A Yorkshireman at Oxford
John Wycliffe was born around 1330, perhaps a few years earlier, probably at Hipswell near Richmond in the North Riding of Yorkshire. His family probably took its name from the nearby village of Wycliffe on the Tees. By the 1350s he was at Oxford, where he spent nearly all his working life. He was Master of Balliol College by 1360, was briefly warden of Canterbury Hall, and became a doctor of theology in 1372.
Like most university scholars of his day, he lived on the income of church livings whose parishes he rarely saw. Balliol presented him to Fillingham in Lincolnshire in 1361. He exchanged it for Ludgershall, near Oxford, in 1368, and in 1374 the crown gave him the rectory of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, which he held until his death. Archbishop Simon Islip made him warden of Canterbury Hall in 1365, but Islip's successor removed him, and Wycliffe lost an appeal to Rome. The system he later attacked supported him for most of his career.
He first made his name as a philosopher. Against the followers of William of Ockham, who held that universal ideas are only names, Wycliffe was a realist, convinced that universals are real in the mind of God and in things themselves. Even the hostile chronicler Henry Knighton granted that in philosophy he was second to none. His realism shaped his theology: a substance, he reasoned, cannot simply be annihilated, so the bread on the altar cannot cease to be bread at the priest's word.
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