lither - What does it mean?

Adjective

Doolittle and myself waited. Colebrook kept on cautiously, squirming his long body in sinuous waves like a lizard's through the grass, and was soon lost to us. No snake could have been lither .

Adjective

Anon, from thy insulting tyranny,

Coupled in bonds of perpetuity,

Two Talbots, winged through the lither sky,

In thy despite shall ’scape mortality.

After the same manner a monk--I mean those lither , idle, lazy monks--doth not labour and work, as do the peasant and artificer; doth not ward and defend the country, as doth the man of war; cureth not the sick and diseased, as the physician doth; doth neither preach nor teach, as do the evangelical doctors and schoolmasters; doth not import commodities and things necessary for the commonwealth, as the merchant doth.

Secondarily, let him which laboreth in his vocation be prompt and active; let him be watchful and able to abide labour; he must be no lither -back¹, unapt, or slothful fellow. Whatever he doth, that let him do with faith² and diligence.

Thus he sketched an education which might have befitted a great king, without a word of ribaldry or scorn, and in such a spirit as proves that he gravely condemned the lazy, lither system of the monasteries.