John Wycliffe

John Wycliffe was Oxford's leading philosopher when he began arguing that Scripture, not the papacy, is the final authority — and that ordinary English people should be able to read it. The Bible that bears his name, translated from the Latin Vulgate by Wycliffe and his circle, was copied by hand and smuggled across England by traveling preachers his enemies nicknamed Lollards. He died of a stroke at his parish in Lutterworth, still legally a priest in good standing. Thirty-one years later the Council of Constance condemned him as a heretic and ordered his body taken out of holy ground. Nothing was done for years, until Pope Martin V pressed the order and, in 1428, Richard Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, had the bones dug up, burned, and thrown into the River Swift. The historian Thomas Fuller saw the picture in it, writing in 1655: the brook carried the ashes into the Avon, the Avon into the Severn, the Severn into the sea, "and thus the Ashes of Wickliff are the Emblem of his Doctrine, which now is dispersed all the World over."