9 January 1414
Lollard plot

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Led by Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollards – supporters of a puritanical Church reform movement – plot to set up an alternative government, in which they would kidnap the king and occupy London. They are soon rounded up. Lollardy began in the 1370s when Oxford theologian John Wycliffe argued that people can find their own route to salvation by reading the scriptures themselves – which meant translating the Latin Bible into English. Condemned as heretics by the Catholic Church, many Lollards are burnt at the stake, including Oldcastle in 1417. The movement was a precursor of the Protestant Reformation of the 1530s.

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