The Man Whose Name Is on Nothing

A history of William Tyndale and the first printed English New Testament

He was strangled and burned in 1536 for a book his own country had a legal procedure for licensing. Three copies of it survive. And no Bible that carries his sentences has ever carried his name — including the one in your house.

A life in 13 parts · about 48 minutes · c. 1491 – today

1526–1996 · What is left of the first printed English New Testament

Three Copies, and Nobody Counted the Rest

In the state library at Stuttgart there is a small book that nobody looked at properly for about a century and a half. It sat on the shelf under the year 1550, which is the date stamped on its binding, and a binding is something a later owner pays for. Only in November 1996, during the unglamorous retrospective cataloging libraries do when they move their records onto computers, did it become clear that the book inside the cover was a great deal older than the cover: a copy of the first printed English New Testament, made at Worms in 1526, and, as it turned out, the only complete one in the world.

There are two others. St Paul’s Cathedral has a copy missing about seventy-one leaves — some hundred and forty pages, lost while the book was being shuffled and disguised and hidden by people who could have been ruined for holding it. The British Library has a copy that is whole except for the one leaf that would tell you what the book called itself; it bought that copy in 1994 from Bristol Baptist College for a little over a million pounds, which is a striking sum for a volume a bookseller had once sold for fifteen shillings. So the title page of the first printed English New Testament survived in exactly one copy, in a German library, behind a wrong date, and nobody in England could say for certain what the book called itself for four hundred and seventy years.

How many were made is another matter. The figure usually printed is three thousand, and that number belongs to a different job in a different city. One near-contemporary document speaks to Worms: Georg Spalatin’s diary for August 1526, recording what Hermann von dem Busche had told him after coming from the town, which is that six thousand had been printed there in English. That is hearsay written down by a man who had talked to somebody who had been in the right place, and it is the only figure with any paper behind it at all. Take either number; the arithmetic is the same kind of arithmetic. Out of thousands, three.

The rest were burned, and burned deliberately, in a country whose bishops bought some of them specifically in order to burn them. That is the unusual thing about the survival rate. It is not the ordinary attrition of old paper — mice, damp, firewood, a century of indifference. It is policy, and the policy worked. The whole edition comes down to us in three volumes, not one of which could be fully described until a German cataloger opened one in 1996.

The reason any of this matters is not bibliographical. A great many of the sentences in that small hunted book are sentences you already know. If you have ever said that someone was the salt of the earth, or that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, or that the powers that be are ordained of God, or that a man should fight the good fight, you were quoting a printer’s sheet that came into England inside a bale of cloth. If you say the Lord’s Prayer with trespasses in it rather than debts, you are not saying the King James version at all. You are saying his.

And he is on the cover of none of it. His name appears on no English Bible of the sixteenth century: not on the one the King licensed ten months after killing him, not on the one chained in every parish church, not on the title page of the King James. The most quoted Englishman after Shakespeare left no manuscript of a single verse, no portrait from life, no grave, and one sheet of paper in his own hand, which is written in Latin and asks for a warmer cap.

c. 1491–1521 · Birth, the alias, Oxford, and the Cambridge that may never have happened

A Man Called Hychyns

Begin with what cannot exist. There is no record of his baptism and there could not be: Thomas Cromwell’s injunction ordering English parishes to keep a register of christenings is dated 5 September 1538, two years after Tyndale was dead. His parents are named in no document at all. Robert Demaus, writing the first serious life of him in 1871, put it flatly — his father and mother are personages unknown as yet to history — and a century and a half of searching has not named them since.

The birth year is contested, and the contest is instructive. You will see 1494 nearly everywhere, and the reason you see it is that a great deal of commemoration was organized around 1994: a biography, a stained-glass window, a quincentenary. The date was computed backward out of the Oxford registers rather than found anywhere. Specialists now generally prefer 1490 or 1491, on the sounder ground that canon law wanted a man to be twenty-four before he was made priest, and Tyndale was priested in April 1515. Older books go back to 1484, which is the year carved on the statue of him in the Victoria Embankment Gardens. So the monument in London and the monument at North Nibley both give a birth year scholarship has abandoned, above a birthplace nobody has established. North Nibley rests on an assertion by Sir Robert Atkyns in 1712, and Demaus noticed the awkward part of it in 1871: the William Tyndale actually born at Hunt’s Court in North Nibley was still alive in 1542, six years after this one was burned.

Even the surname is unsteady. At Oxford he is not Tyndale. He is William Hychyns — supplicating for the BA on 13 May 1512, admitted on 4 July, determining the following Lent, licensed in arts on 26 June 1515, and created Master of Arts on 2 July, one of twenty-two men that day. He was ordained under the same name: subdeacon in 1514 in the diocese of Hereford, deacon at St Paul’s on 24 March 1515, priest on 7 April, Holy Saturday, in the church of the Hospital of St Thomas of Acon in the City of London. He was a priest three months before he was a Master of Arts. The story usually told about the alias — that the family took it coming south after the Wars of the Roses, to escape notice — is first heard of in the reign of Charles II, roughly two centuries later, and the manorial rentals at Stinchcombe show both names used openly side by side, sometimes by one man. It looks less like a disguise than like the ordinary sixteenth-century habit of having two surnames.

He was at Magdalen Hall, Waynflete’s grammar hall attached to Magdalen College and not the College itself; Foxe keeps that distinction and most modern accounts lose it. What he thought of the education is on record, and it is savage. Writing in 1530 he complained that the universities had ordained that no man should look on the scripture until he had been noselled in heathen learning eight or nine years and armed with false principles — that a student met Aristotle for the better part of a decade before being allowed near the book the whole institution existed for. His one genuinely first-person memory of the place is better than the polemic. In a later exposition he recalls hearing a great clerk in Oxford stand half an hour in a pulpit proving Christ by John the Baptist, and then another half hour proving John the Baptist by Christ.

Then Cambridge, which may not have happened. Every biography has him there, usually from 1517 to 1521, often among the reformers said to have met at the White Horse Inn. The whole basis for it is one clause in Foxe saying that he made his abode there a certain space. No year, no length, and no Cambridge record of any kind. David Daniell, who wanted those years as much as anybody, conceded that the hard evidence is minimal that any of those men were ever in the same place at the same time, never mind in the snug of a Tudor pub. The companion claim, that he learned his Greek at Cambridge from Erasmus, is not merely thin but impossible: Erasmus taught Greek there from August 1511 to January 1512, and Tyndale was determining at Oxford in Lent 1513. Hertford College’s own page nonetheless still has him admiring Erasmus’s teaching at Cambridge.

What survives instead of a curriculum is a compliment, and it too comes at one remove. Spalatin’s diary for 11 August 1526 notes what Hermann von dem Busche said about an Englishman at Worms: that he was so skilled in seven tongues — Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, French — that whichever he spoke, you would take it for his native language. It is the same conversation that gives us the six thousand copies. The Englishman is not named; the identification with Tyndale is an inference, a good one. And English is one of the seven, so the famous seven languages are six besides his own.

1521–1524 · Little Sodbury, the plowboy, and the bishop who had no room

The Bishop’s House Was Full

Three years of his life rest on two documents and one martyrologist. The documents are his own preface to the Pentateuch of 1530, which gives about five hundred words of autobiography and is very nearly all the autobiography he ever wrote; and Humphrey Monmouth’s petition to Wolsey, written from the Tower in 1528 by a frightened man trying to get out of it. The martyrologist is Foxe, printing in 1563, forty years after the events, from a Gloucestershire informant he does not name and nobody has identified.

By about 1521 Tyndale was in the household of Sir John Walsh at Little Sodbury, on the western edge of the Cotswolds. He is usually called tutor to the Walsh children, and probably was, though the children were infants — the eldest perhaps four — which is why recent work suggests his real employment was as chaplain, with the tutoring a small part of it. He was an ordained priest and had been for six years. Foxe supplies the scene everyone remembers: abbots and deans and archdeacons at Walsh’s table, Tyndale arguing with them out of his book, Lady Walsh eventually observing that these were men with incomes of a hundred, two hundred, three hundred pounds a year, and asking whether it were reason that they should be believed before him. It is a wonderful scene and there is no witness to it but Foxe.

Then the summons, and here we do have Tyndale’s own voice. He was called before the chancellor of the diocese, who, he wrote afterward, threatened me grievously, and reviled me, and rated me as though I had been a dog, and laid to his charge matters whereof there could be none accuser brought forth, though all the priests of the country were the same day there. The chancellor is not named, by Tyndale or by Foxe, and no record of the citation survives in the Worcester archive. What Tyndale is complaining about is not the shouting. It is that a hearing was held at which the accusers did not have to appear.

The most famous sentence attached to him belongs to this period, and it needs handling with tongs. Foxe has him telling a certain divine that if God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the scripture than thou dost. The escalation you often see — more than the Pope himself, prefaced by I defy the Pope and all his laws — is a later splice of two separate Foxe sentences. And the image was not Tyndale’s to begin with. Erasmus had printed it in the Paraclesis of 1516, prefixed to the very Greek New Testament Tyndale would work from: would that the farmer sing some portion of them at the plow, and the weaver at his shuttle, and the traveler on the road. Tyndale knew that book intimately and quotes it elsewhere. If he said it, he was quoting his own side’s manifesto; and Foxe, writing at least forty years later, rewrote the passage for his second edition, promoting the anonymous opponent to a certain divine recounted for a learned man and adding that Tyndale spoke full of godly zeal.

He also, at Little Sodbury or soon after, translated Erasmus’s Enchiridion into English — a handbook of lay piety, not scripture, and exactly the sort of thing a chaplain might do for a household that had asked. The translation was thought lost until 2015, when the British Library bought a manuscript from Alnwick Castle: an English Enchiridion with a colophon dated 1523, catalogued as Additional MS 89149. Brian Cummings has made the case that it is probably Tyndale’s, while conceding in the same breath that there is no new external evidence linking the text to him. The manuscript carries no translator’s name, no dedication, and no owner’s mark from its own century. It has a date and no person.

In 1523 he went to London, and what he asked for there is routinely misdescribed. He carried a letter of introduction from Walsh to Sir Henry Guildford, the King’s Comptroller, and a specimen translation of an oration of Isocrates to show what his Greek was worth. Guildford spoke to Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, and Tyndale followed it up with a letter of his own delivered by Tunstall’s servant William Hebylthwaite. On the only evidence there is — Monmouth’s sworn deposition — what he wanted was a place in the bishop’s household. Monmouth’s words are that Tyndale “trusted to be in the bishop of London’s service: for then he laboured to be his chaplain.” No source records him telling Tunstall about a New Testament.

The request was not the act of nerve it is usually made out to be, and the reason is legal. Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions, agreed at Oxford in 1407 and promulgated in January 1409, did not ban the English Bible. They forbade translating any text of scripture into English on one’s own authority, and forbade reading a translation made in Wycliffe’s time or since until that translation had been approved by the diocesan of the place. It was a licensing regime, and licenses were granted; around two hundred and fifty Wycliffite manuscripts survive, only a dozen of them carrying the polemical prologue, and about a third fitted with lectionaries for ordinary liturgical use. Going to a bishop was not defiance. It was the statutory route. Tunstall was the obvious bishop to go to: a doctor of both laws, a student of Hebrew, Thomas More’s oldest friend, and the man who had helped Erasmus correct the second edition of his Greek New Testament. The whole force of the story is that the most learned and least bloodthirsty bishop in England was the one who said no.

What he said was that his house was full — that he had more men than he could keep. Tyndale spent perhaps half a year lodging with Humphrey Monmouth, a cloth merchant who had heard him preach at St Dunstan’s in the West and gave him ten pounds toward his living, and about a year in London altogether. And then he left, and never came back. There is no record of the ship, the port or the date. Spring 1524 is reconstructed backward from a line in a German university register, and the line is not conclusive: the Wittenberg matriculation book for 27 May 1524 has Guillelmus Daltici ex Anglia, which becomes Tyndale only if you assume a scribe miscopied a consonant and then reverse the syllables of the surname. Preserved Smith proposed it in 1921 and Mozley adopted it in 1937. Patrick Collinson allowed it a small question-mark. It is worth noticing that Tyndale himself never once writes that he met Luther — not in the Obedience, not in the Answer to More, not anywhere. The claim exists only in the mouths of his enemies.

His own summary of the year is the sentence that ends the passage, and it is the closest he comes to explaining the rest of his life. He had understood at last, he wrote, not only that there was no room in my lord of London’s palace to translate the New Testament, but that there was no place to do it in all England.

1525–1526 · Cologne, one hostile witness, and thirty-one surviving leaves

The Press Stops at the Letter K

The first attempt was a quarto, and it was a proper edition: a long prologue adapted from Luther, cross-references down the inner margin, glosses down the outer, a woodcut of Matthew at his desk. It was being printed at Cologne, almost certainly on Peter Quentell’s press, though the surviving sheets carry no printer, no place and no date and the attribution is made from the types and the initials. It never finished. It stops in the middle of Matthew 22:12, at the word and.

Everything we know about why it stopped comes from one man, who is also the man claiming the credit. Johann Cochlaeus was an anti-Luther controversialist living at Cologne, and he tells the story three times — in 1533, in 1538 and at greatest length in 1549 — each time with himself at the center of it. In his own account he did not overhear drunken printers in a tavern, which is the version usually repeated; he invited the tradesmen in, gave them wine, and drew the secret out of them. What he says they told him is that two English apostates were at work and that three thousand copies were on the press. He went to a friend on the Senate, the Senate ordered the printer to stop, and the Englishmen fled up the Rhine with the printed sheets. He also says he wrote to warn Henry VIII, Wolsey and Bishop Fisher.

Almost every element of that is single-sourced, and the parts people add are worse. No source says Tyndale and his assistant were arrested; the order was against the printer. Nothing was thrown into the Rhine — the river is the escape route in Cochlaeus’s own telling, not the grave. Cochlaeus never names Tyndale, only two English apostates, and the identification is made from what is independently known of his movements. Even the year is a modern reconstruction: Cochlaeus’s fullest account puts the affair in 1526, the familiar 1525 became standard only after Christopher Anderson argued for it in 1845, and the question was still being argued in print in 2020. The date on the museum label is scholarship, not a document.

What survives is thirty-one leaves — sixty-two pages, not thirty-one, an error the press coverage keeps repeating — found around 1836 bound up with a tract by Oecolampadius, and now in the British Library. They run from the prologue into Matthew. Cochlaeus said the work had reached the letter K, meaning about ten sheets, so roughly a fifth of what was actually printed at Cologne survives in no copy anywhere. Somewhere between one and two sheets of an English New Testament, printed in three thousand copies apiece if he was right, have vanished so completely that nobody has read a word of them since 1526.

The two Englishmen took the sheets up the Rhine to Worms, and in 1526 the New Testament was printed there by Peter Schoeffer the Younger, grandson of the man who had financed Gutenberg. What came out was a completely different object from the one Cologne had been setting. It was an octavo, small enough to conceal. It had no prologue, no marginal notes, no cross-references and no chapter summaries — nothing but the text, and a short address to the reader at the back. This is worth stating plainly, because the popular account has it exactly backward: England’s first printed New Testament was not burned for carrying Luther’s inflammatory glosses. The glosses were in the Cologne quarto, which was raided before it was finished. The book that actually reached England was a bare text, deliberately stripped so that it could not be attacked as Lutheran commentary in disguise.

1526–1530 · The cloth trade, the searches, and a bishop who could not get a conviction

Two Thousand Errors, None of Them Listed

The books came in as freight. Antwerp was the hinge of the English cloth trade, English merchants had houses and factors there, and a bale going one way could carry small books bedded among the folds coming the other. What the contemporary evidence actually says about the concealment is Cochlaeus’s phrase and nothing more: secretly, under cover of other goods. The wine casks, the flour sacks and the false-bottomed chests you will find in most retellings are later embroidery, repeated from book to book without a source.

England’s answer is unusually well documented, and the documents are duller and more interesting than the anecdotes. Tunstall issued a written prohibition to his archdeacons on 24 October 1526 — and it never names Tyndale, condemning instead many children of iniquity, maintainers of Luther’s sect. England burned a book whose author it could not yet identify. Between November 1526 and February 1527, John Hackett, Wolsey’s agent in the Low Countries, sent home five long and semi-literate dispatches about his attempts to stop the trade at source, and they are a record of failure. The Antwerp magistrates would not sentence the printer Christoffel van Endhoven unless somebody showed them, in a language they could read, which passages were heretical. Hackett refused to let the book be translated for them. He reported to Wolsey a flat denial of justice, and the books kept coming — in Edward Hall’s phrase, thick and threefold.

At home the bishops tried buying them. On 14 June 1527 Richard Nix of Norwich refunded Archbishop Warham ten marks toward the sixty-two pounds nine shillings and fourpence Warham had spent acquiring Testaments in order to destroy them; the letter survives because Nix quoted Warham’s own circular back at him, and Warham’s circular does not survive at all. The money is documented. Whether the books were actually burned is not recorded anywhere.

Then there is the famous number, which is not a number. Tunstall is universally said to have announced two thousand errors in the translation. No document written by Tunstall gives any figure. The only near-contemporary count is above three thousand, from a hostile verse satire published at Strasbourg in 1528 by William Roye — the assistant Tyndale had sacked and publicly disowned — working with a man Tyndale calls only one Jerome; and the satire adds in the next breath that he could not have proved a single one. Thomas More’s Dialogue of 1529 gives a lower figure, above a thousand texts by tale, and declines to enumerate them. The round two thousand is a modern convention that has hardened into a quotation. Robert Ridley, the chaplain briefing Canterbury on the book’s faults, wrote that he did not own a copy and so could not mark them out.

The sermon at Paul’s Cross is in the same condition. No text of it survives and no source gives its date; Demaus would place it no closer than somewhere in the autumn of 1526. What we have are three glancing references: the Strasbourg satire, which supplies the only narrative of the scene and is written by a man with a grudge; Monmouth’s deposition, which recalls hearing the Bishop of London say that Tyndale had translated the New Testament and translated it naughtily; and More’s Dialogue, answering the faults at Paul’s Cross declared. How many books went on that first fire is not recorded either, and Avner Shamir’s reading of the evidence is that it was only a few copies. The great burnings came later.

The best story in this whole period is also the least secure. Edward Hall’s Chronicle, printed by Richard Grafton in 1548, tells how Tunstall in Antwerp asked the merchant Augustine Packington to buy up every remaining copy, and how Packington — a friend of Tyndale’s — agreed, went to Tyndale, and arranged that the bishop should get the books, Packington the thanks and Tyndale the money, with which he printed a better edition. It is delicious, and it comes to us twenty years after the event, from a chronicler who was not present, with the dialogue supplied. Foxe copied it almost verbatim and quietly cut Tyndale’s eager speech about being glad to sell books to be burned. The bargain can only be August 1529, when Tunstall was returning from the Cambrai negotiations and detoured through Antwerp; the revised New Testament did not appear until 1534, five years later. Demaus thought what Tunstall bought was most likely the stock of the badly printed Antwerp piracies rather than Tyndale’s own sheets. The irony is real. The causal chain is not documented.

The proclamation of June 1530 is usually described as banning the English Bible, and it did rather more and rather less than that. It banned every English book printed beyond the sea, gave fifteen days to surrender them with a pardon for compliance, ordered mayors and constables to arrest offenders on sight, and introduced pre-publication licensing by the diocesan with the examiner’s name to be printed in the book. It also promised a lawful English translation by great learned and catholic persons — on condition that the people first abandoned all erroneous opinions, and if it should then seem to his grace convenient. Hall records what happened next: the bishops did nothing at all.

By then men were dying for it. Thomas Hitton, taken near Gravesend as he tried to board a ship, was burned at Maidstone on 23 February 1530, the first man executed in England over Tyndale’s Testament.

1529–1533 · Thomas More, and the six words the quarrel was really about

Six Words Worth a Man’s Life

On 7 March 1528 Bishop Tunstall did something unusual. He licensed a layman to read heretical books and answer them in English. The layman was Thomas More, and what followed is one of the strangest literary events of the century: two men who never met and never exchanged a letter wrote something like a million and a half words at each other, and then died on scaffolds fifteen months apart, each for refusing to say what a king required.

More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies came out in June 1529, four books of staged conversation with an invented Messenger. Tyndale’s Answere came from Antwerp in 1531. More’s Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer came back in two instalments, the first in January 1532 while he was still Lord Chancellor, the second in 1533 after he had resigned, and it was never finished; its ninth book breaks off mid-sentence, and by 1557 More’s own editor could not find a complete copy and printed the fragment he had with a note saying no more could be found. Tyndale never replied. He revised his New Testament instead, which is either the most eloquent answer in the history of English controversy or simply a better use of the time.

On the surface the fight is about six words, and every one of them is a place where Tyndale took out a Latin technical term with an institution fastened to it and put in an ordinary English word.

Congregation, where the Church wanted church — because a congregation is a gathering of people and a church is an institution with courts, revenues and officers. Senior, which he changed to elder in his 1534 revision, where the Church wanted priest. Love, not charity. Repentance, not penance, which removed a sacrament from the sentence. Favor, not grace. Knowledge or acknowledge, not confess. More understood exactly what was at stake, which is why he called it heresy rather than error: the argument was not about accuracy, it was about who owns the institution, and both men knew it.

One correction is owed to a very common story. These were not changes Tyndale made in 1534 in response to More. Congregation, repentance and love were all in the 1526 book and were the substance of More’s attack on it years before. What actually changed in 1534 was senior to elder — and, less famously, Matthew 1:18, where Mary stopped being married to Joseph and became betrothed.

Underneath the printing there is a body count, and it belongs to More’s chancellorship. Between February 1530 and April 1532 four to six men were burned for heresy in England: Thomas Hitton, Thomas Bilney, Richard Bayfield, John Tewkesbury, James Bainham. More’s own Confutation says of two of them that they were well and worthily burned. What he did not do, and could not have done, is condemn them: no layman could sit in a heresy court, conviction was the bishop’s act and the burning the sheriff’s, and Eamon Duffy stresses that More never presided at a heresy trial. What he did do was issue writs of arrest, hold suspects in his own house at Chelsea, and interrogate them. Whether he also whipped and racked them in his garden is the sort of question this page cannot settle for you: the charge is Foxe’s, printing in 1563; the denial is More’s own, printing in 1533; and there is no warrant, no court record and no second witness in between. Foxe printed James Bainham’s dying speech blaming More in 1563 and then removed it from his later editions, which is its own small mystery.

More was beheaded on 6 July 1535. Tyndale had been in a cell at Vilvoorde for six weeks by then, and nothing records whether either man knew what had happened to the other.

1529–1531 · Hebrew, a lying colophon, and the half of the Bible he reached

Nobody Knows Who Taught Him Hebrew

Here the record thins almost to nothing. Tyndale is the first person to put Hebrew into printed English, and there is not one document anywhere that says where, when or from whom he learned the language. No teacher, no register, no letter, not so much as a hostile deposition sneering at his tutor. Worms, Wittenberg, a rabbi in Antwerp: all three appear constantly and all three are guesses laid over silence. The Worms version comes from a Victorian hedge in the Dictionary of National Biography about a large Jewish colony. The Antwerp version rests on the presence of Portuguese conversos in the city and nothing else — and if he did have a teacher there, being named would have meant the Inquisition for the man, so the silence at least has a motive.

What survives instead is the physical book, and the book is a forgery on its face. The Pentateuch of 1530 carries a colophon saying it was printed at Marlborow in the land of Hesse, by me Hans Luft, and finished on 17 January 1530. Every part of that is false except the date. There was never a printer of that name at Marburg; the librarian of the university there wrote as much to a correspondent in 1881, in plain terms. Hans Lufft was a real printer, Luther’s at Wittenberg, and had nothing to do with it. The book was made in Antwerp, and the woodcuts are the same blocks Willem Vorsterman had used in his Antwerp Dutch Bible of October 1528. The printer was probably Johannes Hoochstraten, which is the standard bibliographical attribution, though other catalogues assign it to Merten de Keyser; the attribution rests on type identification and a page that states either flatly is overstating what is known.

The object itself is stranger than the imprint. It is five separately signed books with five separate title pages, set in two different founts, and there is no general title page anywhere in it. The first English Pentateuch does not name itself, its place or its maker.

Between the work and the printing there was a shipwreck. Foxe says Tyndale was cast ashore on the coast of Holland and lost his books, writings and copies, and had to begin again — a whole Deuteronomy, on that account, drowned. It is one sentence, written thirty years later, and it is the entire record of the event.

Jonah followed in 1531, and survives in exactly one copy, which carries no date, no place and no printer’s name; the year is a guess from the types. After that there is a body of work that reached print only because somebody else printed it. Joshua through 2 Chronicles — nine books, and if you count the King James text of them, a little under a quarter of the whole Bible — appears for the first time in 1537, a year after his death, in a folio assembled by John Rogers, with nothing anywhere in it saying whose translation it is. No manuscript survives. No contemporary mentions its existence. The attribution rests on internal evidence and on Hall’s Chronicle of 1548, and Hall’s own list of Tyndale’s Old Testament books also includes Nehemiah, which in that Bible is demonstrably Coverdale’s. Almost every anthology piece of Tyndale’s Old Testament prose, David’s lament over Absalom among them, comes out of this unsigned block.

And then it stops. He never reached Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, or any prophet but Jonah. Roughly half the Old Testament he never began. The Psalter that shaped English devotion — the valley of the shadow of death, my cup runneth over — is Coverdale’s and Geneva’s, not his. There is a footnote to this that says something about how legends attach themselves to a name: a Tyndale Psalms manuscript was catalogued for years at New College, Oxford, and when somebody finally examined it, it turned out to be a fifteenth-century Wycliffite Psalter. The one Tyndale Psalter anybody ever claimed to hold was another man’s, a century older.

1528–1531 · The Obedience, the divorce, and the mission Henry sent to fetch him home

The Book the King Read, and the Book That Ruined Him

Between May 1528 and the spring of 1531 Tyndale published four books of his own, all of them under the same false Marburg imprint. They made him famous, they got his readers arrested, and they turned Henry VIII from a king who wanted the translation suppressed into a king who wanted the man.

The Parable of the Wicked Mammon came first, in May 1528. The Obedience of a Christian Man followed on 2 October, and it is the one everybody has heard of, because of a story that will not survive being looked at. The story is that Anne Boleyn had a copy, that Henry read it, and that he said: This book is for me and all kings to read. The sole source is a letter written to John Foxe in 1579 by John Louthe, Archdeacon of Nottingham, fifty years after the fact, reporting the testimony of a man who had been dead for at least twenty years. Foxe read the letter and did not print it. It reached print only in 1721, when John Strype lifted it out of Foxe’s papers. The supposed corroborating witness, George Wyatt, never mentions Tyndale’s book at all — he says a book of those controversies then waged concerning religion — and puts the scene after Anne’s marriage in late 1532, by which time Wolsey, who is in the story, had been dead two years. The identification with the Obedience was made by Wyatt’s editor in 1827, who had read Strype and made Wyatt fit.

What Henry actually did with the Obedience is documented and points the other way. In May 1530 he personally convened the commission that examined it, was present on 24 May to endorse its finding of some thirty errors, corrected the resulting injunctions in his own handwriting, and banned the book by proclamation on 22 June. The commission found it seditious as well as heretical. Nor is it quite the manual of royal absolutism it is usually called: the same book calls kings but shadows, vain names and things idle, says it is better to have a tyrant unto thy king than a shadow, describes a passive king as soft as silk and effeminate, and lists Defender of the Faith — Henry’s own prized title from Leo X — among the trinkets the pope hands out to manage princes. Tyndale rules out armed rebellion. That is not the same as flattering the man on the throne.

The book that ruined him was the next one. The Practyse of Prelates, in 1530, is a satire on Wolsey — whom Tyndale calls Thomas Wolfsee throughout, inventing dialogue for him — and it comes out against the King’s divorce. That was the one subject on which Henry had no sense of humor at all. He had the proclamation banning it burned along with the book, according to the imperial ambassador, because naming it had made people want to read it; no copy of the proclamation is known today. English reprints for two generations afterward simply cut every passage bearing on the marriage, because an argument for Catherine’s marriage was an argument against Elizabeth’s legitimacy.

In between the two comes the episode popular accounts flatten into a job offer. In 1531 Cromwell sent Stephen Vaughan to the Low Countries to find Tyndale and bring him home. Vaughan found him — three times, in fields outside Antwerp, at Tyndale’s choosing — and what he wrote back is the only description of Tyndale by somebody who had just met him and liked him. It is also physically broken. The dispatch of April 1531 breaks off in the middle of the sentence I ascertain your Grace, I have not communed with a man—, and the manuscript simply stops. Demaus suspected Henry destroyed the rest in a rage, which is a guess; the truncation is not.

Tyndale’s reply to the offer survives in Vaughan’s report of it, and the manuscript was scorched in the Cotton library fire of 1731, so several words in the most quoted passage are Victorian editors’ conjectures filling gaps where the paper burned away — a fact Demaus put in a footnote that most people who quote it have not read. What he is reported to have said is that if the King would grant a bare text of the scriptures to be put forth among his people, he would promise never to write again, would submit himself to whatever pains the King liked, and would offer his body to suffer it. He asked for nothing else and named no terms for himself.

It did not work, and Cromwell’s own instructions show why it was never going to. The return depended on Tyndale’s conversion and amendment, and on taking away the opinions and fantasies sorely rooted in him. The King wanted him recanted, not employed. Then Henry read the Practyse of Prelates, and after that the Answer to More, and ordered Vaughan to break off altogether, saying he was very joyous to have his realm destitute of such a person.

1534–1535 · George Joye, a pirated revision, and the quarrel we can hear both sides of

Corrected by a Friend, Against His Will

This is the one episode in Tyndale’s life where both parties are in print within months of each other, each quoting the other, and both books survive. It is a quarrel between two English exiles in the same city, in the same danger, about proofreading, money, credit and the soul.

By 1534 Antwerp printers were making good money out of Tyndale without him. George Joye counted three reprints before his own — roughly five thousand copies in the first two, about two thousand in the third — and they were bad. Joye was asked to correct the next one, and did rather more than correct it: at about twenty places where the Greek word for resurrection seemed to him to mean the state of the soul between death and judgment, he rendered it the life after this. His edition came out in August 1534, unsigned, and Tyndale’s came out that November with a second preface at the front attacking him by name.

Tyndale’s charge was that Joye had denied the resurrection of the body, and it is the charge that stuck for five centuries. It is not what Joye did. He kept resurrection at some hundred and fifty places, changed it at about twenty, and put on his own title page that he knew and believed that the bodies of every dead man shall rise again at doomsday. The real dispute was about soul-sleep — whether the dead are conscious before the general resurrection — and Tyndale admits in the preface that he wrote it without having read Joye’s book through. Joye answered in an Apologye dated 27 February, and the reason his side is not the one you have heard is bibliographical rather than moral: Tyndale’s preface was reprinted and Joye’s answer was not. Joye’s book survives in a single copy at Cambridge.

The Apologye is worth reading for what it lets slip. Joye says plainly that Tyndale could not have done the work without such a helper which he hath ever had hitherto — his scribe, even him that wrote and corrected the testament for him — and then does not name him. Tyndale’s amanuensis, the man who physically wrote out the most consequential English book of the century, is anonymous, as is the helper at Cologne and Worms whom Tyndale himself declined to name. And when Joye warned the pirate printers that Tyndale’s own corrected edition would kill their sales, they gave the only statement of motive we have from inside the shop, and it is not religion: if he print two thousand and we as many, what is so little a number for all England? And we will sell ours better cheap.

Two things about the November 1534 book are routinely got wrong. It is not his final revision — an edition titled yet once again corrected by William Tindale came after it, and Francis Fry showed in 1878 that John Rogers followed that one, not 1534, in 798 out of 848 test readings when he built the Matthew Bible. And the furious preface stood in that one edition and no other. It was quietly dropped from everything printed afterward, and nobody recorded who dropped it or why.

A copy of the 1534 New Testament on vellum survives with ANNA REGINA ANGLIAE lettered in red on its gilt edges. It belonged to Anne Boleyn. All sixteen of its preliminary leaves are gone, which means the one thing missing from the queen’s copy is Tyndale’s attack on George Joye.

Tyndale never answered the Apologye. He was arrested less than three months after it was dated, and the last word in the quarrel is Joye’s.

1528–1555 · John Frith, and what happened to everyone else

The Friend at Smithfield

Tyndale never worked alone, and almost nobody who worked with him died in bed.

John Frith is the center of the circle: Eton, then King’s College Cambridge, then one of the Cambridge men Wolsey imported to his grand new Cardinal College at Oxford. In 1528 Wolsey’s people locked a group of them in the college’s fish cellar for holding forbidden books. Four of the prisoners died there. Frith came out alive, went abroad, joined Tyndale, and married a woman whose name nobody wrote down — her entire trace in the historical record is a subordinate clause in a letter from Tyndale saying your wife is well content with the will of God.

He came home in 1532 and was picked up almost at once, first in the stocks at Reading as a vagabond, then taken for good at Milton Shore in Essex. In the Tower he wrote a book on the sacrament, and on 4 July 1533 he was burned at Smithfield, bound back to back with a tailor’s apprentice from Faversham named Andrew Hewet, who was twenty-four. He was not burned for the English Bible. He was condemned on two articles, denying purgatory and denying transubstantiation — and, more precisely, for holding that the question of the sacrament ought not to be a test of faith at all, which is the position that offended everybody.

Tyndale’s two letters to him in prison are the most personal writing of his that survives, and they exist only because Foxe set them in type thirty years later. Andrew Hewet exists only because Foxe named him: there is no parish record of him, no indenture, no will, nothing else at all.

Around Frith stand the others. William Roye, the friar who physically wrote out the first printed English New Testament at Cologne and Worms, whom Tyndale sacked and then disowned in print in 1528 — for being mercenary and indiscreet about who had written the book, rather than for any betrayal — and who then vanishes from the record entirely; where and when he died is not known. Miles Coverdale, whose supposed collaboration on the Pentateuch rests on a single uncorroborated passage in Foxe, and who did not read Hebrew. Robert Barnes, attainted by Act of Parliament without any trial at all in the wreck of Cromwell’s fall and burned in 1540, reportedly saying at the stake that he did not know the cause for which he was dying. George Constantine, who was examined by More, gave up names, escaped from More’s own custody in December 1531, and died an archdeacon in his bed.

And John Rogers, who was chaplain to the English merchants at Antwerp in the year Tyndale was taken there, who assembled the Matthew Bible out of Tyndale’s papers, and who in February 1555 became the first person burned under Mary. Smithfield takes most of them, across twenty-five years, on the same few square yards of ground. None of them has a grave, because there was nothing left to bury.

May 1535 · Thomas Poyntz, Henry Phillips, and the question nobody has answered

A Long Narrow Entry

By 1534 Tyndale had something like a settled life. He lodged in the house of Thomas Poyntz, an English merchant in Antwerp who kept there a house of English merchants — a merchants’ hostel, which is not the same thing as the official English House of the Merchant Adventurers, though the two are constantly conflated. He had a pension from the merchants, a room, and by Foxe’s account a routine: Mondays for visiting English exiles in the town, Saturdays for walking the alleys and giving money away, the rest for the Old Testament.

Then Henry Phillips arrived. He was a gentleman’s son from Dorset who had stolen a large sum of his father’s money and gambled it away, and he spent months making himself agreeable. Poyntz distrusted him and said so. Tyndale did not, and took him to dinner, and lent him money, and showed him his books.

On or about 21 May 1535 — the day is a modern convention, and the Dictionary of National Biography gives 23 or 24 — Phillips called at the house while Poyntz was away at Barrow, some eighteen miles off. Foxe’s scene is the most reproduced in the whole story: Phillips borrowing forty shillings, then leading Tyndale out through the long narrow entry of the house, so narrow that two could not walk abreast, with officers waiting on stools either side of the street door; Phillips pointing down over the shorter man’s head so that they should know whom to take; and the officers themselves, Foxe says, pitying to see his simplicity when they had him. It is a magnificent piece of writing. It is also the recollection of one man, Poyntz, given to Foxe around 1560, twenty-five years afterward, about a scene at which he had not been present — and it conflicts with what that same man wrote three months after the arrest, in a letter to his brother of 25 August 1535 that describes officials simply taking Tyndale out of the house and does not mention Henry Phillips at all.

Who paid Phillips is the great hole at the center of the story, and after nearly five centuries there is no document naming anybody. The suspects have been Bishop Stokesley of London, Bishop Nix, Stephen Gardiner, and — in the version that has reached the largest audience, through a novel and a television series — Thomas More, directing the hunt from his cell in the Tower. Richard Rex demolished the More version in 2023: More is not named or hinted at in any source connected with the case, he had been attainted the previous November with his property at the King’s disposal and his wife petitioning for relief, and the complete silence of both his friends and his enemies on so useful a charge is itself decisive. The Stokesley version is a conjecture of 1937 resting on Phillips’s own boast that he had a commission out — and a merchant’s letter of 1 May 1535 shows that a commission to take three Englishmen had in fact come from the Procurator-General of Brabant, an official Stokesley had no power to instruct. Everything ever written about English episcopal involvement traces back to one clause in Hall’s Chronicle of 1548 saying that Tyndale was taken, as many said, not without the help and procurement of some bishops of this realm — and Hall labels it hearsay in the act of writing it down.

What is not in doubt is what it cost Thomas Poyntz. He spent the summer trying to get Tyndale out: writing to his brother, riding after the Marquis of Bergen with letters from Cromwell to Aachen and on to Maastricht, arguing with officials who pointed out that England was at that moment burning the Emperor’s own subjects for heresy. Cromwell did write — two letters, in early September 1535, with the King’s knowledge — and every word of them is lost; we know who devised them, who carried them and who received them, and nothing of what they said. Poyntz was then arrested himself, held for months, and escaped; his gaoler was fined eighty pounds for losing him, and that debt followed Poyntz for a decade. He left behind a wife, Anna, and four children in Antwerp. She never rejoined him. Two of the sons had to be recovered from Flanders by petition to the King and naturalized by Act of Parliament to be English at all. Poyntz’s brother left him a length of black cloth for a gown and hood; he inherited the family estate only in 1554, and in the years between, Letters Patent record creditors demanding a thousand pounds and Poyntz daily troubled and imprisoned in London debtors’ prisons. He died intestate in a London lodging in 1562.

1535–1536 · Five hundred and four days, one letter, and no recorded date

Five Hundred and Four Days

He was taken to the castle at Vilvoorde, six miles north of Brussels, and held there for about sixteen months. The exact figure comes from an expense account: a bill for keeping him at forty stivers a day for a year and a hundred and thirty-five days, one hundred and two pounds. Almost everything else about those months is either missing or comes from Foxe, printing twenty-seven years later and naming no eyewitness at all.

The first correction is the largest, and almost nobody makes it. He was not tried for translating the Bible. Vernacular scripture was not illegal in the Netherlands. The surviving articles against him are points of Lutheran doctrine, and he was condemned under the Emperor’s anti-Lutheran edict of Augsburg, in the jurisdiction of the Council of Brabant, by imperial commissioners — not by Rome, not by the Inquisition, and not by England, which had no standing to demand anything, the offense being against imperial law on imperial soil. His prosecutor Jacobus Latomus wrote three books about what Tyndale believed and never once mentions the translation.

Tyndale wrote two books in the cell, answering Latomus. Both are lost. They survive only as the shape of the argument inside the books written to refute them, which were themselves composed in 1542 and printed in 1550, after both men were dead. Nothing of Tyndale’s own defense has ever been found; he refused counsel and made it himself, in writing, and Foxe wrote in 1563 that it is to be thought his answer will not be put forth. It never has been.

What does survive is one sheet of paper, and it is the only thing in his hand anybody has. It was found centuries later among the case papers of the Council of Brabant. It is in Latin, it carries no date, and it is addressed to no one by name — only vir praestantissime, most excellent sir. The Marquis of Bergen is the usual guess at the addressee and it is a nineteenth-century conjecture; the marquis’s own recorded career includes no governorship of Vilvoorde. In it a prisoner asks, if he is to remain there through the winter, for a warmer cap, a coat, cloth to patch his leggings, and a lamp, the evenings being long. And then, in the tone of a scholar asking a colleague for a favor rather than a condemned man asking for mercy, for his Hebrew Bible, his Hebrew grammar and his Hebrew dictionary, that he might spend the time in study. Nobody has identified any of those three books. There is no reply, no order, no receipt. Whether any of it reached the cell is unknown, and the season itself is an inference from his own clause about the winter.

He was condemned in early August 1536 and executed some weeks later. That gap is unexplained; no document from the interval is known. He was degraded from the priesthood first — and every vivid account you will read of that ceremony, the scraped hands, the stripped vestments, the accursed Judas speech, is reconstructed from the general Roman rite and transferred to him by later writers. Foxe describes no degradation for Tyndale at all.

Then the date, which does not exist. Foxe gives the year and nothing else. The sixth of October is a commemoration date, not a record, and Daniell would say only one of the first days of October 1536; read against the gaoler’s account, some put the death a few weeks earlier. He was strangled at the stake and his body then burned, which is what every sixteenth-century source says. The modern claim that the strangling was botched and that he burned alive is in none of them; it is an inference from the order of clauses in a single sentence of Foxe’s, and it reaches most readers through recent popular history and a television program.

His last words are reported by Foxe alone, first printed in 1563, with no named witness and nothing corresponding in any Brabant record: Lord, open the King of England’s eyes. Foxe is also the source for the detail that he had converted his keeper and the keeper’s daughter and others of the household — and Foxe writes it as he converted, it is said, which is a hedge his repeaters almost always drop. Neither the gaoler nor his daughter is named. Foxe adds that the letter, his examinations and other disputations remained with her, and says outright that he wished they had reached him. They never did, and have never surfaced.

There is no grave. Burning after strangulation left nothing to bury, no source records where in the town the stake stood, and the castle that held him was pulled down in 1774. Its stone was reused for the building that now houses the museum.

1537–today · Two initials, five versions, and the words you already use

The Name on Nothing

Ten months after he was killed, his New Testament, his Pentateuch and his unpublished Joshua-to-2-Chronicles were in print in a folio Bible licensed by Henry VIII. It went out under the name Thomas Matthew, who did not exist. John Rogers had assembled it and could not put Tyndale on a title page, for the obvious reason. What he did instead is the single most eloquent object in this story: at the end of the Old Testament, on an otherwise blank half-page, he set two large ornamental woodcut capitals, W and T, and left them there. They are cut from the same alphabet as his own initials elsewhere in the book and those of the two men who financed it. It is not a hidden mark. It is an unattributed one — legible to anyone who already knew, deniable to anyone who did not.

Nobody has ever explained the name Thomas Matthew either. The pretty story that it is Greek for a twin to the original gift from God is folk etymology; Thomas is Aramaic, Matthew is Hebrew, neither is Greek, and no source from the period explains the name at all. Of the forty-eight recorded copies of that Bible, twenty-one have lost their title page — the page that carried the King’s license and the false name.

From there the line runs forward and his name never appears on it. Coverdale revised the Matthew text into the Great Bible of 1539, which Cromwell’s injunction put in every parish church. In May 1543 Parliament outlawed the crafty, false and untrue translation of Tyndale by name, while his sentences stood open on the lecterns of those same churches. Then Geneva in 1560, the Bishops’ Bible in 1568, and the King James in 1611, whose translators were handed a rule ordering that the old ecclesiastical words be kept — as the word church, not to be translated congregation. Eighty years after the Confutation, More won that argument in a committee room. Rule 14 of the same instructions names Tyndale’s translation as one they might prefer where it read better, so it is not true that they erased him; what they reversed was his vocabulary. His name is not on the title page and not in the preface, which is of a piece with that preface’s silence about all his predecessors. Suppression of a word is documented. Suppression of a name is inference. The full story of what happened in that committee room is its own page here.

So how much of the King James is his? The honest answer is more interesting than the round one. Ninety per cent is B. F. Westcott’s old high estimate and it competed for decades with a rival figure of eighteen per cent. The only statistical study is Jon Nielson and Royal Skousen’s of 1998, which sampled eighteen passages and found about eighty-four per cent of the King James New Testament and about seventy-six per cent of the Old Testament books Tyndale actually reached to be verbatim his. That is not eighty-four per cent of the Bible. He never touched Job through Malachi, so his share of the whole King James works out at roughly a third, or about half if the unsigned Joshua-to-2-Chronicles is counted in. And he reached 1611 through five intervening versions: measured mechanically, more of the King James New Testament’s wording matches Geneva than matches Tyndale directly, because where Geneva had already revised him, 1611 usually followed Geneva.

The coinages need the same discipline. Passover, scapegoat, mercy seat, showbread and the English form Jehovah are genuinely first-in-English in his Pentateuch of 1530. Atonement is not his: the earliest evidence for the word is 1513, in Thomas More, of all people. What Tyndale gave it was the theological sense, at 2 Corinthians 5:18 — and the King James translators took it back out of that very verse and wrote reconciliation.

The phrases divide the same way, and the test is whether Wycliffe got there first. Let there be light, am I my brother’s keeper, the powers that be, the signs of the times, fight the good fight, eat drink and be merry, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, filthy lucre — his. The salt of the earth is not: Wycliffe has it, and Chaucer has it a decade before Wycliffe’s Bible. Knock and it shall be opened and seek and ye shall find are in Wycliffe almost word for word, and Tyndale changed nothing but the spelling, keeping Axe where the King James later wrote Ask.

And then there is the one that most people carry around without knowing whose it is.

Even the reputation for plain speech wants qualifying. David Norton’s finding is that Tyndale wrote into a register just above common speech, that his English did not seem as natural and easy in its own day as we assume, and that he was filtering out his own Gloucestershire in search of an English that would travel. He appended a table of hard words to the 1526 Testament rather than simplify the text — a glossary in which he tells us which of his own words he knew were new, and which is almost never reprinted. As for the famous monosyllables: measured across whole New Testaments, Tyndale runs 73.2 per cent monosyllabic, the King James 73.5, Geneva 74.5. English biblical prose is monosyllabic, and it is monosyllabic because of him, which is exactly why the statistic cannot pick him out from what came after.

What is left of the man himself is very little and quite recent. There is no portrait: the National Portrait Gallery states there is no authentic likeness, and the bearded face on the book jackets and the college windows was in circulation by the early seventeenth century and appears to derive from a portrait of John Knox. The monument at North Nibley, a hundred and eleven feet of Cotswold stone finished in 1866, stands over a birthplace nobody can establish. The statue on the Embankment, unveiled in 1884, gives a birth year scholarship has abandoned and rests his hand on a printing press that the sculptor modeled on a sixteenth-century example in a museum at Antwerp — a period prop, not a relic. Serious recovery begins in the 1990s: modern-spelling editions, a biography, the Tyndale Society founded in January 1995, and the British Library’s million pounds for a book without a title page.

He asked for a lamp and three books, and there is no record that he got them. His name is on nothing. But an English speaker who has never heard of him will say, in the course of an ordinary week, that somebody is a law unto themselves, or that the powers that be have decided something, or that the spirit is willing; and on Sunday, in a great many churches, several hundred people will forgive one another’s trespasses in the words he chose, rather than the debts of the version that replaced him.

c. 1491 – today

The whole thing, in order

1. c. 1491Born, somewhere in Gloucestershire. No baptism record exists or could; parish registers begin in 1538.
2. 1512Supplicates for his BA at Oxford as William Hychyns, the family’s other surname.
3. 1515Ordained priest on 7 April, and created Master of Arts on 2 July — in that order.
4. 1516Erasmus prints his Greek New Testament at Basel, with the plowman singing at the plow in the preface.
5. c. 1521Enters Sir John Walsh’s household at Little Sodbury, and is summoned before the diocesan chancellor.
6. 1523Asks Bishop Tunstall of London for a place in his household. The house is full.
7. 1524Leaves England for good. A Wittenberg register entry of 27 May may or may not be him.
8. 1525The Cologne quarto is stopped mid-run at Matthew 22. Thirty-one leaves survive; the year is contested.
9. 1526The New Testament is printed at Worms — no prologue, no notes, pocket-sized. Tunstall condemns it in October.
10. 1528The Parable of the Wicked Mammon in May; The Obedience of a Christian Man in October. Tunstall licenses Thomas More to answer him.
11. 1529More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies. Tunstall buys up the Antwerp stock, on Hall’s account alone.
12. 1530The Pentateuch, under a colophon that lies about printer and place. The Practyse of Prelates comes out against the King’s divorce.
13. 1531Jonah, surviving in one copy. Stephen Vaughan meets Tyndale in fields outside Antwerp, three times, and fails.
14. 1532–33More’s Confutation, in two instalments and never finished. Tyndale does not reply.
15. 1533John Frith burned at Smithfield on 4 July, bound back to back with Andrew Hewet.
16. 1534George Joye’s unauthorized revision in August; Tyndale’s own in November, with a preface attacking him.
17. 1535Taken at Antwerp in late May. Thomas More is beheaded on 6 July, six weeks into Tyndale’s imprisonment.
18. 1536Condemned in August and executed in the first days of October. No source records the day.
19. 1537The Matthew Bible, mostly Tyndale, licensed by Henry VIII under a name that belongs to nobody.
20. 1539The Great Bible, chained in every parish church by Cromwell’s injunction.
21. 1543Parliament outlaws the crafty, false and untrue translation of Tyndale by name.
22. 1560–1568The Geneva Bible, then the Bishops’ Bible; both of them his work at one and two removes.
23. 1611The King James appears. Rule 3 had ordered church, not congregation; Rule 14 had named his translation as one to prefer.
24. 1836The Cologne fragment is found in the British Museum, bound up with an unrelated tract.
25. 1866–1884The North Nibley monument and the Embankment statue, both giving a birth year now abandoned.
26. 1994The British Library buys a 1526 New Testament, without its title page, for over a million pounds.
27. 1996A complete copy, with the only surviving title page, is recognized at Stuttgart, shelved for a century and a half under 1550.

Who says so

A note on sources

This is a secondhand history. Nothing in it comes out of an archive; it is assembled from the books named below, and where they disagree the disagreement has been left standing in the prose rather than smoothed out of it.

An unusual amount of it rests on one witness. Patrick Collinson’s estimate is that perhaps seventy per cent of what modern biographers can tell us depends on John Foxe, who printed his first account in 1563, twenty-seven years after Tyndale’s death, and expanded it in 1570. The dinner table at Little Sodbury, the plowboy, the long narrow entry, the last words at the stake, the converted gaoler: all Foxe. The Cologne raid is Cochlaeus alone, telling it three times over twenty-three years with himself at the center. The Packington purchase is Hall’s Chronicle alone, printed in 1548. The story about Henry VIII and the Obedience is one letter of 1579 that Foxe declined to print and Strype published in 1721. Those names sit inside the sentences on purpose.

Some figures here are estimates dressed as counts, and one is a compliment overheard at a dinner. The eighty-four and seventy-six per cent are Nielson and Skousen’s sampling of eighteen passages, not a word-by-word tally, and they describe only the books Tyndale reached. The six thousand copies at Worms and the seven languages come from the same conversation in Spalatin’s diary, at one remove, about an Englishman who is not named. Two thousand errors was never a list. And 6 October 1536 is a day the church chose to remember him on, not a day anybody wrote down.

Further reading

• David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (1994) — The standard life, and the book that put him back into general view. Also, by its reviewers’ account, a work of advocacy — heavy on Foxe and hard on Thomas More — which is worth knowing while reading it rather than afterward.
• J. F. Mozley, William Tyndale (1937) — The older scholarly life, drier and more cautious, and still the place where several of the documentary problems are argued most carefully.
• Robert Demaus, William Tyndale: A Biography (1871) — The first serious life. Its value now is that it says plainly where the evidence runs out, and it is the source of several corrections still worth making.
• Brian Moynahan, If God Spare My Life (2002) — The most readable narrative and the one to treat most carefully: it is the origin of the claim that Thomas More directed the hunt from the Tower, which reached a very large audience and which Richard Rex has since taken apart.
• Richard Rex, Reformation 28 (2023) — The article that demolishes the More conspiracy and reopens the question of who, if anyone, paid Henry Phillips. The answer it reaches is that nobody did.
• David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (2003) — For where Tyndale sits in the whole line, from the Anglo-Saxon gospels to the twentieth century.
• David Norton, A History of the English Bible as Literature (2000) — The sober counterweight on the prose itself, and the source of the finding that Tyndale wrote just above common speech rather than in it.
• Jon Nielson and Royal Skousen, How Much of the King James Bible Is William Tyndale’s? (1998) — The eighteen-passage collation behind every percentage on this page, in Reformation 3. Everything else you will see quoted is an estimate about an estimate.
• Anne Richardson and others, eds., Tyndale Society Journal (1995–) — Where the working arguments happen — the Stuttgart copy, the dating of Cologne, the Enchiridion manuscript — usually years before they reach a book.
• John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1563) — The partisan witness himself, free online in a scholarly edition. Worth an hour to see what kind of writing this page has been holding at arm’s length throughout.