The last age of the church — Text and Context

A Preface That Doubts Its Predecessors

Todd's preface is a careful catalog of scholarly debts and disappointments. He notes that Bishop Bale's list of Wycliffe's writings 'has been necessarily made the Basis' for all subsequent work, and he acknowledges the additions by John Lewis and Mr. Baber. But he is pointedly critical of Mr. Vaughan's compilation, which 'has not added much to our Knowledge' and cannot be commended 'for Accuracy or Learning.' Even the more elegant work of Mr. Le Bas, Todd observes, does not profess to do more than follow his predecessors. The cumulative effect is a portrait of a field stalled by reliance on secondary accounts. Todd's solution is direct: 'until the Works of Wyclyffe, real and supposititious, be collected and published, it is vain to talk of determining his Opinions.' The preface thus positions the present tract as a provisional step, not a final word.

The Black Death as a Textual Witness

The excerpt from the chronicle embedded in Wycliffe's text offers a stark, sensory account of the plague. It describes 'grete Diches and Pyttes' used for mass burial, with bodies layered and covered with 'a lytell Erth.' The passage dwells on the speed of death: 'they that sekened, as on this Daye, dyed on the thyrde Daye after.' It also records a curious biological detail—children born after the pestilence had 'two Cheketethe in ther Heed lesse than they had afore.' Todd's footnotes cross-reference this with Hollinshed and a French chronicle, noting discrepancies in the number of missing teeth. The effect is to show Wycliffe's text as a node in a network of medieval record-keeping, where precise observation mingles with apocalyptic rhetoric.

Editorial Annotations as a Second Text

Todd's editorial apparatus does not merely clarify; it adds a layer of scholarly argument. His footnotes cite multiple chroniclers—Caxton, Hollinshed, William de Nangis—and weigh their accounts against Wycliffe's. For instance, he notes that Hollinshed records a defect of 'four, not two cheke Teeth,' while Wycliffe's source says 'eight grete Teeth.' Todd does not resolve the discrepancy but instead traces it to a French narrative that 'apparently has been the Source from which many of our English Chroniclers have borrowed.' This method turns the edition into a miniature case study in textual transmission. The reader is invited to see Wycliffe's work not as an isolated artifact but as part of a living, contested tradition of historical writing.

Readers approaching this edition should attend to the interplay between Wycliffe's medieval voice and Todd's nineteenth-century editorial frame. The preface's call for a complete collection of Wycliffe's works remains unfulfilled, making this tract a fragment of a larger scholarly project. The chronicle of the plague, with its grim physicality and numerical precision, rewards close reading for what it reveals about medieval habits of observation and record. The footnotes, meanwhile, offer a model of how to read critically across sources.

Reading the editor’s plea to return to Wycliffe’s own words, I recalled my first encounter with the medieval mystics, their patient search for God’s indwelling light. That same quiet ache for immediacy—for a voice unmediated by commentary—comes back here. It is a familiar longing, tender and unresolved, as in Light, Life, and Love: Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages — Reading Notes, where the past feels suddenly, achingly near.