Pecock, REGINALD, author of The Repressor of Over-Much Blaming of the Clergy, was most probably born in Wales; was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, in 1417, and was ordained acolyte and sub-deacon in 1420, proceeding to deacon's and priest's orders in the two following years. His preferments were the mastership of Whittington College, London, together with the rectory of St Michael in Riola; the bishopric of St Asaph's, from Duke Humphrey of Gloucester in 1444, when he also received his degree of Doctor of Divinity, and of Chichester, through the patronage of the ill-fated William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, in 1450. A student of great learning and industry, he plunged eagerly into the controversies of the day, and compiled many treatises, of which the Donet (c. 1440), on the main truths of Christianity, and his practical Treatise on Faith (c. 1456), written for the Lollards, are still extant.
In the latter he gives up infallible authority in the church, makes faith a matter of probability rather than of knowledge, lays a broad foundation for a really rational piety, and makes a noble approximation to the doctrine of religious toleration. The object of his Repressor (c. 1455) was to promote the peace of the church by plain arguments against Lollardy, written in the mother-tongue. He maintained that bishops had higher duties than mere preaching, and strove with great patience and clear logic to demonstrate the reasonableness of those doctrines and ordinances of the church which the Lollards rejected as not founded on Scripture. Of a liberal and tolerant spirit far before his time, Pecock pointed out with much point and originality the teaching of natural religion about man's moral duties, asserting that the judgment of reason must not be overruled and twisted into conformity with Scripture, which rather confirms than serves as the authority for the light of nature. In his argument that Scripture pre-supposes a knowledge of the moral virtues, and that its special object is to make known those truths which reason could not have discovered, he is distinctly the forerunner of the great Hooker. His attack on the Donation of Constantine is an admirable piece of reasoning, and his argument that experience shows that there is no subject on which men are more likely to err than the interpretation of Scripture deals a deadly blow to the bibliolatr of Lollardy and Protestantism. Pecock's philosophic breadth and independence of judgment brought upon him the suspicions of the church, and especially of the friars, whom he had stigmatised as 'pulpit bawlers.' The storm of opposition that had long been gathering burst upon his head at a council held at Westminster in 1457. He was hotly denounced for having written in English, and for making reason paramount even to the authority of the old doctors, while many slanderous and baseless charges besides were heaped upon his head. He was summoned before Archbishop Burchier at Lambeth, where his writings were subjected to examination by twenty-four doctors. In the end he was condemned by the archbishop as a heretic whose doctrines were contrary to St Augustine, St Jerome, and St Gregory, and the cruel alternative was put before him, to abjure his errors or be burned. He elected to abjure, made confession of many errors and heresies of which he had never been guilty, and with his own hands delivered to the executioner his three folios and eleven quartos for the flames. Against the further sentence that he should be deprived of his see he appealed to Rome, and the pope indeed commanded him to be reinstated, but he was prevailed upon to resign his bishopric into the hands of the king. The rest of his days he spent in the abbey of Thorney in Cambridgeshire. Forty pounds a year was allowed for his maintenance; he was to have the service of an attendant, somewhat liberal diet, and a private chamber with a chimney and a passage leading from it which gave a sight of an altar and allowed him to hear mass. He was denied writing materials, and his books were but five—a breviary, a mass-book, a psalter, a legendary, and a Bible. He died about 1460.
See the article LOLLARDS; also James Gairdner's essays on 'The Lollards,' in Studies in English History (1881); the Introduction to Churchill Babington's edition of the Repressor in the Rolls series (2 vols. 1860); and the Life by John Lewis (1774; reprinted, Oxford, 1820).