In the year of Coucy’s visit Wyclif metaphorically nailed his thesis to the door in the form of a treatise, De Civili Dominio (On Civil Authority), which proposed nothing less than the disendowment of the temporal property of the Church and the exclusion of the clergy from temporal government.
“In the year of Coucy’s visit Wyclif metaphorically nailed his thesis to the door in the form of a treatise, De Civili Dominio (On Civil Authority), which proposed nothing less than the disendowment of the temporal property of the Church and the exclusion of the clergy from temporal government. All authority, he argued, derived from God, and in earthly matters belonged to the civil powers alone. By logical progression and in harsh polemic filled with references to the “stinking orders” of the friars and “horned fiends” of the hierarchy, his theories were soon to lead him to the radical proposition that the priesthood should be disestablished as the necessary mediator between man and God.”
