Status Updates From England in the Age of Chiva...

“To overthrow a monarch [Richard II] was a great and heinous act, and one that men dreaded to act upon…this was the prelude to decades of conflict in which Edward III’s descendants tore one another to pieces; by the time the war between the Houses of Lancaster and York was finished, three more kings had suffered violent deaths and countless noblemen were dead with them. The War of the Roses had begun.”

“Wycliffe died peacefully in 1384. However, the Lollards were damned as heretics and, in 1401, burning at the stake was introduced for the first time for anyone who denied transubstantiation, heralding two centuries of increasing religious intolerance and fanaticism.”

“Arguing that the common people should be able to read the Bible for themselves, and not take their priests’ word for it, Wycliffe became at first a nuisance and then dangerous. His followers became known as Lollards, from loller, a Dutch word for itinerant preachers; it also meant ‘mumbler,’ as they were known to mutter memorized passages of the Bible.”

“With the world shook up, more uncertain, and violent, the Plague had led to an ugly anticlerical mood across Europe. In Germany in 1372, papal tax collectors were ‘seized, mutilated, imprisoned, some even strangled’ after Pope Gregory XI demanded a new tithe, something many clerics refused to pay.”