“Hocus-pocus,” the incantation we learned as children, is thought to be a corruption of the phrase heard in the Mass, hoc est corpus meum (this is my body). As far back as the fourteenth century, the chafe between the people and the priesthood was evident. “When a priest could purchase from diocesan authority a license to keep a concubine, how should he have better access to God than the ordinary sinner?”18 Even in Wycliffe’s time, when a man confessed adultery, his confessor (priest) was not allowed to ask the