the Anglo-French dynastic wars—which were but one chapter of a long story—as to certain natural and logical developments of feudalism, sure to take place sooner or later, and already in operation when the fourteenth century began. Feudalism could not endure more than a century or two, at any rate in its original form, in any country not perfectly secure against the risk of foreign wars. ”
Lewis Sergeant, John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers… (1893)
“ We have been at such pains to establish the connection between the early Reformation and the Peasants' Revolt that we may have lost sight for a moment of the main and prevailing causes of this half-abortive revolution. But if anyone could be found in those days capable of maintaining that Wyclif and his disciples were primarily responsible for the Revolt, it would be enough to ask in reply what would have been likely, and indeed certain, to happen at the close of the fourteenth century even if the last of the Schoolmen, the first of the English Reformers, had never written, preached, or lived. ”
