Wycliffe’s Influence on John Huss and the Bohemian Reform

When John Wycliffe died at Lutterworth in 1384, his opponents hoped that the trouble he caused would end with his burial. Instead, his writings began a second life on the Continent. Nowhere was this more evident than in Bohemia, where the Czech reformer John Huss absorbed and adapted many of Wycliffe’s ideas.

The connection between England and Bohemia was forged, in part, by a royal marriage. In 1382, Anne of Bohemia married King Richard II of England. Anne brought with her not only a retinue and political alliances, but also an interest in religious literature. She possessed Bibles in Latin and in her own language, and her presence at the English court helped stimulate contacts between scholars at Oxford and the University of Prague.

During these years, Wycliffe’s Latin works—especially his treatises on the Church, the papacy, and Holy Scripture—circulated among Bohemian students and teachers. Men traveling between the universities carried manuscripts with them. Some brought back copies of the English Gospels, not for public reading in Prague but as evidence that vernacular Scripture could be produced and used to strengthen true faith.

John Huss (Jan Hus), born around 1372, studied at the University of Prague and rose to become both a professor and eventually rector of the university. He also preached at Bethlehem Chapel, an important center for Czech-language preaching in Prague. Huss encountered Wycliffe’s writings as part of the normal intellectual traffic between the two universities. At first, he read them as one scholar reads another—interested, cautious, selective. But the more he studied Wycliffe’s arguments, the more he found in them a powerful ally for his own growing concern about corruption in the Church.

Huss did not simply copy Wycliffe. He remained more conservative in certain areas, especially regarding the Eucharist. Unlike Wycliffe, he did not openly deny transubstantiation. Yet on crucial points—the supremacy of Scripture over tradition, the moral character of true Church authority, the condemnation of clerical luxury, and the need for reform—Huss and Wycliffe stood close together.

To the hierarchy, this proximity was enough. As Huss’ preaching against indulgences, simony, and moral laxity gained influence in Bohemia, his enemies increasingly labeled him a Wycliffite. They pointed to his admiration for the English reformer as proof of his unsoundness. By the time the Church convened the Council of Constance, Wycliffe and Huss were so closely linked in the minds of many that to condemn one was, in effect, to condemn the other.

The Council of Constance and the Condemnation of Wycliffe’s Teaching

The Council of Constance (1414–1418) met in a time of profound crisis. The Great Papal Schism, which had begun in 1378, had by 1409 produced not two but three rival popes: Gregory XII in Rome, Benedict XIII in Avignon, and John XXIII, elected at Pisa. Christendom was weary of conflicting claims, overlapping excommunications, and endless intrigue.

Under the sponsorship of Emperor Sigismund, church leaders gathered at Constance (in present-day Germany) with three stated aims:
to end the Schism,
to reform the Church “in head and members,”
and to extirpate heresy.

The last goal quickly moved to the forefront. Huss had been summoned to the council under a promise of safe-conduct from the emperor. Many hoped that theological debate might reconcile him to the Church. But from the beginning, it was clear that the council fathers regarded him as a dangerous teacher whose ideas threatened both ecclesiastical unity and political stability.

In their eyes, Huss was the fruit of a poisoned root—John Wycliffe. Before they could condemn the Czech preacher, they determined to pass judgment on the Englishman whose writings had supposedly spawned this new outbreak of heresy.

The council examined extracts from Wycliffe’s works that had already been scrutinized at Oxford and by English ecclesiastical authorities. A list of propositions—some drawn directly from his treatises, others distorted summaries prepared by opponents—was compiled. These articles dealt with the nature of the Church, the authority of the pope, the legitimacy of clerical wealth, the power of the civil magistrate over corrupt clergy, and the doctrine of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist.

In 1415, the council formally condemned Wycliffe. A number of his teachings were declared heretical, others erroneous, still others “rash and seditious.” The council asserted that he had died an obstinate heretic and that his errors continued to infect England and Bohemia. They ordered that his books be burned and that steps be taken to eradicate his influence wherever it appeared.

Not content merely to censure his ideas, the fathers of Constance also linked Wycliffe directly to Huss. In their decree against Huss, they referred repeatedly to “damnable articles of John Wycliffe,” asserting that Huss had spread them in Bohemia. In condemning Huss to death by burning, the council presented itself as finishing what English authorities had supposedly failed to do decades earlier.

The message was unmistakable: Wycliffe was to be remembered not as a reforming scholar but as the arch-heretic whose doctrines threatened the unity and authority of the medieval Church.

Burning the Writings and Ordering the Exhumation of His Body

The Council of Constance did not confine itself to theological declarations. It prescribed concrete actions to erase Wycliffe’s presence from the life of the Church. First, it ordered that his writings—wherever found—should be burned. This instruction targeted not only England but also Bohemia and any other region where his books circulated.

Burning books served several purposes. It sought to cut off access to his ideas by destroying physical copies. It symbolically represented the Church’s judgment that his doctrine was “fit only for the flames.” And it sent a warning to others: those who wrote as Wycliffe had written could expect similar posthumous treatment.

Yet the council went further still. In one of its most striking decisions, it decreed that Wycliffe’s bones should be dug up from consecrated ground and cast away. The logic was simple and chilling. A man condemned as a heretic, even posthumously, did not deserve burial in holy earth. His grave was an offense, his resting place a reproach to the Church.

The council specifically instructed the bishops in the region where Wycliffe had been buried to carry out this act. Responsibility fell chiefly upon the bishop of Lincoln, in whose diocese Lutterworth lay. The decree, however, did not take immediate effect. Whether due to hesitation, practical difficulties, or a lingering sense of reverence for the dead, successive bishops delayed enforcing the order.

For more than a decade after Constance, Wycliffe’s remains lay undisturbed in the churchyard of Lutterworth, even as his writings came under attack and his followers—the Lollards—faced increasing persecution. But the decree remained on record, awaiting a prelate willing to execute it. That moment came in 1428.

The 1428 Exhumation, Burning, and Scattering of His Ashes

In 1428, Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln, finally carried out the council’s command. Fleming himself had earlier shown sympathy toward some reform ideas but had since aligned fully with the established Church. Determined to demonstrate his orthodoxy and obedience to Constance, he ordered Wycliffe’s grave to be opened.

By then, more than forty years had passed since Wycliffe’s death. The man who had once challenged popes and parliaments was now reduced to bones and dust in a modest grave outside the Lutterworth church that he had served. Yet the Church authorities approached the exhumation with ceremonial gravity, as if they were dealing with a living threat rather than a long-dead priest.

Accounts from later chroniclers describe the scene: church officials and local clergy gathering at the grave, laborers digging down to the remains, the bones of Wycliffe brought up from the earth and placed upon a prepared pyre. There, under episcopal direction, they were burned.

The fire consumed what was left of the body. But even in ash, Wycliffe’s remains were not permitted rest. Once the flames cooled, his ashes were collected and thrown into the nearby River Swift. The act was deliberate and symbolic. By casting his remains into the water, the authorities intended to show that Wycliffe’s connection to consecrated ground had been completely erased. He was expelled from the cemetery as he had been expelled from the university—driven out of the visible communion of the Church he had sought to reform.

To bishops and council fathers, this was the final correction of a long-standing scandal. A notorious heretic no longer lay honored among the faithful dead. The decree of Constance had been fulfilled, and the Church could take satisfaction in having removed from its soil the bones of a man it judged dangerous even decades after his death.

Yet the very extremity of the act betrayed the fear that still clung to Wycliffe’s name. Few men are hated so intensely that their enemies trouble themselves to destroy their bones forty-four years after their burial. The exhumation was meant to erase him. In reality, it made his story even more memorable.

The River Swift, the Avon, the Severn, and the Open Sea

Once Wycliffe’s ashes were cast into the River Swift, they began a journey that later writers would describe with almost poetic precision. The Swift is a small river, winding quietly through the fields near Lutterworth. From there, its waters flow into the Avon near Rugby. The Avon continues its course until it meets the Severn, one of England’s great rivers, which finally empties into the Bristol Channel and the open sea.

For those who carried out the exhumation, this geographic detail held no deliberate symbolism. They simply chose the nearest river as a convenient means of disposal. But for later generations reflecting on Wycliffe’s life and legacy, the path of those waters became a powerful emblem of divine irony.

Just as the Swift carried his ashes into the Avon, and the Avon into the Severn, and the Severn into the sea, so Wycliffe’s teachings flowed outward from Lutterworth into England, from England into Bohemia, and from there—in time—into the wider world. His critics sought to concentrate their hatred on his grave. Providence scattered the memory of his work far beyond their reach.

Seventeenth-century historian Thomas Fuller famously drew this comparison, noting that as the sea receives rivers from all lands and sends them back in clouds and rain, so Wycliffe’s doctrine, once released, spread throughout Christendom and returned as a blessing to many nations. Fuller’s image is not inspired Scripture, but it captures something profoundly true about the course of church history: human wrath often serves, unwittingly, the broader purposes of Jehovah.

The attempt to eliminate Wycliffe by fire and water could not prevent the broader current of reform that his work helped set in motion. The Lollards continued in England despite persecution. Hussite movements in Bohemia carried forward similar convictions about Scripture and the Church. And in the sixteenth century, when figures like Luther, Zwingli, and others began to challenge Rome, they walked paths that Wycliffe had, in many respects, cleared long before.

Symbol and Providence: A Movement Spreading Beyond Control

The story of Wycliffe’s bones is more than a curious footnote; it is a parable of providence. The Church authorities at Constance and in England believed that by condemning his teachings, burning his books, and scattering his ashes, they could finally silence the English reformer. They underestimated both the power of Scripture and the sovereignty of God.

By the time his bones were burned in 1428, Wycliffe’s most important work was already beyond reach. Copies of his English Bible existed in many hands. His Latin treatises had crossed borders. His ideas lived in the sermons of Lollard preachers, the arguments of Hussite theologians, and the conversations of ordinary believers who had tasted the freedom of hearing God’s Word in their own language. Burning a body cannot unteach a text once planted in the mind.

Moreover, the very extremity of the Church’s actions helped to fix Wycliffe’s memory in Christian consciousness. Hundreds of medieval theologians died quietly, their names forgotten. But the man whose bones were dug up and thrown into a river remains unforgettable. The fury directed against him showed how deeply his challenge had been felt. His enemies, by their vengeance, testified to his significance.

From a biblical perspective, the episode demonstrates the truth that “the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.” Human institutions rise and fall. Councils meet and pass decrees. Bones return to dust. But when a man devotes himself to opening the Scriptures, the effects of his work stretch far beyond his lifetime. Jehovah uses weak instruments to accomplish purposes that no council can finally thwart.

Wycliffe did not live to see the Reformation. He never imagined the printing press, the explosion of Bible translations, or the global spread of the Gospel in later centuries. Yet his insistence that Scripture must rule the Church, and that the Bible must be available in the language of the people, became foundational to movements that continued long after his dust mingled with the sea.

The Council of Constance tried to dig Wycliffe out of history as they dug him out of his grave. Instead, they helped ensure that future generations would ask a simple question: Who was this man they hated so fiercely? Those who seek the answer inevitably find themselves drawn back to the Scriptures he loved and to the Christ he served.

The river Swift carried his ashes away from Lutterworth. Providence carried his testimony across nations and centuries.

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