RECENT historians have drawn attention to the influence of women in later lollardy, and it may also be that in parts of England as soon as lollardy moved out from the university some women immediately adopted its tenets, their involvement being largely hidden by the inadequacies of the contemporary sources. The attractions of lollardy for lay people in general and women in particular are not hard to understand. After a millennium during which a priestly caste had more and more been distancing itself from the laity certain discontented lay people, excluded from the mysteries of the church and especially from direct access to the scriptures, could scarcely have failed to respond to novel doctrines which stated that a lay man predestined to life stood equal in the eyes of God to any priest. These revolutionary ideas first propagated by Wyclif continued to be disseminated by some heretical clergy throughout the fifteenth century. One such priest, John Whitehorne, parson of the parish of Coombe Bisset in Wiltshire, in 1499 confessed to having taught, in addition to much else, that ‘when Christ should ascend into heaven, he left his power with his apostles and from them the same power remaineth with every good true Christian man and woman living virtuously, as the apostles did, so that priests and bishops have no more authority than another layman that followeth the teaching and good conversation of the apostles’.