John Wycliffe and in his sermons, but also in a series of sharp tracts and polemical productions in Latin and English (of which those issued in his later years have been collected as "Polemical Writings"). In the 1380 "Objections to Friars", he calls monks the pests of society, enemies of religion, and patrons and promoters of every crime. He directed his strongest criticism against the friars, whose preaching he considered neither scriptural nor sincere, but motivated by "temporal gain". While others were content to seek the reform of particular errors and abuses, Wycliffe sought nothing less than the extinction of the institution
Henry Knighton philosophies). Knighton was the first historian of Lollardy. He writes that those voicing Church complaints and echoing the principles of Wycliffe in 1382, hence being associated with the principles of the Lollards, were every second man in the Kingdom of England. Knighton did not care for Wycliffe's church reform doctrines or the Lollards as both threatened his way of life. He respected Wycliffe although as an academic scholar, writing he was a famous and very important ecclesiastic clergyman and philosopher of the time. Henry Knighton Henry Knighton (or Knyghton) (died c. 1396, in England) was an Augustinian canon at the