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pilgrimages, purgatory, saints’ images and relics, and laughing at the notion that a cash payment to the Church or the pope could release a soul from purgatory. They laughed, too, at church bells, as peals of vanity. ‘Lo, yonder is a fair bell, and itwere to hang about a cow’s neck in this town’, one was accused of saying.
    They had, too, a leavening of men whose time was coming, merchants, traders, prosperous shopkeepers, lively men with money and ambition. They travelled and spread their ideas. Four London heretics were found to have attended a Lollard meeting at Amersham; one was a goldsmith, another was Thomas Grove, a well-off butcher who was able to slip the large sum of £20 to Dr Wilcocks, the vicar general of the diocese of London, so as to avoid doing public penance, which might have ruined his reputation and his business. John Hacker, a water-bearer of Coleman Street in London, journeyed to Burford and to Buckingham and Essex to distribute heretical manuscripts. In London, he was associated with John Stacey, a prominent member of the Tilers’ and Bricklayers’ Company. Stacey kept a man in his house to ‘write out the Apocalypse in English’, the costs being met by John Sercot, a grocer.
    A scholar like Tyndale, a university man, might seem on a different plane to these rougher and more practical men; but they shared ideas with him, they made up a natural constituency for reform, and they were very brave. ‘Christ sitting at supper could not give his disciples his living body to eat,’ John Badby, a tailor of Evesham in Worcester, said at his trial. In so doing, in front of two archbishops, eight bishops, a duke and the lord chancellor, he condemned himself to death. The Host was displayed to him by a prior as he was bound to the stake at Smithfield. ‘It is the consecrated bread and not the body of God,’ Badby cried, and the fire was lit.
    It needed a bolt of spiritual lightning to fuse Tyndale and the Lollards into a new evangelical force and this was provided by Martin Luther. On 31 October 1517, about a year after Tyndale had gone to Cambridge, Luther nailed ninety-five theses attacking the Church to the door of the castle church at Wittenberg in eastern Germany.

    The immediate cause of Luther’s fury was a papal indulgence, a remission of the punishment for sins in return for a cash payment, which was being sold in Germany to raise money for the rebuilding of St Peter’s in Rome. Luther denied that the pope had the power to remit any guilt, and that it was mere ‘human doctrine’ to preach that a soul flew out of purgatory at the moment that a coin rattled into a Church coffer.
    The obscure Saxon raised a whirlwind. ‘Nobody,’ Luther boasted, ‘will go to hear a lecture unless the lecturer is teaching my theology, which is the theology of the Bible, of St Augustine, and of all true theologians of the Church.’ In fairness, he should have credited Wycliffe, for he went beyond the Lollards in only one major dogma.
    In these final years of Catholic hegemony, popes and prelates reached the heights of magnificence. Nicholas V had summoned his cardinals to his deathbed in 1455, and told them that the loyalty of the ‘uncultured masses’ of believers was best obtained through giving them ‘something that appeals to the eye’. Ideas and theology carried little weight; a popular faith ‘sustained only on doctrines’, he assured them, would ‘never be anything but feeble and vacillating’. But if the Holy See was ‘visible’, if it was ‘displayed in majestic buildings, imperishable memorials and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God himself’, then belief could ‘grow and strengthen like a tradition from one generation to another’, and the Church would be ‘accepted and revered by all the world’.
    His successors were dazzling in their visibility. Julius II, pope when Tyndale went up to Oxford, laid the cornerstone of the Basilica of St Peter’s, tapped the genius of