ABSTRACT
Of all the early but non-contemporary works which throw light on the history of Lollardy, the Acts and Monuments of John Foxe is undoubtedly the most important. Although it contains many tendentious comments, the products of an age when religious passions burned fiercely, comments which are of greater value to the historian of sixteenth-century propaganda than to the student of fifteenth-century heresy, it would be unwise to reject its source-value on these grounds. It is clear then that a basic substratum of useful historical fact lies below Foxe’s more tendentious comment. One may probably discount some of his more detailed stories about the sufferings of the ‘martyrs,’ stories in which propaganda may have led to those elaborations, because of which Foxe has sometimes been regarded primarily as a polemical writer. When an offender held an extreme view, Foxe might suppress it in order to have another stick with which Rome could conveniently be beaten.
