📍Hipswell, Richmond, North Yorkshire DL9 4BD, England
1320 – 1384“I was born around 1320 at Hipswell in North Yorkshire and became a theologian at Oxford who challenged the wealth and authority of the medieval church a century before Luther. I argued that the Bible was the supreme authority for Christians and should be available in English — the poor ploughman should know scripture as well as the cardinal. The Wycliffe Bible, translated under my supervision, was the first complete English translation. I was condemned as a heretic but protected by powerful patrons during my lifetime. My followers, called Lollards, were persecuted after my death. My bones were exhumed and burned by order of the Council of Constance forty-four years after my death. The Yorkshire childhood, the Oxford philosophy, the English Bible — these were the conditions of a proto-Reformation.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Levy, I. John Wyclif: Scriptural Logic, Real Presence, and the Parameters of Orthodoxy (2003), Marquette University Press; Workman, H. John Wyclif (1926), Clarendon Press