Distance: 6.9 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: medium
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
Walk from Rugby to Lutterworth famed for its connections via St. Mary’s church to the 14th Century radical theologian John Wycliffe (father of Lollardism), and its rare, well preserved late medieval doom painting.
The Story
Route Notes
Getting Back
Lutterworth, Britain’s Wittenberg
Born in around 1328 in Hipswell, which is sat at the top of the flat gap between the Yorkshire Moors and the Yorkshire Dales, in Yorkshire’s far north, John Wycliffe should by all rights if remembered at all, be a faded name on a plaque in Oxford’s Balliol College listing its past masters.
As it happens, due to his development and articulation over the course of a decade or more from the early 1370s, of a theology which prefigured claims made during the reformation, John Wycliffe, late medieval priest and Oxford academic is remembered as one of the most significant theologians in British history.
Arriving in Oxford in his late teens around 1345, John Wycliffe’s young adulthood coincided with some of the bleakest and most tumultuous years in European history post antiquity. Wycliffe’s theology and outlook was deeply affected by his experience of surviving the Black Death of the late 1340s which killed as many as half the inhabitants of Great Britain. The years following the first visitation of this horrendous pandemic were also difficult, especially in Oxford, where town versus gown strife sometimes erupted into open conflict. Still in his 20s Wycliffe likely witnessed the St. Scholastica Day Riot in 1355 when 63 students and townspeople were killed in a pitched battle between the two sides.
Amidst this tumult, however, Wycliffe embarked upon the medieval version of an academic career. Becoming first a priest in 1351, while still only in his early 20s, and being admitted to the degree of BA while a junior fellow of Merton College in 1356. Which was the same year that the first book attributed to Wycliffe The Last Age of the Church was published.
As a priest as well as a scholar Wycliffe held a series of parish church positions as well as university ones, which was beneficial to him because they tended to come with a stipend, and Wycliffe was not from an especially wealthy background. It was these church positions outside the university which first brought Wycliffe to the Midlands, when he took a parish role at Fillingham in Lincolnshire.
Wycliffe is supposed to have visited Lincolnshire very occasionally during university vacations. Though taking the role meant that he had to resign as Master of Balliol, a role he held briefly from 1360 till 1361 before taking his first external church role. As the 1360s progressed into the 1370s Wycliffe continued to navigate, with much success, the currents of church and academic politics as well as continuing to publish and develop his reputation as a thinker in the then dominant scholastic approach to scholarship. He received his MA in 1369 and then a doctorate in 1372.
In 1374 Wycliffe became the leading priest at Lutterworth in Leicestershire, a wealthy parish with St. Mary’s a large church. Further away from Oxford than his previous parish in Buckinghamshire, but not too far, Wycliffe remained in this post until his death ten years later in 1384.
It was while he was in Lutterworth that Wycliffe first came to significant secular, non-academic attention. It was in 1374 that he was invited to join a group of clerics, scholars and diplomats who travelled to Bruges and entered into negotiation with Pope Gregory XI’s envoys.
Maybe this experience made Wycliffe more ambitious, perhaps he had been mulling things over for many years, some say that he had already translated the bible into English by the time of his diplomatic trip to the Low Countries. But either way Wycliffe upon his return from Bruges, where he likely met John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and an incredibly powerful nobleman, he began writing a new book On Civil Domination and a series of pamphlets explaining the ideas contained within it to laypeople.
On Civil Domination argues that the state should take over the property of the church and the clergy should live in poverty to be in a more divine state like the early church. This was not a new position, Wycliffe’s argument was indebted to Richard FitzRalph a philosopher and theologian of the previous generation, while the secularisation of church property part of his message was a popular one with nobles like John of Gaunt who was emerging as his patron. Nobles and monarchs had clashed with the church since it first began competing with them for secular influence right at the start of the medieval era.
For several years Wycliffe advanced these arguments from his academic position feeding into the general ferment which characterised the 1370s. A quality which was perhaps due to many of those who were middle aged and in positions of authority, like Wycliffe, having survived the Black Death and lived through its immediate aftermath, while members of the younger generation had typically only known the post-pandemic world.
However, in early 1377, Wycliffe bursts into the historical record again when he was censured by Pope Gregory XI for his views on church property and poverty. He was summoned to explain himself to the Bishop of London, on charges which are lost, but in response to which he managed to acquit himself well enough that they did not advance beyond a preliminary hearing.
The initial hearing took place at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on 19th February 1377. Wycliffe’s appearance before the Bishop of London has been much mythologised. Supposedly he was accompanied by John of Gaunt and other members of the nobility, many of them armed, who insisted that he be allowed to sit before the bishop, despite Wycliffe in clerical terms being vastly his junior. Meanwhile outside the cathedral a crowd hostile to John of Gaunt gathered chanting opposition slogans. The day after the hearing London was convulsed by riots led by those opposed to John of Gaunt’s power. A sign that Wycliffe had become a significant figure in secular as well as church politics.
While his hearing before the Bishop of London led to nothing, the pope far away in Rome was now turning his attention to Wycliffe. In late May 1377 Gregory sent an official condemnation of Wycliffe’s writings on politics and church organisation from Rome to England, with copies to the Archbishop of Canterbury, King Edward III, Bishop of London, Lord Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford. These letters moved very slowly only arriving in England in December, by which time the elderly king had died, and the boy Richard III was on the throne, heavily under John of Gaunt’s influence.
The Pope’s condemnation did have an influence upon the University of Oxford whose vice chancellor briefly confined Wycliffe to the university’s Black Hall, although due to the influence of his supporters in the university and beyond this did not last. During this time Wycliffe continued his involvement in secular politics advising the government that they could reasonably withhold their expected remittances to the pope in Rome.
For the rest of the 1370s Wycliffe continued to pronounce on matters concerning religion and politics, building a network of followers in academia, and gaining strong support from powerful members of the nobility. By the time the decade grew to a close Wycliffe’s position against the papacy had become incredibly stringent as had his views on clerical poverty.
From 1380 onwards until the end of his life Wycliffe, now estranged from Oxford where the university’s hierarchy had rallied to the defence of the established church, primarily spent his time in Lutterworth inhabiting the role of parish priest and writing incessantly. His focus changed, moving from political questions about the role of the church and its relationship with secular power into more theological matters, coming out strongly against the doctrine of transubstantiation. The concept that the priest through the holy communion rite transforms bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ.
This strained his relationship with more doctrinally conservative members of the clergy, who had accepted his critiques of church wealth and involvement of politics, but were generally satisfied with religious practice. Some of his noble supporters also blanched at this turn into questioning long established elements of religious practice.
Wycliffe’s work and some of the conclusions which could be drawn from it also began percolating out of academic, clerical and elite circles into the thinking of the general public. Ideas exposed by figures like John Ball the itinerant clerical inspiration for 1381’s Peasant Revolt could clearly be linked to Wycliffe’s challenge to established religious authority and its role in perpetuating secular power. Aspects of the peasant’s demands for changes in the secular realm could also be traced back to Wycliffe’s work. This, despite Wycliffe himself never especially weighing in against the secular authorities or established social and economic order, also contributed to the priest and his supporters becoming increasingly suspect amongst those in power.
In this way, Wycliffe’s ideas, not unlike those of Martin Luther over 100 years later, began to rapidly move beyond him. Maybe Wycliffe genuinely did believe that late feudal society was the best of all possible worlds, or perhaps decades of deftly manoeuvring as an essentially self made man, in the capricious worlds of the church, academia and secular power, meant that he appreciated it was best for his professional and personal longevity and wellbeing that he clung close to secular power and avoided supporting anything that smacked of disorder.
Many of his followers did not feel the same way. There is no doubt that Wycliffeites, or Lollards as they eventually became known, were numbered amongst the peasant rebels. While he condemned the slaying, Lollards appear to have had a hand in the summary execution during the Peasants Revolt of the Archbishop of Canterbury William of Sudbury. While others later defended the king. During the tumult lay preachers, some of them appointed by Wycliffe himself, other by key followers, preached and helped spread word of the revolt.
Despite his growing tendency towards theological innovation, and the radicalism of some of his supporters, Wycliffe did not entirely lose the support of the secular authorities in England. Following Sudbury’s execution William Courtenay the former Bishop of London who had investigated and sought to prosecute Wycliffe during the late 1370s became Archbishop of Canterbury. In this position during 1382 and 1383 he attempted to wage a campaign throwing the full machinery of the church and the church’s judicial system at Wycliffe. This included a conference in May 1382 at which 24 doctrines, 10 of which were evidently drawn from Wycliffe’s work were condemned. Inauspiciously an earthquake took place during this event, but William Courtenay declared this to be a sign that the world would soon be ridded of heresy.
After this assembly a synod to discuss the suppression of hearsay was organised to take place in Oxford in November 1382. The target was Wycliffe and his followers amongst the lower ranks of the university where his views were incredibly popular. However, there was relatively little that the clerical authorities could do, indeed the country’s secular establishment rallied to defend Wycliffe against any ecclesiastical attempt to censure or punish him and his followers. Wycliffe returned the favour by dedicating a religious memorial address he gave to the synod to his supporters amongst the nobility.
After the synod Wycliffe was summoned to Rome to explain himself to the Pope. However, now in late middle age, he suffered a stroke in early 1383 which so incapacitated him that even the ecclesiastical authorities with whom he had been butting heads for the best part of a decade appeared inclined towards forgiveness and mercy. Proceedings against Wycliffe were discontinued and he was left to see out the rest of his days as the priest of Lutterworth in Leicestershire.
It was in Lutterworth that Wycliffe died aged around 56 in, following a further stroke in December 1384, being buried in the churchyard of St. Mary’s where he had been priest for the previous decade.
After his death the Lollards, so proclaimed by the Pope, continued to grow in number. Some Lollards adhered closely to Wycliffe’s work; others came from very different tendencies critical of the Catholic church, but religious and secular authorities alike tended to lump them all together. In the generation after Wycliffe’s death the movement in England remained strong and operated relatively openly, still possessing powerful patrons. English radical theology had an influence halfway across Europe in Bohemia where Jan Hus promulgated similar claims about the limits of church power and against aspects of established doctrine, albeit firmly within an overarching Christian framework. Unlike Wycliffe Jan Hus was executed, however, the Hussite movement he inspired remained dominant for over 200 years after his death, inspiring the German Reformation from 1517 which established Protestant Christianity in turn.
In England by contrast in the early 15th Century Lollardism, if it survived at all, was forced underground. Elite opinion turned against the tendency, with the first law against the faith being passed in 1401. The religiously inspired rebellions by the Herefordshire born baron John Oldcastle against Henry V in the mid-1410s led to further suppression of alternative religious views. Prior to this in 1408 the University of Oxford with which Wycliffe was affiliated for his entire adult life explicitly banned his books and teaching his thought. In May 1415 over 30 years after his death Wycliffe was declared a heretic by the Council of Constance. This resulted in the religious authorities in England resolving to resume Wycliffe’s corpse, remove it from the churchyard, burn it and scatter the ashes in the River Swift which runs through Lutterworth. This order was not actually carried out until 1428 over 40 years after Wycliffe had been buried. Because of this it is distinctly possible that the bones which were exhumed and burnt weren’t actually his and were rather a random neighbour.
After the Reformation firmly took hold in England after Elizabeth I took the throne in 1558 Wycliffe was almost entirely rehabilitated. Rightly or wrongly he was acclaimed as a precursor of the reformed faith and celebrated as something of a national hero. Lutterworth to this day commemorates the life of its most famous priest, something which echoes the fact that in the immediate aftermath of his death Wycliffe was hailed as a local saint. These days a portrait of the theologian as an older man hangs in the church. Staring straight at, perhaps ironically, a rare and impressive late medieval doom painting, which may have been there during Wycliffe’s ministry, that was covered up during the Reformation but is now on display once more.
Route Notes
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
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This walk from Rugby to Lutterworth, a south west Leicestershire market town, famed for its connections via St. Mary’s church to the 14th Century radical theologian John Wycliffe (father of Lollardism), and its rare, well preserved late medieval doom painting, begins from Rugby railway station.
Exit the station on the side away from the town, to the left if you approach from the north where the West Midlands conurbation is situated.
Head north west along main roads away from the station.
Cross over the River Avon and the Oxford Canal.
Soon you round a roundabout on the busy A426, carrying on straight ahead on the far side.
A little beyond the roundabout you cross a junction approaching a Warwickshire Wildlife Trust nature reserve, called the Swift Valley Nature Reserve, on your right.
Walk down the access road on the right and enter the reserve crossing a car park.
Head through the reserve which comprises woodland and then a series of meadows.
A disused, partially restored canal runs along the right hand side of one of the meadows.
At the bottom of the meadow you reach a bridge which you cross, picking up a path which leads across meadows past a housing and industrial estate.
Soon a raised section of the M6 appears on the horizon in front of you.
Approach the motorway following the disused canal.
On reaching the motorway pick up a track which runs beneath the motorway.
Follow this track for some distance out into the fields.
Soon you pick up a path running across the fields straight ahead until you reach a lane.
Once on the lane turn right and follow it for some distance until you reach the attractive little village of Churchover.
Walk straight ahead down Churchover’s main road.
Upon reaching the far side of the village enter the field in front of you and walk straight ahead.
Follow the path walking more or straight ahead across gently undulating ground past a copse until you reach the A5.
Head to the left and cross the A5 at a point where the crash barrier is low. At this point the A5 forms the boundary between Warwickshire and Leicestershire. And therefore the western and eastern Midlands. Cross over the carriageway on the far side and then turn right until you reach a footpath running to the left through some trees and out into a field.
Follow a path which runs more or less parallel with the River Swift.
Presently you cross the Swift heading to the right until you pass into woodland and follow a path through the trees.
Beyond the trees head to the right and pick up a track.
Soon it turns into a lane which you follow past some scattered houses.
Then you cross the A4303 and enter the southern suburbs of Lutterworth.
Head to the right once you are inside the town and approach the historic part that comprises the village centre.
Upon reaching the main road through the town turn left and head uphill towards the town’s main square and the area where St. Mary’s church, once served by John Wycliffe, and home to a spectacular late medieval doom painting lies.
This is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
At the time of writing in November 2025 Lutterworth is served by several reasonably frequent bus services. The 84 and X84 ran hourly from Lutterworth to Rugby and Leicester which both have well served mainline railway stations. Hinckley which also has a mainline railway station is served by a fairly frequent bus service, as is Market Harborough further away in south Leicestershire. Service patterns on Saturdays are similar to weekdays. On Sundays buses operate to a reduced timetable.