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THIS
picture, like the preceding one, has a tragic significance, but the tragedy is
underlying: the poignancy of it is given by contrast with the peaceful beauty of
the scene, which covers it as with an exquisite veil. Towards the end of the
fourteenth century, in a landscape then as now ideally English, with quiet
ploughlands undulating between shady trees and grey church tower, a group of men
and women are gathered together for reading. The book lies open on the knees of
an elderly scholar; the hearers are of differing ages, classes, and occupations.
There is a ploughman, perhaps named Piers, who has left his plough-team and come
with his wife and baby; a young student, who leans over his master; a boyish
squire, very like the one who rode with Chaucer to Canterbury; two women of
rank—a youthful beauty and her lady mother; and others of more rustic breed,
with shrewd, kindly English faces. Some are stolid, some uplifted, some puzzled
or critical, some troubled by the remembrance that they have great possessions:
all are thoughtful, and with no careless thought. They have an overmastering
concern in what they are hearing, but they listen in the shadow of danger. The
serene beauty of the picture forbids us to draw anger or hatred from the records
of a long dead past. The doctrine of persecution, as the historian tells us, was
an integral part of mediaeval Christianity. “To the men of the Middle Ages
religious persecution was therefore as much a matter of course as civil police.
There is no need to ascribe evil characters to the energetic Kings and Bishops
who persecuted the Lollards .
. . but
neither is there any need to approve of the doctrine of persecution because it
was very ancient and universally held. It was none the less erroneous, and was
destined to cause incalculable evil for centuries to come.”
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