After the condemnation of Wyclif at Oxford and London, his followers were forced to recant or lose their ecclesiastical offices. In 1401, with the act [[De Haeretico Comburendo]] (on the Burning of Heretics), the new [[King Henry IV]] added the power of the State to the condemnation of the Church, and followers of Wyclif who were found to have relapsed into their beliefs were burned at the stake. The teachings of Wyclif passed then into the hands of a number of itinerant preachers, who wandered the countryside, teaching peasants and artisans the rudiments of literacy, and leaving behind them copies of [[the Gospels]] in English.
The [[Council of Constance]], meanwhile, declared Wyclif a [[heretic]], and ordered his bones exhumed and burned. Henry IV, as well as his son [[Henry V]], were vigorous in their persecution of suspected "Lollards" as these followers of Wyclif were known, and many were arrested; the preachers who had led them were executed. Nevertheless, many of the ideas taught by Wyclif survived in the popular imagination, and when the teachings of [[Martin Luther]] reached England in the early sixteenth century, the same areas of England where the Lollards had been prominent were among the strongest in [[Protestantism|Protestant]] dissent.
Due to changes in the nature of English, the "Wycliffite" translation of the Bible had become antiquated by the time that Protestantism became the official religion of England, and the Bible was translated afresh by scholars such as [[William Tyndale]]. Like Wyclif, Tyndale was condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake, but his translation lived on, and many of its passages remained essentially the same through and beyond the [[King James Bible|King James]] (Authorized) text of 1611.