Rebels of the Reformation

Thrilling Biographies from an Era of Economic Revolt

The Protestant Reformation is remembered as a revolt of the soul and a challenge to the spiritual corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. But it was also a catalyst for profound economic change. By shattering the authority of the Church, reformers weakened the foundations of the medieval lord/peasant economy, setting the stage for the eventual coming of the Industrial Revolution. The centuries leading up to the Reformation simmered with economic desperation. This is the story of how that desperation became entangled with the struggle for spiritual freedom.

The Peasants' Revolt of 1381

In the middle of the 1300s, the Black Death wiped out a third of all Europeans. Afterwards, there were many more empty fields than surviving peasants, and so those survivors began demanding pay raises. The labor shortage meant that the peasantry finally had the nobility over a barrel; they played lords off against each other in bidding wars for their labor.

But the nobility was accustomed to making demands, not entertaining them. They used their influence in Parliament to fix the price of labor by law, just as the Roman Emperor Diocletian had done a thousand years before. This naked act of class warfare caused resentment to fester among the peasants in the English countryside.

In 1381, their anger reached a boiling point. Tens of thousands of irate peasants marched on London, a number comparable to the entire city's population at that time. Hopelessly outnumbered, a 14-year-old King Richard II rode out to meet the mob, where he gave in to all their demands. Not only did he promise to end the mandated prices of labor, but Richard also promised to abolish the feudal economic model, in which peasants worked land owned by lords.

After the mob had dispersed, thinking they had won a tremendous political victory, Richard simply betrayed them. He declined to abolish the feudal system or change the laws that fixed the price of labor. Instead, he had the former rebels rounded up and killed. However, the failed Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was nonetheless the beginning of a long historical process that would eventually lead to the replacement of the feudal economic model.

John Wycliffe (1328-1384)

The wealth of the Roman Catholic Church is as legendary today as it was during the Middle Ages. But that legendary hoard contrasts awkwardly with scripture, which is filled with harsh condemnations against wealth accumulation. However, the Church’s strict control over unauthorized, non-Latin translations of the Bible meant that very few outside the clergy could read those awkward condemnations.

However, in the 14th century, an English radical preacher named John Wycliffe defied the Roman Catholic Church. He inspired and supervised the first complete English translation of the Bible. The availability of Bibles in languages people could understand was, according to historian Will Durant, “a blow to political as well as to religious orthodoxy. It exposed the compromises that the secular clergy had made with the nature of man and the ways of the world; it revealed the communism of the Apostles, the sympathy of Christ for the poor and oppressed; in these respects, the New Testament was for the radicals of this age a veritable Communist Manifesto. Peasant and proletarian alike found in it a divine warrant for dreaming of a utopia where private property would be abolished, and the poor would inherit the earth.”

In the decades between the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt, John Wycliffe agitated for the abolition of Church property. He based this advocacy directly on the scripture revealed by his translation. These views attracted a significant following around Wycliffe, who were collectively known as “Lollards”.

There is no evidence to suggest that Wycliffe supported the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Nevertheless, it was used as a pretext for a brutal crackdown on the Lollards, as Richard rounded up his enemies and broke all his promises to them. These were the first stirrings of a controversy that would eventually explode into the Protestant Reformation.

Jan Hus (1369–1415)

John Wycliffe died of old age on the very last day of 1384, 3 years after the Peasants' Revolt. Dying of natural causes was a feat that very few enemies of the Roman Catholic Church managed to achieve. At the Council of Konstanz in 1415, the Church posthumously declared Wycliffe a heretic and excommunicated him. But since he had died 30 years earlier, that was the extent of his punishment.

Such was not the case for Jan Hus of Prague, another fiery preacher whom Wycliffe had inspired to formalize a Czech translation of the Bible. The Church summoned Hus to Konstanz under a guarantee of protection, only to promptly burn him at the stake upon his arrival. Back in Prague, Hus’ multitude of followers, called “Hussites”, turned violent after they heard of his betrayal.

On July 30th, 1419, an angry mob stormed the New Town Hall, got their hands on seven Catholic members of the city council, and threw them out of a second-story window in the corner tower to their deaths. It was the first of the notorious Defenestrations of Prague, which played a significant role in the Protestant Reformation. A picture of the corner tower of the New Town Hall, with the author standing in the foreground, serves as the Title Card for this essay.

Martin Luther (1483–1546)

Both John Wycliffe and Jan Hus made names for themselves by questioning the previously unquestionable authority of the Roman Catholic Church. But they hadn’t been able to topple that authority. That feat was finally accomplished by one of history’s most grumpy and least agreeable figures, the German monk Martin Luther. Like Wycliffe and Hus, Luther translated the Bible into a common language, in his case, German.

But Martin Luther is most famous for compiling a list of his complaints about the corruption of the Vatican and nailing these “95 Theses” to the door of his local church in Wittenberg, Germany. In those days, the doors of public buildings served as makeshift bulletin boards. Chief among Luther’s complaints was the Sale of Indulgences, where the Roman Catholic Church shamelessly raised money by selling God’s forgiveness from sin. The year was 1517, which is traditionally considered the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

The main reason Luther succeeded where Wycliffe and Hus failed was the advent of the printing press. It was invented by fellow German Johannes Gutenberg in 1440, a decade after the Hussite revolt in Prague. The printing presses of Europe churned out Bibles in common languages faster than the Church could confiscate them. The one-two punch of the surly Luther and the printing press plunged Europe into the chaos of the Protestant Reformation.

Conclusion

The timeline stretching from the English Peasants' Revolt to Luther was a long and bloody one, marked by rebels who dared to challenge the twin pillars of medieval Europe, the feudal lord and the Roman Catholic Church. Figures like John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, and ultimately Martin Luther wielded the same revolutionary tool: the Bible translated into the language of ordinary people. In those pages, revolutionaries found a powerful critique of earthly wealth and a vision of divine justice for the poor. The Protestant Reformation was therefore never just about faith. It was an explosive fusion of spiritual dissent and economic desperation; a conflict that tore down the medieval world and laid the groundwork for modernity.

The religious revolt offered the tillers of the fields a captivating ideology in which to phrase their demands for a larger share in Germany's growing prosperity. The hardships that had already spurred a dozen rural outbreaks still agitated the peasant mind, and indeed with feverish intensity now that Luther had defied the Church, berated the princes, broken the dams of discipline and awe, made every man a priest, and proclaimed the freedom of the Christian man. In the Germany of that age Church and state were so closely meshed- clergymen played so large a role in social order and civil administration that the collapse of ecclesiastical prestige and power removed a main barrier to revolution. The Waldensians, Beghards, Brethren of the Common Life, had continued an old tradition of basing radical proposals upon Biblical texts. The circulation of the New Testament in print was a blow to political as well as to religious orthodoxy. It exposed the compromises that the secular clergy had made with the nature of man and the ways of the world; it revealed the communism of the Apostles, the sympathy of Christ for the poor and oppressed; in these respects the New Testament was for the radicals of this age a veritable Communist Manifesto. Peasant and proletarian alike found in it a divine warrant for dreaming of a utopia where private property would be abolished, and the poor would inherit the earth.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Reformation, 1957, page 382