LO, HE THAT CAN BE CRISTES CLERC: FOOTNOTES
1 Then my advice is, neither for lucre nor reward
2 [They] interpret it according to their own lights
3 To them neither spear nor shield are necessary
4 Should lament for what God never complained about
LO, HE THAT CAN BE CRISTES CLERC: NOTES
2 knottes of his Crede. Students learned the Apostles' Creed by memorizing words on knots on rosary beads. For the Apostles' Creed, see Piers the Plowman's Creed.
11 trouth. So RHR; Wr trouthe. I make no attempt here to record Wr's further interpretation of flourishes as final e's.
13 lolle. To speak in a mumble or in muffled tones; or to preach like a Lollard. RHR observes that in Latin poems the Lollards are compared with weeds (lolium). The Lollards were also known as "Lolleres," as in Chaucer's Man of Law's Epilogue: "'I smelle a Lollere in the wynd,' quod he" (II 1173). The word lollard may derive from the Dutch lollaert ("mumbler") and was perhaps deliberately confused with the English word lollere ("a lazy vagabond, fraudulent beggar" [MED s.v. lollere]), though Chaucer's line seems to have scatalogical connotations.
20 For fals . . . brent. A reference to the statute of 1401 (De haeretico comburendo) that authorized the burning of heretics for their beliefs.
24 lewede lust. Also lines 56 and 136. "Ignorant wishes" is perhaps too mild a gloss. "Stupid lechery" or "lecherous craving" might be more appropriate.
25-30 The implication is that Lollard knights slip away at night for secret Bible meetings when they should be sleeping or keeping military watch over the castle.
33 old castel. A reference to Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, with whom the Lollard insurrection of 1414 was chiefly associated.
57 don. So RHR; MS print unclear in this line. Wr, PPS, doun.
64 Under. Wr Unde[r]; RHR Under; MS Vnde.
85 saunz faile . . . saunz doute. Pretentious French phrases meaning, respectively, "without fail" and "without doubt."
105 He wor. So MS. Wr He wer; RHR Ho wor.
106 maad. So RHR; Wr mad. MS print unclear at this point.
116 That last . . . Kent. The Lollards went out of their way to critique the worship of images as blasphemous and idolatrous. They called these icons "dead images," as in the General Prologue to the Lollard Bible (probably of 1396):
Now men kneel, and pray, and offer fast to dead images, that have neither hunger nor cold; and despise, beat, and slay Christian men, made to the image and likeness of the Holy Trinity. What honour of God is this to kneel and offer to an image, made of sinful man's hands, and to despise and rob the image made of God's hands, that is, a Christian man, or a Christian woman? When men give not alms to poor needy men, but to dead images, or rich clerks, they rob poor men of their due portion, and needful sustenance assigned to them of God himself; and when such offerings to dead images rob poor men, they rob Jesus Christ.
As quoted in Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp. 159-60. The specific reference here to a statue of St. James beheaded again and again in Kent has not been identified. In another place Aston writes, of image-worship: "It seems fairly safe to regard this as the commonest facet of one of the commonest (if not the commonest) of Lollard beliefs, and the view that it was idolatry to serve saints' images with pilgrimage or other acts of devotion secured wide support." See England's Iconoclasts, vol. 1: Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 105.
Thomas Hoccleve also was concerned that Lollard types should believe that ordinary Christians would worship the images themselves rather than Christ. See Scattergood, Politics, p. 255.