" [Footnote: Foxe, _Acts
and Monuments_, III, 452.] That which has rent society in twain and has
caused blood to flow like water, has never been abstract opinions, but
that economic competition either between states or classes, that lust for
power and wealth, which makes a vested interest. Thus by 1382 the
eucharist had come to represent to the privileged classes power and
wealth, and they would have repudiated Wycliffe even had they felt strong
enough to support him. But they were threatened by an adversary equally
formidable with heresy in the person of the villeins whom the constantly
increasing momentum of the time had raised into a position in which they
undertook to compete for the ownership of the land which they still tilled
as technical serfs.
CHAPTER III.
Now the courts may say what they will in support of the vested interests,
for to support vested interests is what lawyers are paid for and what
courts are made for. Only, unhappily, in the process of argument courts
and lawyers have caused blood to flow copiously, for in spite of all that
can be said to the contrary, men have practically proved that they do own
all the property they can defend, all the courts in Christendom
notwithstanding, and this is an issue of physical force and not at all of
words or of parchments. And so it proved to be in England in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, alike in Church and State.
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