ed his hatred of clerical and monastic endowments, and in this he showed no great originality. Throughout the Middle Ages the wealth of the clergy was liable to attack, and that sometimes from the most orthodox. What is, however, characteristic of Wyclif is the argument, half-feudal and half- theological, with which he supports his attack on the clergy and the monks; yet though connected with his name it was in part borrowed from Richard Fitz-Ralph, an Oxford teacher and vice- chancellor, who had since become Archbishop of Armagh. Fitz-Ralph had been himself an opponent of the "mendicants", but Wyclif found in his theory of "lordship" a convenient and a novel way of formulating the ancient but anarchical principle that no respect is due to the commands or the property of the wicked. "Dominion is founded in grace" is the phrase which sums up the argument, and dominium it must be remembered is a word which might be said to contain the whole feudal theory, for it means both sovereignty and property. "Dominion", then, or "lordship", belongs to God alone. Any lordship held by the creature is held of God and is forfeited by sin, for mortal sin is a kind of high treason towards God, the Overlord. Fitz-Ralph had used this argument meaning to justify the distinction between "property" and "use" which the moderate Franciscans had adopted and the extremists had rejected. Wyclif, however, brought it down into the market-place by applying it to clerical possessions. He even went further than the argument authorized him, for he came to hold that no monks or clergy, not even the righteous, could hold temporal possessions without sin, and further that it was lawful for kings and princes to deprive them of what they held unlawfully. Logically, Wyclif's doctrine of lordship should apply to temporal lords as well as to spiritual; but this logical step he never took, and he did not, therefore, contribute intentionally to the Peasant Revolt of 1381. Yet the...
