The dialogue begins with the Gentleman lamenting how his class has fallen low and is unable to help the poor, because long ago they were fooled into giving their lands and wealth to the church. . .   Expand    Wikipedia

The dialogue begins with the Gentleman lamenting how his class has fallen low and is unable to help the poor, because long ago they were fooled into giving their lands and wealth to the church. The husbandman then argues for confiscating the possessions of a corrupt clergy which preys upon the poor. Belief in purgatory and indulgences is singled out as the favorite swindle of the clergy, who are ultimately to blame for rising rents. The husbandman suggests taking the issue to parliament (the 1529 "Reformation Parliament"), but the Gentleman demurs, alluding to Simon Fish's A Supplicacyon for the Beggers and Thomas More's rebuttal and defense of purgatory in The Supplycacyon of Soulys (1529). King John, Sir John Oldcastle, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester are listed as good men who came to bad ends for opposing the clergy. Then there is an allusion to the burning of William Tyndale's New Testament in 1526 and Henry V's persecution of Lollards. To defend Lutherans and opposition to clerical possessions from charges of "newfangledness," the husbandman introduces what he takes to be a century-old treatise; i.e., a late-fourteenth-century Lollard text that supports disendowment of the clergy and barring them from secular offices. (The husbandman places it in the time of Richard II.)

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