The clergy knew perfectly well that the main cause of the national discontent with the existing forms and institutions of religion was the teaching of the Wyclyfite.
[Illustration: “THE TRUE PORTRAITURE OF RICHARD WHITTINGTON, THRICE LORD MAYOR OF LONDON” (d. 1423)
It was, indeed, to be expected that his preaching would be popular in all classes down to the very humblest. How should it be otherwise? He addressed all who could be moved by noble and generous inspirations. He preached against the enormous wealth of the clergy and the Religious Houses, wealth which choked up and destroyed the springs of piety; against the vices which too many of the clergy flaunted impudently in the face of the world, sloth, luxury, gluttony, intemperance, and incontinence: he preached in favour of personal righteousness, purity, and faith: it is significant that no new Monastic Houses were founded; that on the other hand, men like Whittington, Carpenter, Niel, and Sevenoke, in the City were founding schools, endowing libraries, rebuilding prisons, erecting almshouses, but never endowing monasteries. Whittington, for instance, gave a library to Grey Friars: he built and endowed an almshouse called God’s House: he founded the College of the Holy Spirit for five fellows, clerks, conducts, and servants: he restored the hospital of St. Bartholomew: he provided “bosses” or taps of fresh water in various parts of London: he rebuilt Newgate: he gave money for a library at the Guildhall. Of other civic benefactors in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we must record the names of Sir John Philpot, who destroyed the pirates: of Sir William Sevenoke, who founded a grammar school in his native town: of Sir Robert Chichele, who gave money to provide a dinner and two-pence once a year to 2400 poor householders: of Sir John Wells, who brought water from Tyburn: of Sir William Estfried, who constructed a conduit from Highbury to Cripplegate: of John Carpenter, town clerk, who has given us the _Liber Albus_, and who founded a small charity which in time grew into the City of London School: of Sir John Niel, master of the hospital of St. Thomas Acon in Chepe, who proposed to found four new City schools: of William Byngham, who founded at Cambridge the small college called God’s House for twenty-four scholars, which afterwards developed into the illustrious and venerable College of Christ: of William Elsinge, who founded the Spital for a hundred poor men which afterwards became Sion College: of John Barnes, who left money to be lent to young men beginning in business: of Philip Malpas, who left the then large sum of £125 a year for the relief of poor prisoners, besides great benefactions to the poor, and a sum of money then yielding £25 a year for Preachers on the three Easter Holydays at St. Mary Spital. When we remember that a priest could then live on £6 a year—does that include his lodging?—the remuneration for three sermons seems generous indeed. Robert Large belongs to the latter half of the fifteenth century: he left a great sum of money in various bequests, including the very useful charity of a marriage _dot_ for poor Maids. There were others, but these may suffice. They sufficiently prove the wealth of the donors, because a man thinks first of his own children or nephews: when he has provided for them, and not till then, he may consider how best to dispose of the residue. They prove also what is known from other sources of information that the endowment of monastic houses had practically ceased. Whittington, it is true, founded a college, but the chief duty of the Fellows was to sing masses daily and for ever for the repose of his own soul and that of his wife. I know nothing that shows the decay of the old belief in monks and friars more clearly than the list of fourteenth and fifteenth century benefactions and endowments. “Let us have libraries for scholars, and almshouses for the aged poor,” says Whittington, and endowed them. “Let us have schools,” says Sevenoke, Carpenter, and Byngham, and they endow them. But for the rich monks of the Holy Trinity, St. Mary of Grace, of St. Albans, of St. Peter’s—nothing.