The prime mover in the fourteenth century was a scholar, John Wycliffe, probably born near Richmond in Yorkshire, admitted to Merton College, Oxford, when he was seventeen, charismatic, we are told, and a fluent Latinist. He was a major philosopher and theologian who believed passionately that his knowledge should be shared by everyone. From within the sanctioned, clerical, deeply traditionalist honeyed walls of Oxford, Wycliffe the scholar launched a furious attack on the power and wealth of the Church, an attack which prefigured that of Martin Luther more than a hundred years later.
