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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Reginald Pecock, bishop of St. Asaph and subsequently of Chichester, has surely been one of the most misrepresented of men. Condemned in his later years as a heretic, he was grossly misunderstood by that garrulous prophet of doom, Thomas Gascoigne, who described him as this ‘Pacock’ who loosed arrows at the sun, one of which by the just judgment of God fell upon his own head. John Foxe allotted him a place as a protestant confessor and Father Robert Parsons wished the martyrologist joy of one who had [allegedly] denied three articles of the Creed and ‘perjuriously abjured’ against his conscience.
1 For a summary biography: Emden (O) s.v.; also DNB; L eNeve 7 p 3. The best short account of Pecock’s life and thought is that by Jacob, [E. F.], [‘Reynold Pecock, Bishop of Chichester’] PBA 37 (1951) pp 121–53 Google Scholar, repr. [idem] Essays [in Later Medieval History] (Manchester 1968) pp 1-34. Blackie, [E. M.], [‘Reginald Pecock’] EHR 26 (1911) pp 448–68 Google Scholar, is still of value, though it needs to be read in conjunction with Deanesly, [M.], [The] Lollard Bible (Cambridge 1920 repr 1966 Google Scholar). The most recent bibliography is in Patrouch, [J. F.] [jr.], [Reginald Pecock] (New York 1970 Google Scholar).
2 ‘Heu! heu! heu! Domine Deus desolata est domina gencium, i.e. ecclesia, quae olimfuit dominagencium’ (Notae Thomae Gascoigne from Oxford Bodleian MS Auctar D iv 5): Loci [e Libro Veritatum, ed J. E. Thorold Rogers] (Oxford 1881) p 231. The Loci are extracted from Oxford Bodleian Lincoln Coll. MSS 117-8. For Gascoigne himself: [W. A.] Pronger [Mrs Maxwell], ‘Thomas Gascoigne’, EHR 53 (1938) pp 606-26; 54 (1939) pp 20-37 (based on an Oxford B. Litt. thesis), where there are a number of criticisms of Thorold Rogers’s editorial work. However, the latter appears to have extracted all that is relevant to Pecock.
3 Loci p 218 and compare p 217. Quotations in English in the text have been modernised.
4 Foxe’s martyrology, Parsons, Harpsfield and the Index (n 6 below) are mentioned by the perspicacious author of ‘Bishop Pecock, his character and fortunes’, Dublin Review 24 ns (1875) p 28 (based on Foxe and Hearne?). Green, Compare [V. H. H.], Bishop [Reginald] Pecock (Cambridge 1945) p 2 Google Scholar; ‘Concerning Pecock’s Opinions, not only from Nicholas Doleman’s [that is Parsons’s] Three Conversions of England…’in [Walteri] Hemingford[… Historia, edT. Hearne] (Oxford 1731) 1 appendix pp cli-clii [also n 6 below]; [R. Parsons or Persons], Three Conversions of England (np 1604) 2 pp 264-7. Foxe placed Pecock in his ‘Kalender’ for 11 February (1457); [The] Acts and Monuments [of John Foxe. .. with a preliminary dissertation by G. Townsend, ed S. R. Cattley] 8 vols (London 1837—41) 1 (preceding text). Townsend examines the criticisms of Foxe by (among others) Parsons and Harpsfield, ibid 1 pp 421-38, 438-66.
5 Dublin Review, p 28; Harpsfield, N. ed Gibbon, Richard, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica: Historia Wicleffiana (Douai 1622) pp 719–20 Google Scholar; Harpsfield, N. (under pseudonym Alan Cope), Dialogi Sex contra . . . Oppugnatores et Pseudo-Martyres (Antwerp 1566) pp 738–1002 Google Scholar (sixth dialogue).
6 Hemingford 1 appendix p lxxvii n 1. Hearne adds: ‘E quibus verbis, quid de Antiquariorum Hispanicorum in re critica peritia sit judicandum, facillime elici potest’’.
7 A treatise proving Scripture [to be the Rule of Faith: Writ by Reginald Peacock] (London 1688).
8 J. Lewis, The Life of. . . Reynold Pecock (London 1744 repr Oxford 1820). However, Lewis did have access to extracts from the Repressor: see The Works of the Rev. Daniel Waterland... ed Mildert, W. Van 11 vols (Oxford 1823-8) 10 pp 208–74 Google Scholar; BL Add MS 33906.
9 The fact is acclaimed by the full title of Lewis’s work. Robson, J. A. wrote of his contribution in Wyclif and the Oxford Schools (Cambridge 1961) p 2 Google Scholar: ‘Protestant lowchurch Whiggery, flushed with the triumph of the Hanoverian settlement, came to the defence of Wydifs memory in the person of John Lewis of Margate (1675-1747)’. There is an even less complimentary description in Heame’s Collections 10 p 128, cited Jacob, Essays p 4 n 3.
10 Hook, W. F., Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury 12 vols (London 1860-76) 5 p 304 Google Scholar. Pecock, Hook discusses s.v. Archbishops Stafford and Bourchier, ibid pp 178–82, 293–311 Google Scholar.
11 Wharton 1 pp 25-6 (Lambeth MS 99 fol 139r.
12 Hannick, [E. A.], [Reginald Pecock: Churchman and Man of Letters] (np 1922) esp p 15 Google Scholar. Compare Dublin Review 24 p 50: ‘We think enough has been said to show that the charges against Pecock, even so far as material heresy is concerned are false, or, to say the least, not proved’. C. Babington, editor of [The] Repressor [of over much blaming of the Clergy] 2 vols (RS 1860) 1 pp 1-lii n 1, discusses some of Lewis’s statements with respect to Pecock’s ‘errors’.
13 Kelly, T., ‘Reginald Pecock: a Contribution to his Biography’ (1945) cited by Patrouch in his bibliography and by Jacob, , Essays pp 4 Google Scholar n 1, 7 n 2, 11.
14 Buckland, J. H. (née Flemming), ‘Reginald Pecock: his place in the History of English Thought’ (Thomas Arnold prize, Oxford Google Scholar). I have not seen a copy of this.
15 Green, Bishop Pecock.
16 Repressor (Cambridge UL MS Kk iv 26); [The] Book of Faith (Cambridge MS Trinity Coll B 14 45), edited by Wharton and reedited with a lengthy introductory essay by Morison, J. L. (Glasgow 1909); [The] Donet (Oxford Bodleian MS Bodley 916 Google Scholar) ed Hitchcock, E. V., EETS os 156 (London 1921 Google Scholar), collated with [The] Poore Mennis Myrrour (BL Add MS 37788); [The] Folewer [to the Donet] (BL MS Royal 17 D IX) ed Hitchcock, E. V., EETS os 164 (London 1924 Google Scholar); [The] Reule [of Crysten Religioun] (New York Pierpoint Morgan MS 519) ed Greet, W. C., EETS os 171 (London 1927 Google Scholar). See Green, , Bishop Pecock,Google Scholar app 2 for a list of works surviving and lost.
17 Greene, Compare, Bishop Pecock cap 15 pp 230–35 Google Scholar ‘Pecock’s Significance’ and Emerson, [E. H.], ‘[Reginald] Pecock: Christian Rationalist’, Speculum 31 (1956) p 235 Google Scholar: Green ‘seems unable to decide exactly what Pecock’s importance is’ despite his claim that ‘he was a man who, from nearly every point of view, played a significant and interesting part in fifteenth-century history and whose life and works are not unworthy of being characterized and studied’.
18 Book of Faith intro p 86.
19 ‘Pecock: Christian Rationalist’ pp 235-6. An area beyond the confines of the present article concerns Pecock’s importance in the history of English prose, where opinion has also been divided. See, for instance, The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature ed Watson, G. 1 600-1660 (Cambridge 1974) cols 665–6, 805 Google Scholar; Kennedy, A. G., A Bibiliography of Writings in the English Language (New York 1961) p 175 Google Scholar nos 4814-6; Krapp, G. P., The Rise of English Literary Prose (Oxford 1915) pp 73 Google Scholar seq; Hitchcock’s introduction to the Folewer; Hannick cap 5; Patrouch cap 2.
20 1 bk 2 ‘Christian Humanism and the Religious Divisions’.
21 A treatise proving Scripture p xxxvi.
22 Persecution and Tolerance (London 1895) p 123.
23 Epistola de Tolerantia ed R. Klibansky trans J. W. Gough (Oxford 1968) pp 98-9.
24 Haines, [R. M.], ‘Education [in English Ecclesiastical Legislation of the Later Middle Ages]’, SCH1 (Cambridge 1971) pp 161–75 Google Scholar. For Arundel’s constitutions (1407) see Wilkins 3 pp 314-19.
25 Gascoigne repeatedly returns to the question of Pecock’s sermons on this theme; for example, Loci pp 15, 35, 39, 41, 44, 49. Jacob, Essays p 4 n 2, questions Mrs Maxwell’s emphasis (Pronger, ‘Thomas Gascoigne’ p 30) on Gascoigne’s fixation, pointing out his concern about Pecock’s attitude to the doctors. For Pecock’s defence of the 1447 sermon made to Archbishop Stafford: Abbreviatio Reginaldi Pecok, Repressor! pp 615-19.
26 Folewer p 69, à propos of ‘our faith’: ‘And þis feiþ we clepen “catholik feiþ”, þat is to seie, vnyversal or general feiþ, and þe same feþ we clepen “ortodox feiþ”, f)at is to seie ri3t feiþ’.
27 Emerson, ‘Pecock: Christian Rationalist’ p 236, argues that what he ‘confessed under pressure’, that is preferring judgment of natural reason to the New and Old Testaments and the Church’s determination, ‘he had earlier . . . established as the ideal for which men should strive’. Nuttall, [G. F.], ‘[Bishop] Pecock and the Lollards’, Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society 13 (1937-39) p 83 Google Scholar, writes that Pecock’s ‘scepticism is a rational one, it is in favour of reason at the expense of the Church; and, in that by him faith and reason are brought into the closest relationship, it is at the expense of faith too, as faith was then understood’. Nuttall saw similarities between Pecock’s thought and that of both Abelard and Hooker. Various writers have taken up the comparison with the latter; for instance Munz, P., The Place of Hooker in the History of Thought (London 1952) pp 41–5 Google Scholar.
28 The first part is particularly the concern of the Repressor, constituting a vindication of the Church against the Lollards; the second is the subject of the (inchoate) Donet, its sequel the Folewer, and of the Reule. The Book of Faith is more concerned with the ‘grounding’ of faith and the nature of authority in the Church.
29 The intent of the anti-Lollard sermons which may be tentatively ascribed to the Benedictine John Paunteley is to ridicule Lollard opinions and the Lollards themselves, to assert that matters of faith and theology are for clerics alone, and to argue that current miracles provide proof of the Church’s ‘validity’. See Haines, R. M., ‘“Wilde Wittes and Wilfulnes”, John Swetstock’s attack on those “Poyswun-mongeres”, the Lollards’, SCH 8 (Cambridge 1971) pp 143–53 Google Scholar, esp pp 148-9; idem, ‘Church, Society and Politics in the Early Fifteenth Century as viewed from an English Pulpit’, SCH 12 (Oxford 1975) pp 143-57, esp p 153.
30 Reule p 21, compare Folewer p 7. For the feminine role see C. Cross, ‘“Great Reasoners in Scripture”: the activities of women Lollards 1380-1530’, Medieval Women, ed D. Baker (Oxford 1978) pp 359-80.
31 Folewer p 13, compare Reule p 87. For the study of the bible in the fifteenth century see Deanesly, Lollard Bible esp cap 13, and for Pecock (likened in two respects to Wyclif and Purvey), ibid pp 360-4.
32 And þerfore myche raþer mowe suche maters be left to þe peple in writyng, for as myche as pei mowe pe writyng ofte rede and þerupon studie, þerupon conseil aske and have helpyng, and so þe bettir it kunne and þe bettir kepe hem fro erryng and of it pe mysundirstonding, pan if pei schulde it heere oonly oonys or twies bi word of preching’. Reule p 21. Elsewhere (Repressor pp 88-9) Pecock distinguishes between the functions of preaching (exhortation) and of scholarly exposition.
33 ‘Meete to ech mannys mesure of receyvableness’. Reule p 22.
34 Reule pp 17—22. Pecock suggested that his works were ‘in þe comoun peplis langage’ for two sorts of people. ‘Oon is of hem whiche holden hem silf so stifly . . . foolili and oonli to þe uce of þe bible in her modiris langage’ that they hold ‘alle þpere bookis writun or in latyn or in þe comoun peplis langage to be writun into waast . . . and cumbring of cristen mennes wittes. The ‘oþer soort’ while reading and studying the New Testament in English and admitting the use of other books in that language ‘þei apprisin so myche þo unsavery bokis’ and hold them to be ‘riche jewils . . . loued and multiplied abrood of alle cristenpeple’.
35 For example, Folewer p 7: ‘And in oþire bookis whiche y write for lay men, y write maters passyng þe capacite and þe power of lay men forto þo maters vndirstonde’.
36 Reule pp 88-90. He also cites Scripture in Latin, ibid pp 133-4, 136-8, as well as in English.
37 For example, Folewer pp 11, 65-8; Reule pp 464-6. Pecock’s The just apprising of doctors has been lost.
38 In the second section of the Repressor Pecock attempts a vindication of the Church’s attitude to images and pilgrimages; in the third he defends the clergy’s revenues; in the fourth the clerical hierarchy and ecclesiastical legislation, and finally, the religious orders.
39 For the ‘Bible men’ see Repressor p 87, where Pecock mentions diverse groups: ‘Doctourmongers’, ‘Opinion holders’ and ‘Neutralis’.
40 Folewer p 37, also p 10; Book of Faith pp 174-5; Repressor pp 8-9, where Pecock mentions his intention to write a treatise on logic in English; Patrouch pp 54-9.
41 Nuttall, , ‘Pecock and the Lollards’ pp 85–6 Google Scholar: ‘In the last resort Pecock would have had to admit that reason, by which articles of faith are to be proved, is its own in trinsic authority, which is a telling illustration of the non-rationalism of a religious conviction, to which the rationalist is eventually driven back; for he would have found it hard to defend the authority of reason by reason’.
42 Repressor p 102, where the Lollard opinion is said to have been: ‘If eny man be not oonli meke, but if ther with al he kepe and fulfille al the lawe of God … he schal have the trewe vndirstonding of Holi Scripture thou3 no man ellis teche him save God’. Pecock summarises his view in the Reule p 33: ‘Manye untrewe opynyouns feyned and forged… wiþoute ground of sufficient resoun or holy scripture, and also þat manye oþer opynyouns taken as for foundid in scripture mysvndirstonden’.
43 Repressor p 10: ‘It longith not to Holi Scripture, neither it is his office into which God hath him ordeyned, neither it is his part forto grounde eny gouernaunce or deede or service of God, or eny lawe of God, or eny trouthe which mannis resoun bi nature may fynde, learne, and knowe’ (the first of thirteen conclusions).
44 But see Repressor p 33. Elsewhere (Folewer p 52) canon law is considered to be the third kind of ‘prudence’, that is of ‘knowyng wherbi we knowen what is to be doon or to be left undoon in oure gouernauncis’.
45 See Haines, , ‘Education’; Patrouch pp 109–13 Google Scholar.
46 Myrk, John, Instructions for Parish Priests ed Peacock, E., EETS os 31 (London 1968); Patrouch pp 113–23 Google Scholar.
47 He challenged Jerome’s statement that ‘Sithen the chirche wexid in dignitees or in possessiouns, he decrecid in vermes’ (Repressor pp 334—9); claimed that with respect to the relationship of faith and reason Gregory contradicted himself (Book of Faith pp 145—52); and remarked of ‘the philosopher’, ‘Wat was Aristotil oþir þan a louer of trouþ?’ (Folewer p 151).
48 See Green, V. H. H., ‘The Donation of Constantine’, CQR 135 (1942) pp 36–64 Google Scholar; Ferguson, A. B., ‘Reginald Pecock and the Renaissance Sense of History’, Studies in the Renaissance 13 (1966) pp 147–65 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The latter argues (p 157) that Pecock ‘never questioned the providential scheme of history’ but was ‘able to see the religious traditions in a new perspective, the perspective of human experience’.
49 Patrouch pp 123-40 summarises Pecock’s ‘system’.
50 In the Reule pp 398-408, Pecock assesses practices associated with prayer and the divine office. Compare Donet pp 202-14. The English version of the Apostles’ Creed is in the latter, pp 103-4. A ‘Long version’ has not survived.
51 Especially Loci pp 208-18. Gascoigne can be supplemented by the [Registrum Abbatiaejohannis] Whethamstede, [edH. T. Riley] (RS 1871) 1 pp 279-89 (Hemingford pp 490-502) and by the derogatory Brief Latin Chronicle in Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, ed J. Gairdner, Camden Society ns 28 (London 1880) pp 167-8. For contemporary critics see Jacob, Essays pp 13-14. Pecock himself (Folewer p 226) comments on current criticism and abuse ‘mych unclerkli’.
52 Loci p 216 (compare 214, 217). See also Folewer pp 66-7; Reule pp 464—6; Book of Faith pp 145-52.
53 Loci p 217; Hemingford p 488; Repressor p 623. Compare BL MS Sloane 3534, fol 3V, which also has a Latin version.
54 For example, Reule pp 96-7: ‘He is in no synne … so þat he be redy to forsake his errour as soone as he may dresse hym silf bettir into trouþe’. Also Reule p 29, where Pecock promises submission to his ‘ordynaries’ (prior to his elevation to the episcopate).
55 Whethamstede pp 285-6; Hemingford p 498; Acts and Monuments 3 p 733 (from Canterbury Reg Bourchier). The recantation is in Oxford Bodleian MS Ashmole 789, fol 303v (cited Jacob, Essays p 19 n 2); Whethamstede pp 286-7. See also Hannick pp 14- 15.
56 Repressor intro pp lvii-lviii, and for the sources of Archbishop Bourchier’s instruction to the abbot of Thorney, ibid n 3; Oxford Bodleian MS Ashmole fol 789, fol 326r (cited Jacob, Essays p 22 n 3). See also R. M. Haines, ‘The Practice and Problems of a Fifteenth-Century English Bishop: The Episcopate of William Gray’, Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972) pp 456-7.
57 Repressor p 602.
58 For instance, Repressor p 576 n 1. (J.] Gairdner Lollardy [and the Reformation in England] 4 vols (London 1908-13) 1 pp 238—42, concludes that Bury’s is ‘really a very able treatise’.
59 Repressor p 606 (Cladius Salomonis).
60 Whethamstede p 288.
61 For Pecock’s attitude to Wyclif see Parouche cap 3. In view of work on the survival of Lollards into the sixteenth century this chapter now requires revision. Green, Bishop Pecock pp 68—9, points out that statutory oaths were taken at Queens’ and King’s Colleges, Cambridge, against the ‘damnable errors’ of Wyclif and Pecock. The brief analysis of the former’s thought by G. Leff, ‘John Wyclif: the Path to Dissent’, PBA 52 (1966) pp 143-80, provides a useful means of comparison.
62 The theme of Acts and Monuments 2.
63 For Netter’s arguments in the Doctrinale and its two supplements: Gairdner, Lollardy 1 pp 186-201; for Paunteley: R. M. Haines, ‘“Our Master Mariner, Our Sovereign Lord”, a Contemporary Preacher’s view of Henry V, Mediaeval Studies 38 (1976) pp 85-96.
64 (London 1932) 1 p 15.
65 Olsen, V. N., John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (Berkeley and London 1973) p 197 Google Scholar. Henriques, Compare U., Religious Toleration in England (Toronto 1961) p 1 Google Scholar: ‘The development of religious toleration in England was an ultimate and wholly unintended consequence of the Reformation’.
66 Reule pp 389-95.
67 Folewer p 10. Yet Pecock warned against ‘Every hasty and vnsufficientli considerid and unavisid doom of resoun’ (Reule p 466).
68 Bussell, F. W., Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle Ages (London 1918) pp 684–7 Google Scholar; Jacob, , Essays pp 30–4 Google Scholar.
69 Repressor intro p lix.