ABSTRACT
By the fourteenth century, the Oxford and Cambridge chancellors had gained a multifarious authority unsurpassed elsewhere among universities of the medieval period. The protracted struggle between the Oxford adherents of Wyclifite and Lollard doctrines and the authorities of Church and State illustrates the ultimate constraints which were placed upon freedom of thought in the medieval English Universities. It is clear that a long history of endemic conflict had preceded the most disruptive episode in the relations between Cambridge scholars and townspeople, namely, the riotous events which took place in June 1381 during the Peasants' Revolt. Although allowance has to be made for propagandist excesses on the University's part, the burden of guilt seems to have lain with Bilneye and the municipal authorities. It is consequently very understandable that in the early fifteenth century the Cambridge masters should have aspired to a final definition of the position of the University with respect to all ecclesiastical authority.
