Lollardy was an irritant a century and a half old in early Tudor England’s otherwise placid religious landscape: a native movement, taking its inspiration in the late fourteenth century from bitter critiques of the official Church developed by the Oxford philosopher John Wyclif. Official persecution by both Church and monarchy had rooted Lollards out of the universities and normally out of gentry society, but they clung on in their clandestine religious life, generally keeping a tepid outward conformity to their community’s public worship. Not many made enough public fuss to attract
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