His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant:
Matthew 25:21
"1401, Lollard priest William Sawtre was burned at Smithfield for heresy — the first known heresy execution in England.
----Sawtre, a humble parish vicar. When put to questioning by the 
bishop
in 1399, Sawtre initially recanted his unorthodox skepticism as to the
transubstantiation of communion bread into Christ’s own literal body — a
doctrinal mystery that would be a tougher and tougher sell to
dissidents yet to come.
But upon moving from Lynn to London where he served at St. Osyth’s, Sawtre relapsed — and some stirring moved his soul to vindicate himself in the face of mortal peril.
Charged before Parliament, Sawtre now defended his heresies under close questioning by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel.
Arundel was even then pressuring this same Parliament for a statute,
which he did indeed soon receive — one with the ominous title De Heretico Comburendo,
at last elevating heresy to a death penalty offense and making the
bishops themselves the decisive arbiters on the matter. It is overtly
and all-but-explicitly aimed at the Lollards.
De Heretico Comburendo was passed only on March 10, but Sawtre was eight days’ dead by that point.
Both the law and the execution were great victories for the Church. “The
king and the archbishop hurried to burn their victim to show that they
could send a heretic to the stake whenever they wished, without relying
on statute” Leonard Williams Levy writes.
“Parliament could neither give nor take the authority to burn a
heretic. If the scepter supported the miter, canon law prevailed.”
executedtoday
