immediate outcome encouraged complacency in the ruling class, beginning with the King. Perhaps intoxicated by success, Richard developed all the instincts of absolutism except the toughness to quell his opponents, and was to end as the victim of one of them. The military saw no need for improvement; the Church was stiffened against reform. Alarmed by the Lollards’ leveling doctrines, the privileged class turned against them. In Gower’s “Corruptions of the Age,” the poet denounced them as breeders of division between church and state sent into the world by Satan. Lollardy went underground, long
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