Modern accounts of the Wycliffite movement and of the beliefs of its adherents have been based for the most part upon records compiled by opponents. Most obviously hostile are the episcopal registers and documents, though these have the advantage of being relatively prolific and almost always dated and localised; inevitably, secular records about the movement become more ample as Lollardy was identified with sedition. The surviving chronicles, such as those of Knighton or Walsingham, were largely written by members of those orders that Wyclif castigated throughout his teaching. The picture constructed from these records has sometimes been filled out with details from overtly hostile and polemical texts such as Netter's Doctrinale. Given such sources, it is hardly surprising that the accounts appear incomplete, even at times incoherent and contradictory. Episcopal registers, as has been suggested elsewhere, present only fragmentary records of the views they condemned; polemical authors, and even chroniclers, often wrote with hindsight, an advantage to their own argument, but a disqualification to their usefulness as historical sources. Particularly in the case of Lollardy, where increasing opposition from the ecclesiastical hierarchy was reinforced after about 1400 by suspicion of treason so amply confirmed in the Oldcastle revolt, late texts are peculiarly unreliable. McFarlane, in his posthumously published lectures, suggested that many aspects of the movement ‘are irremediably hidden from us’, unless ‘new material is found of a kind and quantity so far unsuspected’.

‘There is one Katherine Chidly an old Brownist, and her sonne a young Brownist, a pragmaticall fellow, who not content with spreading their poyson in and about London, goe down into the Country to gather people to them… Katherine Chidly and her sons Books (for the mother and the son made them together, one inditing, and the other writing) are highly magnified, and the brasen-faced audacious old woman resembled unto Jael …’.

The title requires some explanation. There is no satisfactory generic term to cover the institutions and groups discussed in this paper. I have opted for ‘International Protestant Community’, because it he seems on the whole less unsatisfactory than the term ‘ecumenical movement’, which in contemporary parlance at least must include within its scope Catholics as well as non-Catholics. Even the narrower term has its defects, however, since many of the Anglicans who played prominent roles within these international organisations would have considered themselves more Catholic than Protestant, while the Orthodox who figured in at least some of them would not have considered themselves Protestant at all. But in the period reviewed here the dominant influences within this international community were undoubtedly Protestant and the description, International Protestant Community, though inadequate, is probably the least inadequate available.