but who left England fairly early on and made his career in France and Germany, where he died. These men and others like them were part of the universal respublica Christiana, the “Christian commonwealth,” as it is sometimes called, and they cannot be said to have represented a distinctively Anglican form of Christianity. The only medieval figure to be remembered today as a proto-Anglican is John Wycliffe or Wyclif (1328–1384). This is mainly because Wycliffe advocated the supreme authority of Holy