popular acquiescence enabled the papacy to enjoy these privileges for
nearly two centuries longer. National feeling was particularly inflamed
against the papacy because the "Babylonish captivity" of the pope at
Avignon made him appear an instrument in the hands of England's enemy,
the king of France; and that captivity was followed by the "Great
Schism," during which the quarrels of two, and then three, popes,
simultaneously claiming to be the only head of the church on earth,
undermined respect for their office. These circumstances combined with
the wealth and corruption of the church to provoke the Lollard
movement, which was the ecclesiastical aspect of the democratic
tendencies of the age.

One of the most striking illustrations of popular development was the
demand for vernacular versions of the Scriptures, which Wycliffe met by
his translation of the Bible. At the same time Langland made literature
for the common people out of their common lot, a fact that can hardly
be understood unless we remember that villeins, although they might be
fined by their lords for so doing, were sending their sons in
increasing numbers to schools, which were eventually thrown open to
them by the Statute of Labourers in 1406. The fact that Chaucer wrote
in English shows how the popular tongue was becoming the language of
the court and educated classes. Town chronicles and the records of
guilds and companies began to be written in English; legal proceedings
are taken in the same tongue, though the law-reports continued to be
written in French; and after a struggle between French and Latin, even
the laws are drawn up in English. That the church persisted, naturally
enough, in its usage of catholic Latin, tended to increase its
alienation from popular sympathies. Wycliffe represented this national
feeling when he appealed to national authority to reform a corrupt
Catholic church, and when he finally denied that power of miraculous