exemplaria, Vol.

24 Nos 12, 2012, 2845

Trials of Conscience and the Story of Conscience

Christopher G Bradley

This essay analyzes the trials of conscience presented in two medieval interrogation narratives, the Testimony of William Thorpe and the Letter of Richard Wyche. Written by followers of the radical theologian John Wyclif, these are the only surviving texts from medieval England that describe heresy inquisitions from the perspective of the accused. Despite similarities between the two authors and legal proceedings, the texts are strikingly different. Thorpe produces a competing public narrative to the official account of his movement, embracing his chance to share his conscientious convictions. By contrast, Wyches cautious text reflects distaste for the legal technology used to test his conscience, a loyalty oath. He considers public oaths inadequate vehicles for coming to grips with his inner life, or for conveying his religious beliefs. The broader implication is that trials of conscience prompt conscience to tell its story, defining itself in relation to the demands of public, coercive forces. In particular, oaths pointed and memorable are useful not only to narrators such as Wyche and Thorpe, but also to officials creating public narratives of a heresy defeated. Oaths produce coinciding narrative, personal, and political crises, in which the conflicting demands of public and private open to view and enter into negotiations.
keywords conscience, heresy, law, Lollard, Richard Wyche, trial, William Thorpe, Wycliffite

A trial is an indictment of individual behavior, but it is also a challenge from and to those who accuse; it is a gauntlet thrown down by the law and taken up by the watching public. The state must always justify its actions. Those who conduct a trial are always on trial themselves. (Robert A. Ferguson) I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary . . . Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world,
W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2012
DOI 10.1179/1041257311Z.0000000003

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we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. (John Milton) Violences may bring the Erroneous to be Hypocrites; but they will never bring them to be Believers. (Cotton Mather)

Conscience the storyteller

By the Story of Conscience in this essays title, I mean to show that, instead of just an idea revealed through a narrative, conscience is the very stuff of story, an idea that exists and functions most of all as a generator of narrative. Conscience is, in a sense, the storyteller, which tells the story of conscience, aiding the conscientious subject in a search for understanding of individual and social identity. As indicated in the other part of my title, Trials of Conscience, it is in times of juridical testing that conscience generates its most revealing, compelling narratives, and the deep connection between trials of conscience and narratives of conscience is, for reasons that will become clear, no coincidence. I focus on two heresy inquisitions from the early fifteenth century, memorialized in The Letter of Richard Wyche and The Testimony of William Thorpe. These are the only two autobiographical trial narratives from medieval England. The Letter and Testimony were written in a high moment of persecution, and each authorprotagonist faces a trial of conscience, over whether he will swear an oath of allegiance and submit to church authorities. As these two texts illuminate, broad shifts in historical horizons may be less important for students of conscience than the ground-level textual, social, political, and personal spaces within which trials of conscience unfold. I argue that despite their similarities, their striking historical and philosophical points of contact, ultimately the two authors put forth quite different understandings of conscience and of the stories conscience tells.

The Wycliffite heresy

The medieval texts treated here emerge from the Wycliffite heresy of late medieval England, well known to medievalists, though sometimes treated by scholars of other periods as having been eclipsed by the later Reformation to which it is inevitably compared (Hudson, Premature; Hornbeck). From the 1380s onward, English political and religious authorities condemned the teachings, and persecuted the followers, of the brilliant Oxford philosopher-theologian John Wyclif. Wyclif challenged orthodoxy on issues ranging from transubstantiation to confession to the propriety of church property-holding; his was a comprehensive challenge to or, he argued, a return to apostolic ideals of the churchs role as mediator between individual believers and their God. Though Wyclif and his foremost followers were deeply imbued with and inspired by the rarefied techniques and topics of late medieval academic discourse, ultimately the substance and form of Wycliffite teaching

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converged in an inflammatory, even revolutionary, emphasis on lay people learning and reading beyond priestly supervision, and on the production of religious texts in English, including a hugely popular and strictly forbidden Bible translation. Wyclif died in 1384, but his movement preoccupied religious and political authorities for decades. The persecution would culminate in the first decades of the fifteenth century in the burning of a number of Wycliffites and the strict prohibition of unapproved religious texts, especially those in English. Officials commonly arrested suspected Wycliffites and investigated them in interrogations equivalent to the preliminary stages of a trial that is, in inquisitions, although the term here refers not to the later, more notorious Inquisition, but to ad-hoc heresy proceedings presided over by less specialized church officials, as part of their broader pastoral duties.1 Officials often forced Wycliffites, in addition to paying fines or suffering other punishments, to swear an oath abjuring heresy, embracing orthodoxy, and submitting to the authority of the church. Post-oath infractions could put a suspect in grave danger. Relapsed, obdurate heretics faced execution or other extreme punishments. While Wycliffite interrogations were usually instigated not because of unorthodox beliefs per se (matters primarily taken up in confession), but because of preaching, book ownership, deviant religious practices, or other legal infractions, the public and private merged in many cases because Wycliffism involved such deep commitment to educational and other detectable ideals. For many Wycliffites, the conflict between inner commitment and outer expression was not easily avoided, particularly as official surveillance and investigation activities, though still quite low by any modern standard, heightened. Richard Wyche and William Thorpe well-educated priests whose writings boldly display their Wycliffite sympathies lived, taught, and wrote in this charged climate. Wyches text was written soon after the trial it describes, probably winter of 1402/1403.2 After the series of interrogations described in his Letter, Wyche recanted, between October 1404 and April 1406, under circumstances unknown. More than a decade later, he was detained and investigated again by political and church authorities, but he was released and he held further ecclesiastical positions near London. Finally, Richard Wyche was burned as a relapsed heretic in 1440. Though Wyches Letter was likely composed in English and in England soon after the events it describes, it survives in a single, later manuscript in Prague, in a rough Latin translation, apparently smuggled out and preserved by Hussites followers of the heresy of Jan Huss, a related religious movement deeply rooted in Wycliffite thought.3 William Thorpes lengthier and slightly later Testimony survives more widely, but Thorpe the man leaves little historical record. After the interrogation his Testimony describes, which appears to have taken place in 1407, he may have fled to live among Hussite sympathizers in Prague (Hudson, Introduction liiliii; Hudson, Which Wyche 236). In the Testimony, Thorpe claims to have studied with Wyclif himself and to be personally acquainted with leading Wycliffites (4041). Documentation of an earlier interrogation of Thorpe that is mentioned in the Testimony survives (91;

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Hudson, Introduction xlviil), as does corroboration of the interrogation described in the Testimony (Jurkowski). These two men faced trials of conscience, then, not particularly different from those endured by many of their fellow Wycliffites, some of whom recanted, some of whom resisted, and many of whose reactions we know little of. What truly marks these two individuals out from the rest is that their stories have survived, not just in answers recorded in the records of the authorities, but in what give every indication of being personal, firsthand accounts. The two interrogation memoirs aptly serve as starting points for an investigation of conscience at trial and how conscience tells its story.

The intimate Letter and strident Testimony

The Letter and Testimony could, at first glance, hardly be more closely related. Not only were the texts written within a few years of each other, describing nearly contemporaneous events, they were written by men who shared much educational, professional, and personal background. In addition, both were composed in Middle English but translated into Latin, apparently to facilitate circulation in sympathetic European circles. There is also the striking fact that these two authors, out of so many possible candidates, wrote the only surviving narratives by accused heretics in medieval England, recounting their interrogations in their own voice. Moreover, each individual faces the same, high stakes in the described events: potentially, capital punishment in cases of resistance; or, in cases of submission, a very public and embarrassing renunciation of deeply held conviction. In both texts, the conflict centers on the demand for (and resistance to) an oath of orthodoxy and allegiance. In both texts, the narrative ends without resolution, aside from the particular resolution each author finds, or constructs, out of the very material of the narrative. Finally, the earlier of the two texts, Wyches Letter, may, in passing, reference Thorpe by name,4 but in any case, given the similarities between the men and the texts they left, it strains credulity to think Thorpe was unaware of Wyches Letter when he wrote the Testimony. In fact, by all appearances, Thorpe crafted his aggressive, polemical Testimony to be the assertive, surefooted public document that the Letter was not. For the Letter is indeed a letter, written (it is claimed, in any case) from Wyches cell while he was detained in the bishops castle. The author asks his recipient an intimate associate, unnamed to keep the contents of the letter close,5 and with some reason, since Wyche discusses potentially identifiable Wycliffite sympathizers (modern detective work has indeed identified some, see Jurkoswki; Hudson, Which Wyche), and shares potentially embarrassing details of his own experience, ranging from lifethreatening bowel troubles to deep spiritual anxieties. Most of the Letter is a narrative account, made up of nine scenes of tense, semi-public interrogations alongside some smaller-scale confrontations and reflections from an anguished incarceration. Wyche also finds time to orchestrate a surreptitious exchange of correspondence,

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money, and books, as well as to indulge in a long coda of very personal, Pauline exhortations and benedictions to his friends and disciples. Amidst all this intimacy, however, Wyche explains surprisingly little about his actual beliefs, avoiding the theological explications that take up the great majority of Thorpes Testimony.6 Matching his stance as protagonist to his attitude as author, Wyche remains cautious and reluctant throughout the interrogations recounted in the Letter. Even in his own Letter, his only chance to tell his story as he wishes, Wyche avoids exposing his own inward space of conscientious conviction, focusing instead on conveying the agonies of imprisonment, the self-doubt and loneliness brought by persecution, the confusion and alienation provoked by extended interrogation. He provides some precise details of his experience, for instance by noting the time of each interrogation, often quite precisely et in crastino (535; the next day) and post quindenam (539; after fifteen days) in a manner recognizable as that of a lonely prisoner with little else to mark but time. He frankly and minutely explores his own perceptions, recording his prayers and emotional responses to stages of his ordeal. As I mentioned, Wyche even manifests his inwardness in a striking and apt affliction: he confesses to serious, chronic constipation, emphasizing that he is literally unable to release what is within into the world. In contrast to Wyche, William Thorpe provides not a letter but a Testimony, addressed to the widest audience he can imagine. At a length that renders the stated time-frame for the interrogation, one day, implausible, Thorpe carefully spells out the accusations against him, the questions of his opponents, and his extended answers to them. More than a trial narrative or even an autobiography, his account serves as a solid primer on Wycliffite beliefs, and, if far too polished and sharply presented to be convincing as accurate trial record, it makes for compelling, well-dramatized polemic. Wyche and Thorpe differ in what they emphasize concerning how and why their ordeals were initiated. Wyche sees divine providence at work behind his apprehension: In prima die recessus mei a vobis, ut ostenderet michi Deus viam per quam ambularem, percussit me casu penali, ut recordarer penas inmensas in amima mea quas filius Dei pro peccatis nostris in corpore suo pertulit (531) [In order for God to show me the path I was to take, He inflicted me with a prosecution the day after I left you, putting me under threat of punishment so that in my soul I would remember the immeasurable punishments that for our sins the Son of God endured in his flesh]. Wyches painful, personal tutelage at the hands of an omnipotent God is announced as his focus from the outset. He provides few details concerning his opponents, aside from recording some of their names, which has if anything the effect of humanizing them and showing some compassion or concern for them even as they interrogate him.7 By contrast, rather than looking to the providential backdrop, Thorpe focuses on the intervening acts of wicked humans, the human initiators of evil. For him, the battle lines quickly harden, and he sees his enemies as the Church officials who are also enemyes of truthe (25).8 Thorpe specifically intends for his own work, through the support it will provide to his fellow Wycliffites, to influence his opponents consciences: For summe enemyes of truthe thorugh the grace of God

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schulen bi siche charitable folkis ben maad astonyed [shall by such charitable folks (i.e., informed Wycliffites) be made perplexed] in her concience, and in hap [perhaps be] conuertid from her vicis [their vices] to vertues (27). For Thorpe, the public forum of the conscience preserves the possibility of conversion, which he imagines to happen with an almost visceral force, as the conscience is maad astonyed and conuertid. He fights for victory on the battlefield of the conscience, as the enemyes of truth with their bewildered consciences are turned, not so much by inner conviction but by forceful outward persuasion, from muddled perplexity into the clarity of truth and vertues. Thorpe allies conscience with debate, with truth, and with public testimony. In accordance with his consistent emphasis on influence and conversion, and with his polemical confidence, Thorpes awareness of his audience, present from the beginning, never abates. He explains that the friends who urged him to record his story also begged him to be scrupulously honest not for honestys own sake, but in light of the likelihood of his text encountering both friendly and unfriendly readers:
that I bisie me [engage myself] with alle my wittis to go as nygh [near] the sentence [meaning] and the wordis as I can, bothe that weren there spoken to me and that I spak, enaunter this my writynge come ony tyme [lest this text of mine should come at some point] bifore the Erchebischop. (25)

Thorpe exploits church surveillance, turning it to his benefit with this sharp rhetorical move at the beginning of the work. The ultimate assurance of the truth of Thorpes Testimony is that his opponents will inspect his work and hold him to account for any falsehoods. Brilliantly, he emphasizes the awesome, all-pervasive power of his enemies and then uses it to vouch for the truth of his testimony. Quite the opposite of a personal Letter, this Testimony welcomes its public presence and turns scrutiny to its benefit and to the benefit of its audience. Thorpe goes on to profess the concordance of this advice with his own conscientious convictions:
And of this counseile [with this advice] I am right glad; for in my conscience I was moued to bisie me hereaboute [thereabout (i.e., in that task)], and to axe herto [ask therein] the special help of God. (25)

Rather than Thorpes being the subject of spiritual instruction or discipline from God, he enlists God as his helper, and he invokes his conscience, which has been moved in a way that happily converges with the advice of his friends, to be the energetic motivator of his narrative efforts. Thorpes conscience, marked as the storyteller from here at the start, reaches outward, seeking to astonish and convert the consciences of others. Here and throughout his text, in every instance I can find, Thorpes inward, personal convictions manifest themselves only as concerns for their public effect. Thorpe the writers pursuit of perfect and public narrative transparency mirrors his performance as protagonist within the narrative. He provides well-crafted model

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answers abstracted out of any particularities of impulse, views, or doubts.9 In keeping with its simple polemical orientation, in the Testimony the battle lines, once drawn, never blur or shift. Thorpe portrays his enemies as violent tyrants. His lead interrogator, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Arundel, serves well in the role. Arundel was, in fact, the most vehement and powerful anti-Wycliffite leader in England and a man who reached the heights of both church and state power. He becomes, in Thorpes telling, a wholly successful caricature of an arch villain (Kendall 5359; Copeland 2046). Thorpe enthusiastically exemplifies the strategy described by Robert Fergusons epigraph to this essay, putting those who conduct [his] trial . . . on trial themselves, though Fergusons assumption that there will be a watching public is not borne out in this case, much to Thorpes frustration. Under interrogation, Thorpe insinuates it is the fearful church that would prefer to keep his story quiet, under wraps, while Thorpe himself would prefer to share it with all the world. I make this protestacioun bifore you alle foure that ben now here present [all four of you who are now present here], coueitynge [coveting] that alle men and wymmen, which now ben here absent, knowen [would know] the same (33). Again the Testimony fulfills Thorpes desire and comforts his conscience, as it performs for the audience of all men and wymmen, which now ben here absent. Thorpes audience-seeking conscience insists on speaking its story as widely and as truly as possible, and the worst that the church can do to counter such a conscience is not to oppose it so much as to silence it. The Testimony is a triumph not because (or not just because) Thorpe out-argues his opponents. Victory in argumentation is so commonplace as to be a banal feature of dialogical polemic. Rather, the Testimony triumphs precisely because it lays the argument out for a wide public. The voice of Thorpes conscience cannot be stifled.

Will you swear?

Never are the differences between Thorpe and Wyche more apparent and telling than in their treatment of the sharpest trial of conscience they face. The trials center on the question put to each of them by powerful, prominent authorities wielding the power of life and death (not to mention estrangement from the universal church): will you swear an oath abjuring heresy and agreeing to follow ecclesiastical guidance? Generally, a principled objection to swearing signaled Wycliffism in the popular imagination of late medieval England (for instance, in The Canterbury Tales10), although in truth Wycliffite attitudes toward oaths remained unsettled and dynamic throughout the life of the heresy. Some Wycliffite arguments for resistance to oaths derived from the biblical injunction to let yes be yes, some asserted that swearing on any object or entity aside from God represented idolatry, and some pointed to the reality that oaths were, in the eyes of Wycliffites, tools of persecution wielded by fraudulent pretenders to divine authority (Hudson, Premature Reformation 15861,

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37174). Hudson notes that the Wycliffite reputation for crafty evasion and equivocation led to officials pressuring one group of recanters to swear I shall make no other glose [i.e., gloss, interpretation] of this myn oth bot as the wordes stonde (Premature Reformation 373). Oaths were the border defenses of orthodoxy, constantly reinforced against clever infiltration. As with most borders, so with the border between orthodoxy and heresy: it was an insecurity over who really belonged inside and who outside that made the border so tense, so well-policed and so shifting and unstable. The struggle over a warily negotiated oath, one with a glose, serves as the narrative crux of Wyches interrogation narrative. When a knight, who later proves to be duplicitous, visits Wyche in his cell and claims to have been sent as the bishops negotiator, Wyche agrees to swear the oath of submission, limitatum in corde meo (534; limited in my heart). The fig leaf of legalistic compromise and the knights assurances of good faith overcome Wyches skepticism, which is apparent in his probing questions on how an oath limited in the heart could be a true one, or how his private intention could preserve his freedom from the oaths imposition:
Bene, domine. Sed vos scitis bene, dixi, si reciperem iuramentum a iudice, oportet me recipere secundum intentum iudicis et non secundum meum. At ille: Pro certo scias, quod dominus meus reciperet a te iuramentum istud, quia sum missus a Domino meo ad te ad tractandum tecum super isto iuramento. ... Et miles surrexit, et cum stetisset in hostio domus, dixit: Richarde, in fide, vis tu tenere pactum de istis que dixisti? Eciam, si dominus meus voluerit tenere pactum de quibus vos dixistis. Eciam, scias illud pro certo. Et recessit. (53435) I said, Very well, my lord. Except that, as you know, if I take an oath from a judge, I have to receive it according to the intention of the judge, not my own intention. You may be certain my lord will accept this oath from you, because my lord sent me to negotiate it with you. ... The knight got up, and, standing in the doorway, asked: Richard, in faith, will you keep your promise as you have said? Certainly if my lord keeps to the agreement as you have said. Certainly. You may be sure of it.

Despite mutual assurances (certainly, in faith, be sure of it), under Wyches arrangement with the knight the actual intentions of each party remain by necessity cloaked and cloudy. Certainty is repeatedly evoked because uncertainty haunts the negotiation. The knight goes so far as to enjoin Wyche not to bother the bishop with any questions about the oath when it is posed (535), guaranteeing the pact will remain shadowy, ill-specified, and unenforceable. Wyche tries to evade the dichotomy embodied in the Cotton Mather epigraph to this article, as, in the face of threatened Violences, he seeks to remain Erroneous (not becoming a Believer in the eyes

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of the church) without becoming a Hypocrite. It quickly and predictably emerges that his situation more fits another of the epigraphs, the one composed of Miltons famous phrases although Wyches fugitive and cloistered virtue is perhaps both purified and sullied by his trial by what is contrary. The agreement of course disintegrates after Wyche finally swears the oath with his inward glose:
Et posui, et ipsi legerunt illud iuramentum; et cum legissent, osculatus sum librum; speravi episcopum non recepturum a me nisi iuramentum pacti, sicut et pactum voluit, si veritas staret. Et tunc dederunt michi ad legendum unum iuramentum de fide sua eukaristie et aliud ex confessione ut iurarem. (535) I put my hand on the book. They read the oath, and when they finished, I kissed the book, hoping that the bishop would not try to extract anything from me beyond the agreed-upon oath if, indeed, the truth was that he wanted an agreement. But they gave me another oath to read and to swear concerning the doctrine of the Eucharist, and yet another on confession.

Wyche refuses to swear these extra oaths (which might bind him to specific statements of doctrines he finds odious), and then finds himself in a difficult position. His initial oath, apparently a blanket acceptance of orthodox ecclesiastical authority, was sworn in the presence of observers. A completely private, subjectively oriented agreement about such a quintessentially public act is fatal. Wyche has been humiliated and out-maneuvered, but his narrative responds by shifting inward:
Et missus in carcerem fui per tres dies in magna tribulacione et affliccione spiritus super illo iuramento intoxicato . . . Et dulcis pater . . . ex sua gracia reduxit ad memoriam pactum et modum pacti cum milite sicut prescribitur et quomodo numquam cogitavi nec in mentem ascendit, et nunquam habui voluntatem ad iurandum illud iuramentum, sed iuramentum limitatum a milite. Et exultavi in Domino. (536) I was sent back to the cell, and for three days I was in great sorrow and affliction of spirit about that poisonous oath. The kind Father . . . in his grace, reminded me of the agreement with the knight, and the manner of agreement, as written above: how I had never thought, nor had it arisen in my mind, nor had I ever consented in my will, to swear their oath, but only the oath limited by the knight. I rejoiced in the Lord.

Wyches comfort comes from his intentions, the purity of his will, which he insists can overcome the troubling ambiguities (compromises?) of his actions. In a sense, Wyches emphasis on the truth deeply known to his conscience even in the face of the churchs dishonesty resembles Thorpes emphasis on the truths of his conscience juxtaposed against the churchs peddling of lies and stifling of truth. But Wyches

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torment about the oath is an inward one, aligning him with a different tradition of sufferers of conscientious self-doubt, of consciences in crisis, of trials of conscience, from Augustine onward. As with Augustine and others, Wyches salvation arrives in the form of a private assurance anxiously conveyed in a carefully wrought confessional autobiography. He puzzles over the oath because he puzzles over himself, and he is comforted only when he is assured as to his own intentions.11 Wyche triumphs, insofar as he triumphs, not over church authorities but over his own doubts. One wonders if Wyche justified his recantation, which as noted above took place after the interrogations described in the Letter, by reference to his purity of intention, as well as perhaps an eye toward the expediency of surviving to teach for several future decades before his final capture and execution. Wyches reassurance, sincere though it may have been, remains tinged with the ambiguity that went before, and marks his continued uncertainty about what his oath meant. In the end, his Letter is the story of Wyche as author and protagonist coming to terms with the representation of his dissenting identity, seeking to find room for a new, truer public self without compromising his conscience. Consistent when looking outward as well as inward, Wyche equally resists any implication that inward convictions can be deduced from the words or deeds of others. He professes ignorance as to the intentions even of his bitter enemies. At the climax of the narrative, Wyche recounts this exchange, in which he confronts but then stops short of actually accusing the knight who has betrayed him:
Et dixi: Magnum peccatum est homini in dolo tractare cum fratre suo. Et miles surrexit: Dicis tu, dixit, quod ego tractavi tecum in dolo? Non sic dico, dixi, quia nescio cor vestrum, neque novi quare dicerem sic de vobis, sed ego generaliter quod est magnum peccatum cuicunque in dolo tractare cum fratre suo. (539) I added, It is a great sin for a man to deal treacherously with his brother. The knight rose. Are you saying that I dealt treacherously with you? I am not saying that, because I do not know your heart, nor do I know whether I should say it about you. But I do say generally that it is a great sin for anyone to deal treacherously with his brother.

Just as Wyche himself seeks to remain opaque, so he leaves the other characters in his story unknown and unknowable, avoiding speculation on the motivations, desires, or errors of his opponent. Even in the extreme example of the knight, where guilt seems clear to Wyche, he stops short of judgment. He insists both explicitly (in his interrogation) and implicitly (in his narrative) that the details of religious convictions should be left to the individual believer and God (and perhaps her confessor). He cannot try the knights inner disposition, and thus in effect his conscience, any more than the bishop could legitimately try Wyches thoughts and intentions. Though admittedly self-justifying, his presentation of the relationship between inward, conscientious identity and public actions that is, the pervasive and devastating

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uncertainty of the relationship saturates his narrative, its characterizations and even its structure, so inwardly focused, cautious, clouded. By contrast, Thorpes conflict, Thorpes trial of conscience in fact conducted in a more private setting than Wyches, in the presence of only a few clerics with the wider public pointedly excluded prompts only the briefest flashes of self-reflection. After Arundel threatens him with burning, Thorpe notes:
I was moued . . . for to holde [I was moved to believe that] the Archebischop thirstide yit aftir [still thirsted for] the schedynge out of more innocent blood. And anoon herfore [right away, therefore] I was moued in alle my wittis for to hold the Archebischop neithir prelat [prelate, i.e., high ecclesiastical official] ne preest of God; and, forthi that [because] myn inner man was altogidre thus departid from the Archebischop, me thowghte I schulde not haue ony drede of him. But I was right heuy and sorowful that there was noon audience there of seculer men [no audience there of laypeople]. (36)

Thorpe no sooner acknowledges the possibility of an inner man than he entirely, altogidre, denies any uncertainty to that inner life. Arundels fierce thirst for blood only emboldens Thorpe. The Testimony performs for the audience of seculer men whose absence during the actual interrogation Thorpe laments; in another variation on the theme mentioned above, the Testimony narratively fulfills Thorpes desire to have his suffering observed more widely, memorialized more publicly. It extends his influence and lets his inner man speak freely, free from the hands of the false churchmen he had departid from. Although with such different emphases, Thorpes story of conscience in this resembles Wyches: the narrative itself soothes the anxious conscience. The drive to narrative is a drive, in each case, to conscientious consolation in Wyches case to a self-justificatory explanation of apparently damning deeds, in Thorpes case to a limitless connection with the widest possible imagined audience of receptive and pliable consciences. Thorpe never wavers or loses sight of the consequences of compromise with his clearly delineated, anti-Christian enemies. If he were to compromise (perhaps by swearing an equivocal oath as Wyche did?), Thorpe claims:
. . . my conscience schulde euer be herwith ouer mesure vnquyetid [would always be immoderately upset about it]. And also, ser [sir], I knowe wel that manye men and wymmen schulden ben herthorugh [through it] greetli troublid and sclaundrid [greatly troubled and defamed] . . . And if, thorugh remorse of conscience, I repentide me ony tyme [at any time], turnynge agen into the wei which ye bisien you now to make me forsake [you now busy yourselves to make me forsake], ye, ser, and alle the bischopis of this londe with other ful many preestis, wolden defame me and pursuen me as a relapis [relapse] (38).

His conscience attends carefully to the proceedings and remains quiet so long as his public witness remains in order; this commitment to firm views extends as well to Thorpes behavior as an author. The revocations of his former fellow Wycliffite leaders disgusts Thorpe (39). As he portrays himself, Thorpe simply lowers his head

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and accepts his role. He needs no space for maneuvering, for unpredictability, for doubt. The conclusion that Thorpe had read Wyches text becomes irresistible in light of how well the Testimony reads as a corrective to the indecisiveness and evasions of Wyches Letter. Elizabeth Schirmers recent explication of Thorpes narrative theology notes Thorpes virtuosity in intertwining his testimony of his conduct under interrogation with his unorthodox set of beliefs.12 As Schirmer explains, Thorpes innovation is to link his portrayal of himself as a plain witness of Gods truth to the Wycliffite emphasis on the plain text of the Bible. Priests themselves are for Thorpe the books of the laity.13 Thus, although both Wyche and Thorpe fear the unquiet conscience that might result from compromise, Thorpe engages this inner moral sense in the service of clear-cut and public goals. Asserting the legibility of the self, [Thorpes narrative] shifts the purpose of autobiographical narration from self-discovery in the context of oral confession to self-assertion in the face of persecution (295; see Copeland 2067). Church duplicity features in Thorpes narrative as well as Wyches, but instead of humiliating him outwardly and distressing him inwardly, it reinforces Thorpes conviction and clarity. When accused of teaching a heresy about the sacrament of confession on the previous Friday, Thorpe reacts in surprise:
anoon thanne [right away] I knew that I was sotilly [subtly] bitraied of [by] a man that cam to me into prisoun on the Fryday bifore . . . bi his wordis I gessid [guessed] that this man cam than [then] to me of [out of] ful feruent and charitable desyre, but now I knowe that he cam to tempte me and to acuse me. (80)

Just as Wyche did, so too Thorpe suffers betrayal in the course of his trusting interaction with a traitorous agent of the church. But the deceit plays out differently than in Wyches text, where the trick reinforces Wyches preference for privacy and inwardness. In this case, it follows the rules of Thorpes transparent world: the ecclesiastical officials do not deny the subterfuge, and Thorpe in any case shows it to have been unnecessary. He enthusiastically complies with a request to repeat the heresies he told the spy (81). Similarly, in considering his oath, Thorpe again takes a precisely intentionally? contrary tack to Wyche. Far from seeking an agreement, Thorpe puts all the small print into the spotlight from the outset, all but guaranteeing disagreement: bifore that I swere . . ., telle me how and whereto I schal submitte me [how and to what I will be submitting myself], and schewith [show] to me whereof that ye wol corecte [instruct/correct] me, and what is the ordenaunce [decree] that ye wol [you will] thus oblische [bind by a vow] me to fulfille (34). Ultimately, predictably, Thorpe refuses to swear. And Thorpe expresses gratitude that he does not have to wrestle the demons of uncertainty and fear that Wyche did:
I gladid [rejoiced] in the Lord forthi [because] thorugh his grace he kepte [preserved] me so bothe amonge [amidst] the flateryngis specialli [especially], also [as well as] amonge the manassingis [threatening(s)] of myn aduersaries that withouten heuynesse and agrigginge [without heaviness or burdening] of my conscience I passid awei fro hem. For

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as a [one] tree leyde [laid] vpon another tree ouerthwert on crosse wyse [transversely cross-ways], so weren the Archebischop and his three clerkis alwei [always] contrarie to me and I to hem [them]. (93)

Thorpes buoyant conscience remains unburdened, withouten heuynesse and agrigginge. He gladly suffers the pains of the cross that he imagines himself to form with the churchmen, leyde vpon another contrariwise. No weeping in the Garden for him, pleading for his cup to be taken away; no Why hast thou forsaken me. But, just as Wyches asseveration of the radically inward, spiritual peace that he achieved after his failed compromise carries a whiff of special pleading, so too, perhaps, does Thorpes polemical certainty. It renders improbably simple an inherently complex situation that had stymied so many of his peers, including Wyche. Thorpe composes an intellectually rewarding and formally coherent contribution to the genre of narrative polemic, and a suitable instruction manual for inspiring resistance with adept persecution narrative but the Testimony does pay a price for its sharp polemical edge. With its caricatured villains, repetitive scenic structure, and one-sided debates, the need for polemical force ultimately overshadows any pretence to realistic portrayal of the terrors and disorientations of interrogation. Unlike Wyche, the narrator of the Testimony, and its eponymous protagonist, lack shadows. Thorpes confident conscience is focused on convincing his audience; he tellingly compares himself to a tree, solid and at righteous right angles to his enemies.

Law and the inner life

Thorpes conscience tells a story that will serve as a final illustration of this struggle. He reports overhearing a discussion between a maistir of dyuyntee and a lawyer, which lawyer was also cunnynge of [knowledgeable about] dyuynytee. And amongis other thingis these men spaken of oothis [oaths] (75). The debate appears to lie between two Wycliffite sympathizers, debating difficult dimensions of loyalty oaths. The lawyer claims that an individual could lay a hand on a book to swear and then simply remove the hand unless he perceyuede the oath he was charged to swear to be leeful [lawful]. The master of divinity, however, claims that laying the hand on the book itself amounts to a gesture of submission to whatever oath follows; anyone seeing the hand will attest to the validity of the oath, as will the later public, all thei that heeren hereof [all those who hear about it] (76). Further, because laying the hand on the book in response to an injunction to do so amounts itself to an oath because the words of the oath and the gesture of the oath cannot be considered separately this is an idolatrous oath, as it is taken on a book and not on God himself, the only proper guarantor of oaths (according to Wycliffite doctrine). This somewhat confused passage in the Testimony conveys the way in which legal obligation, public perception, and inward sincerity collide, and become inseparably tangled, in oath-taking, which is in this sense the preeminent exemplar for all acts of faith or conscience brought before public authority and tested. This observation gives

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a clue as to why Wyches inward comfort concerning his own pure intentions and his own, explicitly private interpretation of the oath he takes offers no comfort to Thorpe. Thorpes inner man, as mentioned in the beginning of his Testimony, becomes more assured only in Thorpes public acts: first his defiance under interrogation, and second his composition of a reliable, transparent, literary self-revelation. Throughout the Letter and the Testimony, the pervasive presence of lawyers and of questions of lawfulness situate legal practices and forums as crucial sites of negotiation of the boundaries implicated in trials of conscience, including the crucial question of what sorts of responsibility the inward self of conscientious conviction owes to the public self and the assorted communities looking on. These are the questions posed by the narratives, both in terms of the content of the interrogations they describe, but also in terms of how they describe these ordeals. From the drama of question and answer a rhetorical, hermeneutic, even literary drama emerge conceptions of conscience, of individual identity and social life. What is not recognized often enough in studies of authority, repression, and dissent is that resistance and capitulation are never the only two options: there are always more nuanced choices of how questions are posed, answers offered how relationships between self and society are structured. And no two conceptions or portrayals will be alike. Key distinctions between the two texts here are easily missed when the narratives are read as records of what is tacitly thought of as the heretical perspective or the Wycliffite perspective on the interrogations we so often know only from the orthodox side (itself hardly monolithic or univocal). Here I suggest that amidst the overlaps and the differences in the stories told by Wyche and Thorpe, one key distinction between these texts is Thorpes bold embrace of the public revelation of his beliefs, registered in his behavior under interrogation and in the narrative manifestation it takes afterwards. He stands in sharp contrast to Wyche, who muses, in his intimate letter, over his wrenching experience with an ambiguous oath, treacherous churchmen, and the pressures of public exposure of inner conviction.

The narrative and legal usefulness of oaths

I emphasize the contrast between the tacks taken by Thorpe and Wyche, in their interrogations and in their autobiographical accounts of these interrogations, because the distinction between the two texts is easily missed. With closer observation and appreciation the distinctions strikingly and significantly emerge, and we discover that the heretics perspective on their interrogations is fragmented, hardly unitary or even coherent. The concept of, and discourse about, conscience and a number of related conceptions of the divide between public and private commitments or truths has been subject to macro-level shifts in emphasis, over the centuries. But, most of the time, intellectual history is the story of unstable ideas being made to fight unresolved battles, and the history of conscience is no exception. The concept of conscience becomes known and discussed because of its deployment in the course of subtle

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struggles between shape-shifting and strategically adept combatants, arriving with all sorts of interests and aims such as political dominance, popular entertainment, or personal consolation, to name three that occupy much of the field. In the case of Wyche and Thorpe, both political dominance and personal consolation are certainly at stake, manifested and contested explicitly and implicitly. The author-protagonists face loyalty oaths they cannot swear for conscientious reasons, yet Thorpes text seeks to produce a competing public narrative a parallel orthodoxy, as it were to the official account. He embraces the oath as an invitation to conflict. Without hesitation Thorpe exposes his beliefs to public scrutiny, grasping this opportunity for preaching, and confident in his efforts. Wyches cautious, closed letter reflects his fundamental distaste for the technology of oaths of obedience. He considers them inadequate vehicles for coming to grips with the complexities of the inner life. Wyche tells us, implicitly, that the resolution he seeks is not public, cannot be communicated explicitly but only experientially, through his psychologically sophisticated memoir. In view of these connections between narrative choices and conceptions of conscience, it is perhaps revealing that Thorpes efforts to serve as a public witness were successful. His text was popular in the early modern period,14 and even today scholarly attention has focused primarily, and more favorably, on Thorpes text. The popularity of Thorpes polemic stretched from his death down to the present day perhaps because of the inherent appeal of the sharper conflict, but more importantly because the type of conflict Thorpe portrays remains the one most familiar, most resonant to discourses of power that continue to prevail. Wyche offers high drama of his own, but of a more complicated sort, premised on what it seems fair to say (for better or worse) is a conception of conscience and authority that has lost out or been diverted to forms of self-expression into the narrow realms of private or subjective expression such as artistic or literary venues, insulated from later technologies of surveillance and control. The prominent role of oaths in both texts derives from their narrative usefulness. Oaths serve as powerful devices for heightened and pointed drama, and representations conveniently purporting to verbalize the precise border between inward conscience and outward allegiance. Oaths provide sharp testing-grounds for disagreements that might otherwise register only in diffuse skirmishes difficult to convey comprehensibly or dramatically. The pointed, memorable, and easily recorded qualities of oaths make them not only attractive to narrators such as Wyche and Thorpe but also to officials creating public narratives of a heresy successfully suppressed. Whether prosecution were to unfold in a grinding legal conflict or in a summary proceeding (inquisitions were sometimes one and sometimes the other), punishment for a diffuse heterodoxy would make for a much less compelling story than punishment for a poisoned, false oath, taken after a conflict narrated in close detail. The fraught oaths represented by both Thorpe and Wyche function as a way of rendering the conflict pointed which might otherwise unfold over the course of decades (as in the case of Wyche, with his decades

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of survival). Oaths are, so to speak, helpful plot points in legal or political records as well as in traditional forms of narrative. Conflicts over oaths make for high legal drama because they sharpen the point of conflict while allowing for the elaborate verbalization of conflict, not just in the oath but in the many forms of discourse gloses, letters, and testimonies included that surround it, amplifying it, undermining or qualifying it, crowding around it. The oath produces, that is, a narrative crisis as well as a personal crisis, in which the conflicting demands of public and private open to view and enter into negotiations.

Acknowledgments
I gratefully acknowledge the comments and criticism of Anne Hudson, Christina von Nolcken, Kantik Ghosh, Cristina Serverius, Fiona Somerset, Chad Flanders, William Forbath, Noah Feldman and the generous participants in the 2010 Folger Library seminar, The Voice of Conscience, 13751613. Remaining errors and inadequacies are entirely my own. Comments welcome at cgbradley@gmail.com.

Notes
1

English heresy prosecution in the late medieval period remains imperfectly understood. Several excellent accounts in English, all acknowledgedly incomplete, are to be found in Helmholz; Kelly, Trial Procedures; Kelly, Lollard Inquisitions; Forrest 155. Hudson, Which Wyche 223. See that article, as well as Copeland 15190 and von Nolcken, for thorough bibliography, background, and useful readings on Wyche. Summers 10842 also provides a basic reading. Translation from English to Latin was uncommon, and a Hussite audience would find the Latin more amenable. I suggest the original was English because its recipients include laypeople (thus Copeland 152 n. 7) and because the inconsistent Latin seems more logically attributable to a slapdash, ad hoc translation effort from an English original than to original composition in Latin. A writer, even one not particularly fluent in Latin, would nonetheless choose more felicitous and consistent Latin constructions in original composition than might a similarly educated translator forcing his way through an English original. It refers to an individual qui esponsatur sorori domini Wilhelmi Corpp (543; who is married to the sister of master William Corpp). English names are consistently misspelled in the Letter, and the letter forms for C and T are often indistinguishable (Hudson, Introduction lviii). Here and throughout, I rely on my forthcoming translation of Wyches Letter, with some slight modifications.

10

Ista sunt secreta mea. Ideo si placet vobis secrete custodite ea (541, 544; These are my secrets. Therefore, if you please, keep them secret). Discussions are waved off thus: et multa alia verba (533; among a number of other words), Et tunc plura verba alia huiusmodi. Sed iste quodammodo efectus illius diei (532; Many similar discussions followed, but this was the way that day went), Et multa alia verba fuerunt, sed hec est sentencia (534; There was much more said, but this was the gist). He says one interrogator spoke valde modestus ut apparuit michi dixit (538; very modestly, it seemed to me), and describes the false knight as a seemingly reliable man (apparuit michi . . . solidus homo, 534; he appeared a reliable man to me). While the knight disappoints him (see below), no doubt that Wyche paints a more compassionate and conflicted picture than he might have. I use the text of the Testimony as presented by Hudson, but I silently accept her emendations and I modernize punctuation and orthography. On Thorpes exemplary arguments and for other important readings of dimensions of Thorpes narrative in light of Wycliffism and late medieval England, see Schirmer; Kendall 5089; Somerset 179215; von Nolcken 13031; Copeland 191219; Steiner 22939; Aers 6798; Strohm 3262. Thus in Chaucers Canterbury Tales, when the pious Parson objects to the partys Host swearing, the Host by way of reply exclaims, I smelle a Lollere in the wynd (Epilogue of the Man of

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12

11

Laws Tale, II.117173). Lollere or Lollard was a popular medieval term for those holding beliefs associated with Wycliffism. As von Nolcken has put it: [E]ven Wyche himself had trouble interpreting what he intended when he actually swore this oath. Not only has the pressure brought to bear on him by his opponents caused him to lose any confident access he might once have had to the wills of persons around him; it has also caused him to lose any confident access he might have had to his own will. . . . He has attempted to reach and expose to scrutiny what the Middle Ages would have termed his inner man. (144)

13

14

Unfortunately, this article leaves an impression that the Testimony involves less theological argumentation than it does, and Schirmers focus on Thorpe leads her to disparage Wyches Letter unnecessarily (27172). 287. Her phrase plays on the medieval commonplace that images are books for the laity. [T]he book of William Thorpe is a title frequently mentioned amongst the books owned at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries by Lollard suspects. Hudson, William Thorpe 132; see Hudson, Introduction xxx xxxvii. Of course, Thorpes survival in a more accessible language, English, may also play a part in his popularity, from his own time onward.

Works cited
PRIMARY: Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. The Riverside Chaucer. 3d ed. Ed. Larry D. Benson, et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987. The Testimony of William Thorpe. Two Wycliffite Texts. Ed. Anne Hudson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Early English Text Soc. os 301. 2493. The Trial of Richard Wyche. Matthew, F.D., ed. Eng. Hist. Rev. 5 (1890): 53044. The Letter of Richard Wyche: An Interrogation Narrative. Trans. Christopher G. Bradley. PMLA, forthcoming. SECONDARY: Aers, David. Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2004. Aston, Margaret and Collin Richmond, eds. Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages. NY: St Martins P, 1997. Bruschi, Caterina and Peter Biller, eds. Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy. York: York Medieval P, 2003. Copeland, Rita. Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Evans, G. R., ed. Christian Authority: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. Ferreiro, Alberto, ed. The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey B. Russell. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Forrest, Ian. The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Helmholz, R. H. The Privilege and the Ius Commune: The Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. In Helmholz 1746. Helmholz, R. H., ed. The Privilege Against Self-Incrimination: Its Origins and Development. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Hornbeck, J. Patrick II, Stephen E. Lahey and Fiona Somerset. Introduction. Wycliffite Spirituality. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist P, forthcoming 2012. Hudson, Anne. Introduction. Two Wycliffite Texts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. EETS OS 301. xilxiii. . The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. . William Thorpe and the Question of Authority. In Evans 12737. . Which Wyche? The Framing of the Lollard Heretic and/or Saint, 22137. Jurkowski, Maureen. The arrest of William Thorpe in Shrewsbury and the anti-Lollard statute of 1406. Historical Research 75 (2002): 27395. Kelly, Henry Ansgar. Trial Procedures against Wyclif and Wycliffites in England and at the Council of Constance. Huntington Library Quarterly 61 (1999): 128.

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. Lollard Inquisitions: Due and Undue Process. In Ferreiro, 279303. Kendall, Ritchie D. The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity, 13801590. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986. von Nolcken, Christina. Richard Wyche, a Certain Knight, and the Beginning of the End. In Aston and Richmond 12754. Schirmer, Elizabeth. William Thorpes Narrative Theology. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 26799. Somerset, Fiona E. Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Summers, Joanna. Late Medieval Prison-Writing and the Politics of Autobiography. Oxford: Clarendon P, 2004. Steiner, Emily. Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Strohm, Paul. Englands Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 13991422. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.

Notes on contributor
Christopher Bradley holds an AB from Princeton University in Classics, an MPhil and DPhil in medieval English literature from the University of Oxford, and a JD and LLM (International Legal Studies) from the New York University School of Law. In addition to medieval English studies, he has written articles about international, administrative, and commercial law.