Free Book of Fire by Brian Moynahan Page A

Lollards’ tower, the ecclesiastical prison maintained by the bishop of London in the west churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral. Three years before, Hunne’s son Stephen had died at the age of five weeks. The infant’s body was taken to St Mary’s Church in Whitechapel for burial, where Thomas Dryfield, the priest at St Mary’s, demanded a ‘mortuary’ for performing the service. By tradition, a priest could demand to be given a piece of property belonging to the deceased.
    ‘Mortuaries’ figured prominently in lay grievances against the Church. Wycliffe had condemned them in his day, as gouging the poor when they most needed the consolation of religion, and Londoners were notoriously anti-clerical, alert for any excuse to attack the clergy. Dryfield nonetheless insisted that Hunne give him the bearing sheet in which the baby Stephen had been wrapped for his christening. Hunne refused. He argued that, by English common law, a corpse cannot own property. He refused to let the sheet go.
    The little scrap of cloth aroused passionate interest. If it was won by the priest, it would signify the continuing subservience of the laity to the priesthood and the Church. If Hunne kept it, common law would have triumphed over the canon law of the Church, for canon law had recognised the validity of mortuaries for centuries.
    Dryfield sued Hunne for the sheet in the Bishop’s Court, the ecclesiastical court where cases involving the Church were tried under canon law. The case was heard by Cuthbert Tunstall, then chancellor to the diocese, in May 1512. Tunstall ruled in favour of Dryfield. Hunne refused to part with the sheet. When he attended his parish church, St Margaret’s in Bridge Street, Dryfield greeted him with the formula: ‘Hunne, thowe arte accursed and thowstondist accursed.’ Hunne was thereby excommunicated from the body of the faithful and his soul consigned to hell. Hunne retaliated by charging the priesthood with violating praemunire , a fourteenth-century statute upholding the rights of the common law courts and the king against the pope and the Church courts.
    This development thoroughly alarmed Tunstall and senior churchmen. Bishop Fitzjames, Tunstall’s predecessor as bishop of London, brought formal charges of heresy against Hunne. More was convinced that Hunne had Lollard friends ‘that were wont to haunt those midnight lectures’ at which manuscript copies of Lollard Bibles were read out. He accused Hunne of publicity seeking; the tailor was ‘high-minded and set on the glory of a victory’, he said, and ‘he trusted to be spoke of long after his days and have his matter called Hunne’s case’.
    The case indeed became notorious, to the anger of More and Tunstall. Hunne was arrested and interrogated by the bishop and his officers on Saturday 2 December 1514. He was then locked away in the Lollards’ tower for the weekend. In the early hours of Monday he was found hanging dead in his cell. A coroner’s jury was summoned. It found there was no evidence that Hunne had killed himself. He could not have inserted his neck into the noose in which he was found; his wrists showed signs of having been bound, the only stool in the cell was too far from his body for him to have used it, and there were marks of manual strangulation around his neck. The jury declared that Hunne had been murdered.
    The bishop declared the jurors to be ‘false, perjured caitiffs’ and continued with the heresy case against Hunne. Canon law, as in the case of Wycliffe, permits trials of the dead. An English translation of the Bible was said to have been found among Hunne’s papers. More claimed that he had seen it, and that Hunne had written notes in the margin on the ‘heresies’ it contained, thus proving ‘what naughty minds the men had, both he that sonoted them and he that so made [the manuscript]’. More said that the prologue to the Bible contained a condemnation of the mass.
    Hunne’s corpse was charged with