A history of the Wycliffe Bible

The first complete English Bible went unprinted for more than four hundred years. The Crown’s valuer listed a duke’s copy among his romances, a servant of Queen Elizabeth’s scullery read another copy through and began again, and in the years between people went to the fire with English books among the evidence. The law of 1409 never once uses a word for owning.

A history in 15 parts · about 1 hr 20 min · c. 1370 – 1850

Before 1471 · Ten lines on a spare leaf

Before My Mother Bought the Book

At the back of a small New Testament in Manchester, somebody has tried to make ten lines go away. The note was written in a small cursive hand on a spare leaf, and a later reader went down it with a pen, striking out line after line, and then rubbed at what was left until the page took a dark smear. Someone else copied a sum of money underneath, as though that were the part worth saving. Under the sum stands a date, 29 July 1597, and under the date an Elizabethan hand has used the rest of the leaf for a recipe for ink: a pint of white wine, galls, green copperas, gum arabic.

Some of the note can still be read. The catalogers at the John Rylands Library make out a son or daughter writing about a mother, a price of four pounds, six shillings and eightpence, and one clause: “hit was overseyn And redd by doctor Thomas Ebbrall and Doctor Yve or þt my moder bought hit.” Before my mother bought it. Thomas Eborall was master of Whittington College in the City of London and William Ive succeeded him, so the book passed under their eyes before Eborall died in 1471, perhaps in the 1460s. The two were doctors of theology, said to have been active against heresy and reported to have owned forbidden works of Wycliffe’s. Neither was a bishop or signed anything, and if the note ever gave the woman’s name, it is gone. No other record of a copy examined before sale has been found.

What she bought was a handsome thing, one scribe’s work from start to finish, with fine gold initials and a table at the front showing which epistle and gospel belonged to which mass of the year. It was already old when she saw it, copied a generation or two before, so this was very likely a secondhand sale, and not a cheap one. Six and a half marks, at thirteen and fourpence to the mark, was more than twice the forty shillings at which the Crown’s valuer had put a duke’s entire English Bible, two great volumes in red leather, some seventy years earlier.

Nothing about her looks like a rebel. Mary Dove, the modern historian of these books, reads the note as the record of a wealthy, demonstratively orthodox woman who decided to “insure herself against suspicion of heresy in advance.” She wanted the New Testament in English, and the only New Testament in English to be had was the translation made by the followers of John Wycliffe. Some two hundred and fifty manuscripts of it survive, more than of any other text in Middle English. Kings seem to have owned it. Over the same years men and women went to the fire with English books among the evidence against them. And the law that stood between those two facts, by then more than fifty years old, has no word in it for owning a book.

A canon lawyer named William Lyndwood had put the question in so many words a generation before she bought it. He was writing of tracts with errors in them, and the suspicion he described came to fall on English scripture as well. What of someone who knowingly keeps such a book? Is he by that a heretic? No, said Lyndwood, but a vehement suspicion of heresy rises against him; he must clear himself, and if he cannot, he is punished as one. She seems to have understood the position. To see how it came about you have to go back a century, to a rector in Leicestershire whose Latin, as far as it has been searched, never says that he translated anything.

c. 1330–1384 · John Wycliffe

A Softer Seat

The page that records John Wycliffe’s beginnings is torn. Around 1540 the antiquary John Leland, listing who lived where in Yorkshire, noted “Wiclif a meane gentilman dwellith at a litle village caullid Wiclif,” and under that line he wrote something about the heretic. The foot of the leaf has since been torn away. John Stow copied that note before it went, so we can still read that they say he was born at Ipreswel, a poor village near Richmond, which may be the modern Hipswell. The report is hearsay, set down two centuries after the birth it describes, and it survives in another man’s copy. No document gives the year; historians count back from his Oxford career and arrive somewhere around 1330. Medieval writers spelled his name more than thirty ways, and Thomas Walsingham of St Albans preferred Wykbeleve, wicked belief. Scholars now print Wyclif. This page keeps the spelling the rest of the site uses.

The documents start at Oxford. A John Wyclif was master of Balliol by about 1361 and took his doctorate in theology around 1372. On the testimony of people who detested him he was the ablest mind in the university. Henry Knighton, a canon of Leicester, calls him second to none in philosophy and incomparable in the schools, and adds with some acid that he labored above all to outrun other men’s wits and to differ from their opinions. In 1374 the Crown gave him the rectory of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, because the patron was under age and the right to present had fallen to the king. That year he went to Bruges as the one theologian on a royal embassy to the pope’s envoys, a junior clerk’s errand that settled very little.

Two of his ideas matter here, and both were Oxford ideas before they were anything else. One held that all lordship rests on grace, so that no lord, bishop or prelate rightly holds his place while in mortal sin, which made Wycliffe useful to noblemen with an eye on church land and, after 1381, frightening. The other came out of his philosophy. As a realist he thought of Scripture as an eternal truth before it was ever a book, the exemplar by which every opinion had to be tested, and in 1378 he argued as much at length in his treatise On the Truth of Holy Scripture. That book asks for no translation. It wants preachers, and it says a pastor must know the speech of the people in his charge.

The scene everyone remembers took place in the Lady Chapel of St Paul’s on Thursday 19 February 1377, when William Courtenay, bishop of London, had Wycliffe cited to answer for his opinions. He came with John of Gaunt, the king’s son, with four friars to speak for him, and with Henry Percy, marshal of England, walking ahead through a crowd so thick the lords could barely pass. Percy told him to sit, since he had much to answer and would need a softer seat. Courtenay said that a man cited before his bishop stands. Gaunt, after some threats, muttered that he would sooner drag the bishop out of the church by the hair, and Londoners heard him. The sitting broke up with no charge answered, and the next day a mob went for Gaunt and Percy, in a riot that concerned the marshal’s powers in the city far more than it concerned heresy. Our one detailed account comes from a St Albans chronicler who loathed everybody in that escort, and in the whole of it Wycliffe does not say a word. The dispute is about a chair.

In May Pope Gregory XI issued bulls against him, complaining that Rome had heard of these weeds before England did and ordering his arrest. Nobody arrested him. Edward III died that summer, and the boy Richard II was king. At Lambeth the following year the bishops had him before them when Sir Lewis Clifford, a knight of the household of Joan of Kent, the new king’s mother, walked in and forbade them to pass sentence, while Londoners pushed into the chapel behind him. Walsingham says the bishops trembled as though they had no horns.

The Eucharist cost him his protectors. By 1381 he was denying that the bread ceased to be bread, and the chancellor of Oxford and twelve doctors condemned the opinion. A Carmelite dossier, the Fasciculi Zizaniorum, tells how the sentence was read out in the Augustinian schools while he sat in his chair maintaining the contrary, how he said that neither the chancellor nor the chancellor’s friends could break his argument, and how John of Gaunt then arrived and told him to say no more about it. That summer the Peasants’ Revolt killed the archbishop of Canterbury, and a teaching that questioned every lord’s title looked different. The same dossier claimed years afterward that the rebel priest John Ball had confessed to two years as Wycliffe’s disciple, and promised that the notary’s instrument would appear at the end of the book. It never does. In the sixteenth century the Protestant antiquary John Bale, reading the manuscript, wrote in the margin that so far it had not. Knighton, every bit as hostile, reverses the order and makes Ball the forerunner.

William Courtenay, the bishop of the softer seat, was now archbishop of Canterbury. In May 1382 he called a council to the Blackfriars in London, and on the day it sat the ground shook across England. Some of the bishops wanted to go home. Courtenay steadied them, and the dossier explains that the earthquake meant the kingdom was purging itself of heresy, as the earth expels foul air. Wycliffe called it the earthquake council and said that when Christ’s members fail to cry out against such men, the ground does it for them. The council condemned twenty-four conclusions, ten as heresy and fourteen as error. They concern the sacrament, confession, the papacy, church property, tithes, the friars and preaching without a license. None of them concerns translating the Bible or reading it, and in 1382 the English Bible was not yet an offense.

At Oxford it took about six weeks to break his party. The chancellor, Robert Rigge, had been ordered to help the Carmelite Peter Stokes publish the condemnation. On Corpus Christi, on the Carmelite telling, Rigge gathered about a hundred armed men against him instead, and a week later Rigge was on his knees at Blackfriars. Philip Repingdon and Nicholas Hereford were excommunicated. Repingdon abjured and rose to be bishop of Lincoln. A Lollard, as Wycliffe’s followers came to be called, later reported Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, as saying that no bishop in the land pursued Lollards more sharply. Wycliffe himself was never condemned in person or punished in his lifetime, though a mandate of June 1382 named him as a suspect and barred him from Oxford’s pulpits and schools, by which time he had gone home to Lutterworth. A stroke followed, and he went on writing. John Purvey was beside him, his constant companion on the word of the Carmelite Thomas Netter, and so was a young parish priest, John Horn. Wycliffe excused himself in 1384 from a journey to Pope Urban VI: he would come if he could, but God had necessitated the contrary.

His end comes to us through Horn. In 1441 Thomas Gascoigne, an Oxford theologian with no love for Wycliffe, questioned the old priest, by then eighty, who swore to what he had seen. Wycliffe had been a paralytic for two years. On Holy Innocents’ Day, Wednesday 28 December 1384, he could still speak when he came into his church. At about the elevation of the sacrament he fell, struck above all in the tongue, and he never spoke again. He died on the Saturday, the last day of the year, and the bishop’s register agrees: the church fell vacant on the last day of December by the death of its last rector. Walsingham put the stroke on the feast of Thomas Becket, while Wycliffe was preparing to blaspheme the saint, and supplied a twisted mouth and a death in despair. Horn has none of that. He says that he saw it, and that he will answer for it before God.

Very little of Wycliffe remains at Lutterworth. The pulpit shown there is fifteenth century, the table on which he is said to have translated the Bible is Jacobean, and the chair came two centuries after him. Nobody recorded who buried him. No portrait from life exists, and the earliest English image found is a Protestant woodcut of 1548.

1378–1384 · What Wycliffe said about English

Englished

Go through his Latin for the words that would settle the matter and they do not turn up. In the works searched for this essay, by keyword and leaving out his sermons, the Trialogus and several other works, he never says that he has translated anything, and he never asks for a whole Bible in English.

In 1378 his concern is still the pulpit. In the same treatise on Scripture he mentions that he had issued thirty-three conclusions on church property “in ligwa duplici,” in two languages, because he wanted the matter shared between clerks and lay people. That is the firmest evidence found that English writing went on under his eye, and it concerns poverty and property. From about 1381 he complains. A tract of about that date reports that “our satraps and Pharisees” say a man ought not to preach the gospel or gather it in the common tongue, although the seven deadly sins and the ten commandments may be explained in English. That had been the working line of the English church since Archbishop Pecham a century before: tell the people in their own language what they must do, and leave the gospel with the priest. Wycliffe explains it unkindly. Somebody has said, he writes, that they will not have the gospel preached in English because the people would then see how far the prelates’ lives lie from Christ’s.

The talk of a ban, then, begins in Wycliffe’s own mouth, more than a quarter of a century before there was any ban to talk about. His plainest rule comes in a short piece addressed to secular lords: Scripture is to be taught “in quacunque lingua plus nota fuerit,” in whatever language it is best known, and those who say lay people need not know God’s law are the heretics. About 1383 he wrote the sentence that has been misquoted longest. It is folly, he says, to condemn writings as heretical because they are in English, for it is possible that the noble queen of England, the emperor’s sister, has the gospel written out in three languages, Czech, German and Latin, and to call her a heretic for that would be the pride of Lucifer. Anne of Bohemia had married Richard II in January 1382. “Possibile est … habeat,” he wrote, it is possible she has; and since John Bale in the sixteenth century, retellers have turned the supposition into a fact, with Wycliffe reporting what the queen owned. They also cut the last line, which is the point of the passage. As the Germans reasonably defend their own tongue, he says, so the English ought to defend theirs.

The last thing he was writing at Lutterworth says twice that bishops and friars dread “quod evangelium anglicetur,” that the gospel should be Englished. The verb comes as near as anything found in his Latin to naming the thing he is remembered for, and it stands in a complaint about other people.

English scripture was already some four centuries old when he wrote that, and the English church had never pronounced against it. A priest named Aldred had written an Old English gloss between the lines of the Lindisfarne Gospels in the tenth century. The West Saxon Gospels went on being copied into the twelfth. Aelfric and others had put much of the Old Testament into English before the Conquest, abridging as they went, and their Genesis has Adam and Eve make themselves a wædbrec, a pair of breeches, at the verse for which the Geneva Bible would one day be laughed at. There were psalters in northern verse. Richard Rolle, who died in 1349, wrote an English psalter with a commentary so well regarded that his own copy was said to lie chained at Hampole, among the nuns there, and after 1408, on the evidence gathered by the historian Margaret Deanesly, it was the English scripture a careful person could most safely leave in a will.

The whole Bible had never been made, and the oldest of this inheritance had moved out of reach. A Lollard writer around 1400 says that gospels from the old days could still be found in many places, “of so oolde Englische that vnnethe can any man rede hem.” Lords who wanted scripture had the French Bible of about 1260. An English tract traditionally pinned on Wycliffe, and possibly not his, makes the obvious complaint: as “lordis of englond han þe bible in freynsch,” it would be no offense to reason for them to have the same in English. That wish was old and lawful, and the scale of the answer was new. Somebody set out to translate the whole Bible, and two manuscripts show the place where one stint of that work stopped.

c. 1370–1390 · The Early Version

Two Words into Baruch

The translation survives in two forms, a literal one called the Early Version and a freer revision called the Later. Two manuscripts of the Early Version in the Bodleian Library at Oxford stop at the same word. MS Bodley 959 is a stout vellum volume in five hands, its text full of erasures and corrections, and the first part of MS Douce 369 seems to have been copied from it. They carry the Old Testament in an English that clings to the Latin word by word. Both run on through the prophets as far as the little book of Baruch, and there, two words into the twentieth verse of the third chapter, both break off: and othyr men in the place of hem risen. The ȝunge. The Latin goes on to say that the young men saw the light. The English does not get there. A copy at Cambridge is reported to break at the same point. In Douce, directly under the broken line, a hand of the time has added a note in poor Latin: Explicit translacionem Nicholay de herford, here ends the translation of Nicholas Hereford.

It is very nearly the only place in the whole tradition where anybody is named, and it has carried a great deal of weight. Hereford was an Oxford doctor of theology and one of Wycliffe’s warmest partisans. He preached for the cause at St Frideswide’s on Ascension Day 1382, was cited a few days later, and was excommunicated at Canterbury on 1 July. He went to Rome to appeal and was sentenced to life imprisonment; a Roman mob let him out in 1385; he came home, was caught at Nottingham, escaped, and in the end recanted. In 1850 the first editors of the Wycliffite Bible, Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, did not think it “unreasonable to conjecture” that the summons of 1382 had interrupted him at his desk. They said conjecture. It has been told as fact ever since, a man called away in the middle of a sentence.

The books do not prove it. In Bodley 959 the break comes on the last line of the second column, at the foot of a full page, f. 332r, and the back of that leaf is blank. The sentence stops where the page stops, which is an unlikely place for a summons to fall and an ordinary place for a stint of writing to end. If Douce was copied from Bodley 959, its break shows only that the scribe’s exemplar stopped there, and nothing in any record says Hereford stopped translating that summer. The English does change at that word. Before it the translator keeps the order of the Latin and never adds a gloss; in the first complete chapter after it, his successor inserts nine. The Latin dilectus had been loued or leef and now becomes dereworth. Someone else has taken over, and we do not know why, or whether the note means that Hereford made everything before it or only that a stint ended there. Deanesly, who mapped the dialects of the five hands in Bodley 959 in 1920, thought they were translators and not copyists, because a scribe does not consistently change a man’s participles. Near the end of Bodley 959 a fifteenth-century hand has left a private remark that has nothing to do with scripture: þat þing þat ȝe spac of touchynge Sauages douȝter wole not ȝet be. Whatever was being arranged for Savage’s daughter, it was not going to happen yet.

Did Wycliffe himself put a hand to it? No medieval scribe says so. Dove found that the manuscripts never name him as a translator, and his name does not appear in the treatises written for and against an English Bible in the years around 1400. The case rests on two sentences, apart from a letter of Arundel’s taken up below. About 1390 Henry Knighton, in Leicester, a day’s walk from Lutterworth, wrote that this Master John Wycliffe had turned the gospel, which Christ gave to the clergy to dispense to lay people as they had need, out of Latin into the English tongue, “non angelicam,” not the angelic one, so that it lay more open to lay people and to women who could read than it was accustomed to be to well-read clerks, “et sic evangelica margarita spargitur et a porcis conculcatur.” And so the pearl of the gospel is scattered abroad and trampled by swine. Knighton means this as an outrage, and he says gospel, not Bible. The second sentence comes from the Czech preacher Jan Hus in 1411, arguing that Wycliffe was no German: the English themselves say, he writes, that he translated the whole Bible from Latin into English. That is a rumor, quoted to settle a point about nationality.

The editors of 1850 had no doubt that Wycliffe took a part, though they would not fix his share, and of the steps that led him to the work they said that the evidence is scanty and affords only a presumption. His treatise of 1378 asks for no translation. Modern opinion divides. Anne Hudson, the leading modern authority on the Lollards, thought it unlikely that he worked on the text. Mary Dove, whose book of 2007 is the standard account, took the view that Wycliffe instigated the project, that the work began in the early 1370s at the Queen’s College in Oxford, and that he, Hereford and John Trevisa all played a part; she added that there is no external evidence and that she had found herself writing “probably” again and again. Henry Ansgar Kelly has since gone the other way, arguing that the translation was an orthodox Oxford work the Lollards later took over, which remains a minority position.

Books will tell you that John Purvey, Wycliffe’s secretary, revised the whole Bible about 1388. The name is a guess with a date on it. The theologian Daniel Waterland suggested Purvey in 1729, admitting that he was guessing, in a letter to John Lewis, who later printed the Wycliffite New Testament, and Hudson found no medieval document that connects Purvey with the translation. Lewis passed the name on without the admission, Forshall and Madden built on it, Deanesly made it the center of her book, and Hudson took it apart. The long list of Purvey’s errors and the recantation he made in 1401 say nothing about translation. The books themselves show a team working over a long time, some twenty years on Dove’s reckoning, with changing hands and uncertain resources.

c. 1385–1400 · The Later Version

A Simple Creature

The Early Version is a construe, the kind of English a schoolboy writes under his Latin. Adam hid hym and his wijf, it says at Genesis 3:8, following the Latin order. At 1 Samuel 2:10, which the medieval Bible called 1 Kings, it has The Lord shulen drede the aduersaries of hym, and a reader who took that in order would conclude that the Lord was afraid. Hudson thought it hardly comprehensible without the Vulgate, the Latin Bible, beside it. Dove argued that it was a first stage in a longer job, never meant to be copied as a translation in its own right, and that in the early 1380s its makers lost control of it. People wanted the thing, and they copied what there was. The earliest great copy that can be dated, made for Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, before his death in 1397, is in this version, stiff as it is.

One of the people responsible for the translation described how it was made. The Later Version carries in a few copies a long General Prologue, probably of the mid-1390s, and in its fifteenth chapter the writer steps forward without giving his name. A symple creature hath translatid the bible out of Latyn into English, he says, and then explains how. First, with diuerse felawis and helperis, he gathered many old Bibles, doctors and glosses, to make one Latin Bible sumdel trewe. Then he studied it afresh with the commentators, above all Nicholas of Lyra. Third, he consulted old grammarians and divines about hard words. Only the fourth time did he translate, as clearly as he could, with good colleagues correcting.

Before they could English the Bible they had to work out what the Latin said, and the common Latin Bibles, the writer says, need correcting more than the English one does. At Genesis 29:25 many late medieval Bibles had Jacob ask why Leah had been substituted for Rachel; the translators restored the older reading, and the Later Version says whi hast thou disseyued me? Where Jerome and Lyra reported that the Hebrew differed, the writer set the Hebrew reading in the margin, at second hand, through them.

Then he gives his rules, and they are a schoolmaster’s. The best translating, he says, is aftir the sentence, and not oneli aftir the wordis, so that the meaning stands as open in English as in Latin, or more so. An ablative absolute can be undone with while, for, if, when or after: his classroom example is the maistir redinge, I stonde, which becomes while the maistir redith, I stonde. A participle can become a verb and a conjunction. And that sentence about the Lord and his adversaries he turns around in front of the reader: the aduersaries of the Lord shulen drede him. Forshall and Madden checked the rules against the text and found that they fit the Later Version. It reads like English, and readers preferred it, with copies of it outnumbering the Early Version by more than five to one.

The same chapter has a temper. Worldly clerks ask what spirit makes idiots bold to translate the Bible, he reports, when the four great doctors never dared. This replicacioun is so lewid, that it nedith noon answer, no but stillnesse, eithir curteys scorn. French, Czechs and Bretons have the Bible in their own tongue, and why the English should not, he cannot tell, no but for falsnesse and necgligence of clerkis. Earlier chapters of the Prologue go further, attacking Oxford, its statutes and the prelates of the realm. Some 250 manuscripts of the translation survive. The Prologue stands in about ten of them, and only six or seven of those have its polemical chapters. The manuscript that Forshall and Madden printed it from gives out in this chapter, three lines before the translator speaks of himself, and all of his account comes from a Bible that later belonged to Edward VI. The great majority of copies were the bare text of Scripture with no opinion attached, and in that text, as Anne Hudson and the others who have read it most closely agree, there is no heresy at all.

1395–1401 · An argument at Oxford, and the first fire

An Open Question

For a few years the English Bible was something a master could dispute in the schools. About 1401 an Oxford writer, almost certainly Richard Ullerston, a secular priest of Queen’s, put the question this way, in Deanesly’s English: “Whether, since it was lawful for S. Jerome to translate the sacred canon from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, it is in like manner lawful to translate it into other tongues, less principal and less beautiful?” Two weighty doctors of the university, he adds, had been spending the whole time of their lectures on it, one on each side. Ullerston came down for translation. The Franciscan William Butler, regent at Oxford in 1401, came down against, on six grounds that begin with the attractions of Scripture and take in the hierarchy of the angels: it is not good policy, he wrote, that anyone at all, anywhere at all, should give himself to the fervent study of the Scriptures as much as he likes. He would not leave it even to those who read Latin. Then he closed with a bow to those who thought otherwise, as one does in a disputation.

The Dominican Thomas Palmer wrote an account of what the English language can do. Many of its sounds, he says, cannot be shaped by the tongue or spelled in the Latin alphabet, and come out by stammering and spewing from the throat, “quasi grunnitus porcorum vel rugitus leonum,” like the grunting of pigs or the roaring of lions. English has no words for substance or accident. If Deanesly is right, he is the Thomas Palmer who had written a defense of Nicholas Hereford in Hereford’s own voice some years before. Of the three texts only his came down whole. Ullerston’s survives without his name in a single manuscript in Vienna. The opening of Butler’s is lost: it starts in mid-sentence in a Merton College volume, with a note saying to look for its beginning at folio 119, and the folios there have been cut out. Palmer’s preserves some seventeen arguments for translation so that it can knock them down, which makes it one of the better sources for the other side.

Outside the schools the mood had already changed, and it changed first about books. A royal writ of July 1382 ordered the halls of Oxford searched for anything by Wycliffe or Hereford. Commissioners went out in 1388 to seize such books in whoever’s hands they were found and to forbid anyone to buy or sell them. Four men of Nottingham swore in English in Chancery in September 1395, before Thomas Arundel, archbishop of York, that they would not receive “her books ne swych books,” the books of what “men clepith Lollards doctrin.” A Herefordshire squire, John Croft, swore in 1397, apparently at the king’s request, that he would not read or own English books drawn from the bare text of Scripture by certain persons commonly called Lollards. The same year the king’s officers listed Thomas of Woodstock’s two great volumes of the English Bible among his romances at Pleshey, and thought only of what they would fetch.

William Sawtrey, a parish priest from Lynn in Norfolk who had abjured in 1399, was brought before Convocation, the assembly of the province’s clergy, in the chapter house of St Paul’s on 12 February 1401, charged among other things with refusing to adore the cross. He was declared a relapsed heretic, a man who had sworn off his errors and gone back to them, degraded from his orders in full vestments, and on 26 February the king issued a writ for his burning. That writ cites the law of God and man and the canons, and it names no statute, apparently because the statute did not yet exist. He died at Smithfield about the beginning of March, the first of Wycliffe’s party to go to the fire, chained upright to a post inside a barrel according to Adam of Usk, who worked for Arundel and is our only witness to that detail. A few days later, on 6 March, John Purvey stood up at Paul’s Cross and recanted.

De heretico comburendo, on the burning of a heretic, followed within days and became law in March 1401, on the petition of the clergy, and for the first time an act of Parliament spoke of people who had books. All who held books or writings of this wicked doctrine must deliver them to the bishop within forty days of the proclamation; anyone who did not could be arrested and held in the bishop’s prison until he purged himself or abjured. The burning came further down, for those who would not abjure or who relapsed, and its list runs through preachings, doctrines, opinions, schools and informations without mentioning a book. Did an English Bible count as a book of wicked doctrine? In 1401 no law had said so, and at Oxford two doctors were still lecturing on the matter, one on either side.

1407–1431 · Arundel’s Constitutions

The Word the Law Left Out

As far as the record shows, the law arrived without ceremony. In the autumn of 1407 Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, summoned the clergy of his province to St Frideswide’s Priory in Oxford for 28 November, and what they made there closes with the words Datae Oxonii. No record of who spoke has been found, and none of any debate or vote. The text was published again at a convocation that opened at St Paul’s on 14 January 1409, a meeting summoned to discuss the two rival popes and to send proctors to the Council of Pisa. The republication sits among those papers, and the printed record gives it no day. In April Arundel sent the whole thing out from Queenborough Castle to be copied to every bishop in the province, so that no one could plead ignorance. The law of 1409, made in 1407 and known as Arundel’s Constitutions, is thirteen articles of church legislation for the province of Canterbury, whose canons York accepted in general only in 1462.

Most of it has nothing to do with the Bible. Nobody is to preach without a license. Nobody is to teach against the church’s determinations on the sacraments, or dispute them, in public or in private. Masters of arts and grammar are to stay out of theology. The heads of Oxford’s colleges and halls are to inquire into their members every month, because the university, the text complains, has turned its vine to sour grapes. Article six deals with Wycliffe’s books: no treatise by him or by anyone else of his time or since is to be read in schools or halls or anywhere else in the province until a panel of twelve from Oxford or Cambridge has examined it and the archbishop has approved it. Article seven opens by citing Jerome on the danger of translation, and then it makes its whole provision in a single sentence. No one henceforth is to translate any text of holy Scripture on his own authority into English or any other tongue, by way of book, booklet or treatise; and no such book, booklet or treatise, composed lately in the time of the said John Wycliffe or since, or to be composed hereafter, is to be read in part or in whole, publicly or secretly, under pain of the greater excommunication, until the translation has been approved by the bishop of the place or, if the matter requires it, by a provincial council; and whoever does otherwise is to be punished as a favorer of heresy and error.

There are two verbs, transferat and legatur, translate and read. There is no word for having, keeping, buying or owning, here or in any of the other twelve articles, and the same legal world had those words and used them: a royal writ of 1382 says habuerit, a commission of 1388 says possessione, the statute of 1401 says habentes. The approval falls on the translation, and no clause approves a reader. The word noviter, lately, leaves older translations alone, so that a West Saxon gospel or a Rolle psalter was not caught. And “publice, vel occulte,” on its face, covers reading at home. Henry Ansgar Kelly, known here only from reviews, reads noviter so narrowly that neither Wycliffite version is caught, which requires the word to outweigh the plain reference to the time of Wycliffe.

The offender, moreover, is not called a heretic. When these drafters meant heretic they said so, in articles one and four, and they wrote the penalties of heresy and relapse into article nine, each time for the man who persists or relapses. In article seven the offender is to be punished “ut fautor haeresis et erroris,” as a favorer of heresy and error, the lesser category of a person who gives heresy help or occasion.

Thomas More knew what everyone supposed article seven said. More, the lawyer and royal councillor, wrote his Dialogue of 1529 at Bishop Tunstall’s request to answer the new heresies, as a conversation with an invented Messenger who brings him what the town is saying. The Messenger complains that the clergy find an English Bible in a man’s keeping and lay heresy to him for it, under a provincial constitution by which “they haue prohybyted that eny man shall haue eny vppon payn of heresye.” More fetches out the Constitutions with Lyndwood on them and turns him to the place. The Messenger, who has just said that every man else has always taken the law otherwise, reads the place and marvels that men could report so plain a matter so far wrong. Two chapters later More faces the awkward part. Why, in all those years, had no good man made a translation and no bishop approved one? “Thys can [I] no thynge tell.”

So far as anyone has found in print, no bishop or provincial council approved an English translation of Scripture between 1409 and 1530, and no named person held a license to own or read a Wycliffite Bible. The words that have been taken to mean otherwise are More’s: he said he had seen old Bibles in English “knowen & sene by the byshop of the dyocyse” and left with lay men and women the bishop knew for good and catholic folk. He never uses the word license there, he names nobody, and he thought those Bibles older than Wycliffe, which would have needed no approval at all. He was almost certainly looking at the Wycliffite translation, which he denounces elsewhere in the same book. His next sentence gives the rule as he says it worked: “But of trouth all suche as are founden in the handys of heretyques / they vse to take awaye.” The one license he does mention in the book let him borrow the English New Testament that William Tyndale had printed abroad. Bishop Tunstall’s grant to More covers heretical books in English and names no Testament, and it survives with a name, a purpose and a date, the form such a thing takes in a register. For scripture, the author of a devotional book for the nuns of Syon says he asked for and had his bishop’s leave to put the texts of their service into English. Richard Rex, the historian of the Lollards, believes that some licenses were granted. Tyndale replied to the whole arrangement in 1531: “If no translation shall be had, until they give licence or till they approve it, it shall never be had.”

What of a person who only had a forbidden book? William Lyndwood answered that. He was the leading canon lawyer of the province, and by about 1430 he had finished the Provinciale, a commentary on its law, in which the statute stands in large type in the middle of the page with the gloss set around it. Beside the end of article six he puts the case. “Sed pone,” he writes: suppose someone has not published such a book, but knowingly receives one composed by another and keeps it by him. Is he by that reckoned a heretic or a believer in heresy? “Dic quod non, sed surgit vehemens suspicio Haeresis.” Say no, but a vehement suspicion of heresy rises against him, because no one ought knowingly to take or hold such books, but rather burn them or hand them to the bishop to be burned. Purgation, clearing himself on oath with others to swear beside him, must therefore be imposed on him, and if he fails in it he is to be punished as a heretic.

Lyndwood is commenting on the law, and he is speaking of a book containing errors and of a keeper who knows what he has. Elsewhere he says that earlier translations may lawfully be read. But the words vehement suspicion were not his alone, since article thirteen sends the bishops after anyone vehemently suspected in any of these cases, and the ladder he describes is the one a suspect climbed. A favorer of heresy, he says on article seven, makes himself vehemently suspect; on that suspicion he can be inquired against; purgation can be imposed at the inquirer’s discretion; and whoever fails in it can be condemned as a heretic. The favorer himself is excommunicate, unable to make a will and denied church burial, and Lyndwood’s heading for the article speaks of “nota Haereseos,” the mark of heresy, which is as near as the law books come to the Messenger’s phrase. Mary Dove’s phrase for the result, more than five centuries later, is that possession of scripture in English was prima facie grounds for suspicion.

“Own” came into the law by stages, as other men read the article more broadly than it was written. Dives and Pauper, a popular treatise finished perhaps in 1409, remarks that “now men say” that “men are forbidden to have God’s law in their mother tongue.” Lyndwood himself, dividing the article, says it forbids the use or reading of such books. Oxford’s reform articles of 1414 asked the king that new English books might be taken “eorum possessoribus,” from their possessors, until approved, a request that would have been needless if the law already did so. Archbishop Chichele in 1416 ordered sworn men, wherever heretics were rumored, to report anyone “libros suspectos in lingua vulgari Anglicana conscriptos habentes,” having suspect books written in English. At St Albans in 1427 the abbot charged three men with holding English books, and the ladder can be watched in use. One purged himself with witnesses at once, the second was given a day to do so, and the third, a maltman, William Redhed, abjured, confessing that he had held such a book “sine licentia et praevia examinatione Ordinarii,” without license or prior examination. The abbey’s chronicler says he had kept it “contra Constitutiones Provinciales,” the earliest passage found that treats possession as an offense against them. It was a tract, and he threw it into the fire himself at the Great Cross. John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells, went further in 1431 than any English law he could have cited and forbade anyone in his diocese to possess books of Scripture translated into English, with no provision for approval in the extract Deanesly prints. Stafford ended his career as archbishop of Canterbury.

The word suspicion lasted as long as the law did. Archbishop Warham’s mandate of November 1526 ordered English New Testaments surrendered on pain of excommunication and of incurring suspicion of the crime of heresy. A royal proclamation of 1530 finally put the ban on having into English, forbidding any person to “bye, receive, kepe, or have the New Testament or the Old in the English tonge.” Parliament annulled the statute of 1401 in 1534, remarking that no bishop should put a subject in the infamy of heresy “by any suspeccion conceyved of hys owne fantasie.” No repeal of article seven has been found; the royal injunctions of 1538, which put an English Bible in every parish church, overran it. And the one statute found that forbids reading the English Bible by name came in 1543, from the king who had put it in the churches: women below the gentry, apprentices, serving men and laborers were not to read it, to themselves or to anyone else, on pain of a month in prison.

John Foxe, the Protestant martyrologist whose Acts and Monuments first appeared in 1563, gave the Messenger’s version its authority. Replying to the Catholic controversialist Nicholas Harpsfield, he wrote that Arundel had decreed that Scripture “should not be had, or read in the vulgar tongue” under “pain and punishment of heresy,” and his margin says that reading such books was “made heresy.” His own translation of article seven, a hundred and fifty pages earlier in the same volume, says neither thing. The sentence people quote about those who read the Scriptures in the mother tongue forfeiting land, cattle, life and goods goes back at least to Bale in 1544, and he attached it to the Statute of Leicester of 1414, which says nothing about reading, Scripture or English. Harpsfield caught the error, and Foxe backed away: “I say not, that for the Scriptures being read in the English tongue, therefore the law was enacted.” Foxe had a better point a few lines later. As for the bishops’ approval, he says, it “maketh more for a show or pretence, than for any just exception.” Bale’s sentence stayed in Foxe’s book anyway, and it is still quoted today.

1394–1414 · Thomas Arundel

Struck in the Throat

The man who made this law was no zealot by temperament and no fool. Thomas Arundel was the third son of the earl of Arundel, a bishop at about twenty-one, archbishop of York in 1388 and of Canterbury in 1396. In September 1397 Richard II’s parliament impeached him and banished him while his brother went to the block. He went abroad as far as Florence, landed with Henry Bolingbroke at Ravenspur in 1399, and helped make him king as Henry IV. He was not hostile to English as such. About 1410 Nicholas Love, prior of the Charterhouse of Mount Grace, brought him an English life of Christ called the Mirror, and a note in the copies records that the archbishop kept it some days, approved it by word of mouth, and ordered it published for the edification of the faithful and the confutation of Lollards. Love wrote it, he says, for simple creatures who need the milk of light doctrine. Lay people might have Christ’s life in English from a safe hand, and psalms from Rolle, and primers and books of devotion, and in time the printer William Caxton and his successors would print Love without difficulty. Bishop FitzJames of London approved a second life of Christ, Simon the Anker’s, in 1506. Deanesly found no printer who touched the Sunday gospels.

Selection seems to be what troubled Arundel. William Thorpe, a Lollard priest he examined at Saltwood in 1407, wrote up the interview afterward, and it is a partisan text and a good one. In it the archbishop complains that men like Thorpe pick out sharp sentences of Scripture to maintain their sect against the ordinance of holy church, and he tells Thorpe he will never have back the psalter taken from him at Canterbury until his heart and mouth accord with the church’s government.

One story has Arundel preaching at the funeral of Queen Anne at Westminster in August 1394 and praising her because, though born a foreigner, she had all four gospels in English with the doctors on them, had sent them to him, and he had found them good and true. The story rests on one Lollard tract, written years later to prove that English scripture is lawful, for which it was the best card available. No text of the sermon survives and no other witness mentions it.

His most quoted sentence may not mean what it is quoted to mean. About 1411 or 1412 Arundel and his suffragans wrote to Pope John XXIII denouncing John Wycliffe, pestilent and most wretched, of damnable memory, son of the old serpent. Histories of the English Bible quote the letter for the claim that Wycliffe devised a new translation of the Scriptures into the mother tongue to fill up the measure of his malice. Read whole, the Latin seems to say something a little different. The sentence about Wycliffe appears to end earlier. The next one begins with what grew from his root, “serpentini generis posteritas,” the serpent’s brood, and it is that posterity which strove to attack the church, with the practice of a new translation devised to complete its malice. The archbishop’s line, in other words, seems to be about the followers. The same letter asks the pope to have the heresiarch’s bones dug up and thrown on a dunghill or burned, three years before any council ordered it.

Arundel died at his lodge at Hackington, outside Canterbury, on 19 February 1414, of some sudden affliction of the throat. Thomas Gascoigne, who was about ten at the time and wrote decades later, says the archbishop was so struck in the tongue that he could neither swallow nor speak for days before he died, and that people believed this was because he had bound the word of God in the mouths of preachers. Gascoigne is writing about the licensing of sermons, and he says nothing of the Bible. A pamphlet of 1528 is the first found to tie the death to English books. Foxe printed Gascoigne at second hand, still about preaching, and added, “Which if this be true, as it doth well here appear,” a warning to all who stop God’s word. The tongue that swelled until the archbishop starved has not been found before Francis Godwin’s catalog of the English bishops in 1601, nearly two centuries after the event, and even Godwin hedges it with “as some report it.”

1382–1417 · The first Lollards

Those Called Lollards

The people Arundel’s law was aimed at had a name, which began as an insult, though nobody is sure in which language. Dutch had lollaert, a mumbler of prayers, used of pious vagrants on the Continent. Clerks heard Latin lolium, the tares in the wheat, and punned on it for decades. Langland, in the last version of Piers Plowman, derives it from good English, a man who lolls, lame or out of joint. A hostile Latin poem that may date from late 1381 already says “Lollardi sunt zizania,” and a Carmelite narrative of the 1390s has the Cistercian Henry Crumpe suspended at Oxford in 1382 for calling heretics by the name, though the king’s letter about the case does not use it. The first dated document found that does is a mandate of the bishop of Worcester of 10 August 1387, and by 1389 the archbishop’s register is calling them men commonly so named. They called themselves poor men and treasurers of Christ, and later known men, and they were by no means all of one kind.

Leicester had the first of them outside Oxford. Knighton tells how a hermit-priest, William Swinderby, suspended by his bishop, found a pair of millstones for sale outside a chapel by the leper house, set up a pulpit between them on the king’s highway, and preached in the bishop’s teeth, and the crowd doubled. Lodging at that chapel was William Smith, whom Knighton describes as ugly and jilted, who had given up meat and wine and linen and taught himself his letters. The story that he and a chaplain chopped up a painted image of St Catherine to cook their cabbages is Knighton’s, a neighbor’s, told with relish. In November 1389 Archbishop Courtenay came through Leicester and made Smith walk in penance in his shirt and breeches, carrying an image of St Catherine and a half-pound candle, on a Saturday around the market, in cold so bitter that the penitents were allowed clothes at mass. Knighton adds that he was forced to hand over “libros solemnes” that he had written out in English, of the gospel and the epistles, and confessed to eight years’ labor on them. No line survives of the earliest English gospel books found to have been seized.

Higher up, the chroniclers named a group of knights around the court, Clifford and Stury and Latimer among them, the same Clifford who had carried Joan of Kent’s message to Lambeth. The evidence is three overlapping lists by hostile chroniclers, and in 1402, Walsingham says, Clifford turned and gave Arundel the sect’s conclusions and its names. Somebody fixed twelve conclusions to the doors of St Paul’s and Westminster in 1395, on Walsingham’s word, and a text of them was offered to Parliament. They attack church endowment, the priesthood, celibacy, the sacrament, pilgrimage and prayers for the dead, and they condemn goldsmiths and armorers as useless crafts. They do not ask for an English Bible, though they do remark that all this is set out at length in another book, in their own language.

The tailor John Badby of the diocese of Worcester was the next to burn. At his earlier hearing in the Blackfriars he said that if every consecrated host were the Lord’s body, there would be twenty thousand gods in England. Arundel kept the key of the room that held him, and his register sets the last hearing at St Paul’s on Wednesday 5 March 1410, before the duke of York and the chancellor, where Badby said that the duke himself, and any man who had lived since Adam, was worth more than the sacrament of the altar. While he was being examined, the clerk records, a very great spider ran across his mouth in the sight of everyone, and the clerk calls it the poison of asps. A chronicle continuation confirms it, and has Arundel saying to someone who went to brush it off: leave it, now we shall see who teaches him to speak. Foxe printed the register almost word for word and cut the spider. Badby burned at Smithfield that afternoon, in a hollow vessel, by the king’s decree. The register never mentions the prince. The story that Prince Henry had him pulled from the fire and offered him his life and a living comes from a London chronicle and from St Albans, whose version makes the living threepence a day.

Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, was the great catch, and a book helped to catch him. In 1413 a limner in Paternoster Row, London’s book street, had on his bench some unbound quires of small tracts, waiting to be decorated, when they were seized. The craftsman said on the spot whose they were. Some of their worst conclusions were read to Henry V at Kennington, and the king was horrified, and Oldcastle said he had read no more than two leaves. By Arundel’s own account of the trial, when Oldcastle produced a statement of faith in English, the archbishop answered with the church’s determinations on the sacrament and confession, and he had them put into English, “pro leviori intellectu ejusdem,” for Oldcastle’s easier understanding. That was four years after his Constitutions, and the English stands in his register.

Condemned as a heretic and held in the Tower, Oldcastle escaped that October, helped by a parchment-maker, William Fisher, who hid him at Smithfield. Oldcastle attempted a rising in St Giles’s Fields in January 1414. The indictment speaks of twenty thousand men and Walsingham of fifty thousand who would have come if London’s gates had stood open. Charles Kightly, who worked through the court records county by county in 1975, could name no more than 222. Of the 107 whose trades are recorded, thirty-one were weavers and five were parchment-makers, with a textwriter and scriveners among the rest, which may say something about how Lollard books moved. Kightly counts thirty-six hanged on four new pairs of gallows, seven of them burned as they hung. The rising did what no bishop had managed. The Statute of Leicester that spring wrote the word Lollardy into English law as a threat to the king as well as to the faith, and every sheriff and justice now swore on taking office to hunt it down. Oldcastle himself was taken in Wales in 1417, carried to London in a litter, and hanged and burned at St Giles in December.

The first case found in which an English book plainly helped to kill a man came between the rising and Oldcastle’s death. John Claydon, a London currier who had already spent years in prison and abjured, was brought before Archbishop Chichele at St Paul’s in August 1415. Among the books found with him, the mayor gave up one “well bound in red leather, of parchment, written in a good English hand.” Claydon said he knew it very well, because he had paid to have it written, at great cost, since his abjuration. Asked who the scribe was, he said one John Grime, and that he could not tell more of him. Asked whether he had read it, he said that he could not read, but that he had heard a quarter of it read aloud by a man named Fuller, and that he had great affection for it because of a sermon in it preached at Horsleydown. It was not a Bible. It was the Lantern of Light, a Lollard tract. They burned the book, and then they burned its owner as a relapsed heretic, on articles drawn from his books and on the word of witnesses.

1397–1517 · Who owned it

The King’s Shelf

Eighteen years before Claydon’s red book went on the fire, another English book in red leather had been given a price by the Crown. By December 1397 Clement Spice, the king’s escheator in Essex and Hertford, had been through Pleshey Castle valuing what Thomas of Woodstock had owned. The duke was dead and a judgment in Parliament had forfeited his goods, so the roll records a valuation and no sale. The chapel list has the Latin Bibles, where a reader would expect them. The English Bible stands further on, among the Livres de diverses Rimances et Estories, the romances and histories, between the Romance of the Rose at six shillings and eightpence and a Livy in French: “Item un bible en Engleys en ij grantz livres covertz de rouge quyr,” a Bible in English in two great books covered in red leather, forty shillings. A book of the gospels in English stood on the same list at six and eightpence. The British Library suggests that its Egerton 617 and 618, which carry the duke’s arms, may be this Bible, though they run only from Proverbs to the end of the New Testament, and Forshall and Madden thought the pair had once been a single volume.

Kings kept it too, though the proof for each is thinner than the popular lists suggest. MS Bodley 277 is a lectern Bible of 377 large leaves, made about 1415 to 1425, and near its end two early Tudor hands have left inscriptions, one of them crossed out. The other reads, “Hic liber erat quondam henrici sexti qui postea donabatur domui Cartusiensium quae Londino contigua est.” This book once belonged to Henry VI, and was afterward given to the house of the Carthusians next to London. Histories say Henry gave it, but the verb is passive and the sentence names no giver. The monks of the London Charterhouse treated the book as scripture, checking its text against a Latin Bible and adding to it. Deanesly wrote in 1920 that neither Henry IV nor Henry V owned an English Bible, and thought the fact significant; the Bodleian’s catalog now speaks of an English Bible known to have been owned by Henry IV, the king in whose reign the statute of 1401 was made. An Early Version New Testament in New York has at the foot of its first page “a uous me ly, Gloucestre,” I am bound to you, which may be the motto of Richard of Gloucester, later Richard III, though the library queries the reading. A connection with the court, and no more, appears in the reign of Henry VII, when someone painted a new first leaf, with a red rose, the portcullis and the royal arms, for Royal 1 C VIII, the manuscript on which Forshall and Madden would base their Later Version.

The paperwork of the time hardly mentions it. Deanesly went through the catalogs of monastic libraries from 1408 to 1526, and the only English biblical book she found listed in any of them was Rolle’s Psalter. She worked through some 7,578 wills from before 1526, and after 1408, the year she takes as her dividing line, no lay person leaves an English Bible in any of them. She could name five priests who owned one. Inscriptions in the books themselves lengthen her list a good deal, and her count of the wills and catalogs is a century old and has not been rechecked here.

A careful owner could stay out of the paperwork by giving the book away in her lifetime. On Mid-Lent Sunday 1517, which fell on 22 March, Dame Anne Danvers, the widow of a knight, sent her son Thomas to the brethren at Syon with an Early Version New Testament with gold initials, and on its last leaf she had a message written out. “Good Mr Confessor of Syon wt his brethren,” it begins. She gives the book so that she “the moore tenderly may be comytted unto the mercy of our lord god,” and asks them to remember the people named below, herself and her five children among the living, and Sir William among the dead. A translation that had been a suspect book for a century had become a bede-roll, a list of names to be prayed for, in one of the grandest religious houses in England. Dove infers that the gift kept English scripture from being declared with the widow’s estate, and nothing on the leaf shows any anxiety. A century earlier a friar of Thomas Palmer’s own order, a Dominican recluse at Newcastle, had owned an Early Version New Testament, and a red inscription in it says so: “Iste liber constat fratri Iohanni lacy.” This book belongs to Brother John Lacy.

The law did not stop the scribes. Forshall and Madden, in 1850, dated many of the copies they saw to the middle of the fifteenth century. Elizabeth Solopova’s recent catalog of the Oxford manuscripts moves them back: of the forty-two Bodleian records read for this essay, thirty-one are dated to about 1400 to 1425, and one great Bible, Fairfax 2, was finished in 1408, between the council at Oxford and the publication at St Paul’s. A catalog can rarely put a book on one side or the other of January 1409, and these are a sample of Oxford’s copies, but nothing in them shows production stopping at the law. Most of the surviving copies look like shop work. Dove finds very few amateur copies and no evidence that the surviving books were made and sold in secret, and no binding in the printed lists is disguised. More than a third have a table of the lessons for the church year. Dove reads that as stationers expecting a devout and orthodox buyer, and adds that sellers and buyers doubtless wanted to divert suspicion; Deanesly held that books of liturgical gospels and epistles were how heretics most often read the text. Some books did have to be hidden afterward. Thomas Bowyer, quoted by Dove, recalled that his family’s Bible had been “kept in hugger mugger” in “those superstitious tymes.”

What could separate the king’s Bible from the heretic’s was the front of the book, and Richard Hunne’s case shows how. The King James page tells how the London merchant tailor was found hanged in the Lollards’ Tower on 4 December 1514, and how Bishop FitzJames condemned the dead man as a heretic twelve days later. In Hunne’s lifetime the bishop’s officers had charged him, in the sixth of their articles, with keeping “divers English books prohibited and damned by the law; as the Apocalypse in English, epistles and gospels in English, Wickliff’s damnable works,” which claims more than Arundel’s article ever did. After he was dead the bishop’s man Dr Hed went through “the prologue of his English Bible, remaining then in the bishop’s hands,” and drew thirteen more articles from it. Foxe is the authority for all thirteen and Deanesly for most. The articles attack the pope, pardons, canon law, images, swearing by saints and the University of Oxford, and they deny the bodily presence. The thirteenth reads, “He defendeth the translation of the Bible and the holy Scripture into the English tongue, which is prohibited by the laws of our mother, holy church.” None of the thirteen cites a verse of the translation. Thomas More, who was at St Paul’s for the sentence, says the Bible lay open there with other English books of Hunne’s, “that euery man myghte se the placys noted with his own hande,” and that its Prologue held words on the sacrament that good Christian men abhorred to hear. In one place More says Hunne’s books were burned with his body. At the end of the same chapter he says of the Bible, “whyther the boke be burned or secretely kept I can not surely saye.” No register read here names an English Bible on a fire before 1526, though the rumor More gives his Messenger runs “burned vp as fayre bybles in englysh as eny man hathe lyghly sene.”

Bodley 277 and Royal 1 C VIII, the two identifiable books from before the Reformation with the best claim to a royal connection, each carry the first chapter of the Prologue, a harmless list of the canonical books, and no more. Hunne’s carried the rest. Dove reasons that only a copy opening with the Prologue was evidently Wycliffite, an official had no easy way of telling any other copy from a lawful translation, and the owner’s orthodoxy had to vouch for the book. That, on her reading, is what the woman in the Rylands note was buying from the two doctors. In law their inspection gave her nothing, since neither doctor was a bishop and article seven forbade reading the translation until a bishop or a council approved it, which none is known to have done. It gave her two respectable witnesses, both of them, it is reported, owners of forbidden Wycliffe themselves. Who later struck the note out, and whether from fear or tidiness, the leaf does not say.

On five of the six words that Tyndale and More would fight over, the Wycliffite Bible follows the Latin into the church’s own vocabulary, chirche, prest, charite, penaunce and grace, though where the Latin differs it can say loue and eldre men too, and on the sixth it has knowleche, the plain English word that Tyndale chose as well. FitzJames’s register, as Foxe copied it, could still charge one Richard Butler with reading all night in “a great book of heresy,” certain chapters of the evangelists in English. What the word heresy was aimed at is open: Deanesly supposes the Prologue, and Foxe the gospel itself.

Some readers knew what they had. A fine Later Version Bible at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 147, opens with the whole Prologue, and a note from the circle of Matthew Parker, Queen Elizabeth’s archbishop of Canterbury, identifies the hostile notes in its margins as the hand of Geoffrey Blythe, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. Beside the Prologue’s cry against Oxford the annotator speaks of the wickedness of Wycliffe, who, when he saw that he could not turn the learned from the faith, urged that free entry to Scripture should lie open to all the unlearned, so as to corrupt the simple at least. The cataloger M. R. James observed that many of the passages behind the articles against Hunne are marked in this copy, and it has been suggested since 1901 that this may be Hunne’s Bible itself. The case is argued and unproved: More saw notes in Hunne’s own hand, and no one has identified any here. At Exodus 6:9 in the same volume, where the sons of Israel assentide not to hym for þe anguische of spirit, the scribe drew a small red scroll in the margin and wrote three lines inside it: þus þe peple fariþ now for fere of þe prelatis more and lesse. So the people fare now, for fear of the prelates great and small. Nothing else of the kind has turned up among the 170 manuscripts Forshall and Madden listed in 1850. The scribe’s complaint stands twenty-six leaves after the bishop’s note and about a century before it.

1398–1428 · Prague, Constance, Lutterworth

The Nearest Stream

All this while the man himself lay at Lutterworth. In 1428 his bones were dug up and burned, it seems because of Bohemia, and that story begins with Wycliffe’s Latin, which traveled further than the English Bible ever did. Jan Hus, who would lead the reform at Prague, copied five of Wycliffe’s philosophical tracts in his own hand in 1398, and the copies are in Stockholm. Jerome of Prague told the general council of the church at Constance that as a young man he had gone to England, written out the Dialogus and the Trialogus, and brought them home, which Johann Loserth dates to about 1401 or 1402. A colophon of early 1407 has two Czech students, Nicholas Faulfiss and George of Knyehnicz, correcting another of the treatises at Oxford, and others place them in country parsonages at Braybrooke and Kemerton. Faulfiss, Hus said, carried something else to Prague, a testimonial dated 5 October 1406 under the seal of the University of Oxford, declaring that Wycliffe had never been convicted of heresy. The English called it a forgery, and the histories leave the matter open. At Constance Hus’s enemy Stephen Palecz told the council that the same Faulfiss had brought back a piece of stone from Wycliffe’s tomb, which the Czechs venerated as a relic. Hus’s partisan Peter of Mladonovice wrote that down, and nobody else reports it.

By 1410 the quarrel at Prague over his books had gone further than anything at Oxford. On 16 July Archbishop Zbynek had Wycliffe’s books burned in the courtyard of his palace, with the clergy, says a pro-Hussite university chronicle, singing the Te Deum and the bells ringing as if for the dead. That September the Lollard priest Richard Wyche wrote to Hus from London, and Hus read the letter out in a sermon to a crowd he put at nearly ten thousand, who asked him to turn it into Czech. His reply to England says, “populus non vult audire, nisi sacram Scripturam, praesertim evangelium et epistolas.” The people will hear nothing but holy Scripture, above all the gospel and the epistles.

The Council of Constance turned to the dead man. On 4 May 1415 it condemned forty-five articles and Wycliffe’s books, declared him a notorious and obstinate heretic, and ordered that his body and bones, “si ab aliis fidelium corporibus discerni possint,” if they could be told apart from the bodies of the faithful, should be dug up and thrown far from consecrated ground. The sentence says nothing of fire or water, and it names nobody to carry it out. A longer list of 260 articles came from Oxford itself, extracted by the twelve doctors whom Arundel’s Constitutions had set to work, and the council condemned it on 6 July, the day Hus, who had come to Constance to answer for his teaching, went to the fire as a heretic. Mladonovice saw the end of that. The executioners threw Hus’s coat and shoes on the fire so that the Bohemians should have no relics, then loaded the ashes into a cart and tipped them into the Rhine nearby.

For thirteen years nothing happened at Lutterworth. The church had no agreed pope until the council elected Martin V in November 1417, and the bishop of Lincoln until about 1420 was Philip Repingdon, once Wycliffe’s disciple and by then a hunter of his followers. Herbert Workman, Wycliffe’s biographer, says Repingdon would do nothing of himself, an inference, since no order to him has been found. His successor let seven more years go by.

Richard Fleming had been in trouble at Oxford himself. At about twenty-four he sat on the committee of twelve, and in the autumn of 1409 he also maintained propositions that Anthony Wood describes as rankly smelling of heresy, so that Arundel named him in a furious letter among those who had spoken against the Constitutions. Whether that was sympathy or love of argument is disputed. Wood says his mouth was stopped with preferments. He became bishop of Lincoln about 1420 and papal chamberlain, argued the papacy’s most extreme case at Siena in 1424, and was sent back to Lincoln in 1425 after the pope had tried and failed to make him archbishop of York. On 13 October 1427 he obtained letters patent for a little college at Oxford, a collegiolum, to train theologians against heresy, and his preface says why. The jaws of simple lay people, swinish jaws, were presuming to feed on “pretiosissimis margaritis,” the most precious pearls of the sacred page. Knighton’s swine and Knighton’s pearl had lasted nearly forty years. The thorns, Fleming adds, had grown up in the rose gardens of the universities, which he was in a position to know. Lincoln College is still there. John Wesley was a fellow of it.

The order came two months later, and the timing points to Bohemia. Martin V had already told the archbishops in February 1427 to have Wycliffe’s books surrendered and burned, and a crusade against the Hussites failed that summer. On 9 December he wrote to Fleming. The sentence was to be published in the churches when the crowds were largest, and the bishop was to go himself, “te personaliter conferens,” to the place of burial, have the bones dug up and thrown out as Constance had said, and then do two things Constance had not asked for, though Arundel had asked for the first. The bones were to be “igne publice concremari,” publicly burned, and the ashes disposed of so that “nullum possit imposterum residuum seu vestigium apparere,” no residue or trace could ever appear of the man whose memory was being wiped out. Letters went the same day to the king’s council, to Archbishop Chichele and to Humphrey of Gloucester, asking them to help.

The fullest account of what followed is a footnote to Arundel’s own law. Writing in 1429, William Lyndwood reached the name of John Wycliffe in the constitution against his books and stopped to gloss it. He starts with Bohemia, wholly poisoned by the man’s doctrine, against which Pope Martin had raised a crusade that year under Cardinal Beaufort. Then he says that the body buried in the parish church of Lutterworth was dug up by order of the Apostolic See, and the bones burned, “cineribus eorundem projectis in proximum amnem ad damnationem & deletionem memoriae suae,” the ashes thrown into the nearest stream, to the damnation and blotting out of his memory, with Richard Fleming, the present bishop of Lincoln, carrying it out, in the year 1428. A London chronicle confirms that the bones were “take uppe and brentte at Lutterworthe,” and Netter, who died in 1430, says that the river absorbed the ashes. These witnesses give no month and do not show whether Fleming stood there as the pope had told him to, and the bill for the work, Workman says, has not been kept. Lyndwood’s word for what Fleming did is exequente, carrying out, which could mean either.

Foxe has no name for the water: “which ashes also, they toke & threw into þ riuer.” He counts forty-one years from the burial, which is short by two or three, and his woodcut supplies the Official, the Sumner, the Commissary and the archdeacon who have stood around the grave ever since. He also wrote that “though they dygged vp his body, burnt his bones, and drowned his ashes, yet the worde of God and truth of his doctrine, with the frute and successe therof they could not burne.” The church historian Thomas Fuller named the Swift in 1655, 227 years after the event, and he is the first writer found to do so. “Thus this Brook hath convey’d his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow Seas; they, into the main Ocean. And thus the Ashes of Wickliff are the Emblem of his Doctrine, which now, is dispersed all the World over.” He reports a vulgar tradition that the brook has never overflowed its banks since, and dismisses it. The name is a safe deduction, because the Swift runs below the town. Martin V had ordered that there should be no residue, and Foxe and then Fuller made the residue the point.

1429–1532 · The readers

Five Chapters of St James

The residue was in people’s houses. Many Lollards never owned a Bible, and the records of their trials are full of people hearing one. About 1429, the year after the ashes went into the stream, a Norfolk woman, Joan Clifland, told Bishop Alnwick’s court at Norwich that her neighbor Margery Baxter had asked her and her maid to come in secret by night to Margery’s chamber, where “she should hear her husband read the law of Christ unto them, which law was written in a book that her husband was wont to read to her by night.” The law of Christ, Deanesly says, was the Lollards’ ordinary name for the New Testament. Another witness, William Wright, listed who in the group could read as though it were a piece of intelligence: Thomas Moon’s daughter “can read English,” William Bate’s son “can read English very well.” He also traced a single book. The priest Hugh Pye had bequeathed “a new Testament, which they then called the book of the new law,” to Alice, a servant of the Lollard priest William White, and a man in Colchester was holding it for her.

Ninety years later, in the Chilterns, the same life can be seen more closely, though only through Foxe, because Bishop Longland’s court book is lost and what survives is what a partisan editor copied from a prosecutor’s clerk. Agnes Ashford of Chesham taught James Morden some verses of Matthew 5, and he came to her five times to learn them. The lessons were taken down, and two lines show where they came from. “Blessed be mild men, for they shall weld the earth” has the verb of both Wycliffite versions, weld for possess. “A city set upon a hill may not be hid” follows the Later Version, a citee set on an hil may not be hid, where the Early has putt. Some hundred and thirty years after the translators finished, their English was still alive in a Buckinghamshire woman’s mouth. Other phrases have drifted, candle for lanterne, and that may be her or the clerk or Foxe, but a clerk could hardly have supplied weld. She was bid to recite these lessons “before six bishops,” and they told her to teach them “no more to any man, and especially not to her children.”

Alice Colins of Ginge was “a famous woman among them, and had a good memory, and could recite much of the Scriptures, and other good books.” When a conventicle met at Burford, commonly they sent for her. Her husband Richard owned more than almost anyone in the record, the tract called Wycliffe’s Wicket, the Gospel of John, the epistles of Paul, James and Peter, a book on the Apocalypse, and still the group sent for the wife who remembered. Their daughter Joan learned “the Ten Commandments, the seven deadly sins, the seven works of mercy, the five wits bodily and ghostly, the eight blessings, and five chapters of St. James’s epistle,” which is all of it. Most of that list is what any parish priest was supposed to teach. What set it apart, on this page’s reading, was lay people teaching it in English at home, with James on the end. The London goldsmith John Barret had the same epistle “perfectly without book.” Old Durdant of Iver Court, at dinner with his children and their wives, sent a boy out “that he should not hear and tell,” and then recited Paul and the Gospels.

A copy in the head could not be seized, though memory had risks of its own. James Morden, Agnes Ashford’s pupil, used his Pater Noster and Creed so much in English “that he had forgotten many words thereof in Latin,” and Bishop Smith ordered him to say them no more in English. He did not keep the injunction, “he fell therefore into relapse,” and he appears among those condemned for it in 1521.

Books were dear, and the prices in the record fall into no neat order. Nicholas Belward paid four marks and forty pence for a New Testament in London about 1429, and Foxe, who had seen what print did to prices, remarked that the same money would now serve forty people. Alice Sanders of Amersham gave twelve pence toward a book for her daughter and was told that a noble, six and eightpence, would not suffice; another time she gave sixpence toward a book that cost five marks, which looks like a purchase pooled among many. The same record has a Bible at twenty shillings. Foxe says that some gave a load of hay for a few chapters of James or Paul, and no entry he prints supports it.

Durdant begged his visitors not to say he had an English book in his house, “lest he should be burned for the same.” When Roger Parker told John Phip he was foul to blame for burning his books, since they were worth a hundred marks, Phip answered “that he had rather burn his books, than that his books should burn him.”

The instrument that found these readers was the oath. Longland, says Foxe, “first began with one or two of those who had been abjured,” and made them name others by force of the oath they had already sworn, since refusal risked relapse. The inquiry then fed itself. Robert Bartlet named his brother, his sister and his wife. Robert Pope named his father, his brother and his wife. William Phip and his son Henry named each other. John Edmunds had placed his daughter Agnes with the Colins family “to the intent she might be instructed there in God’s law,” and then he named her too. Penance was meant to be seen: three times around Burford market, a quarter of an hour on the cross step with a faggot, a bundle of firewood, on the shoulder, a faggot through high mass, a faggot at a burning, bread and ale on Fridays for life, and a mark on the cheek that no hat or kerchief might hide. The fire was rare and the faggot common. Queen Mary would burn some 284 Protestants in under four years in the 1550s. A count through Foxe gives about fifty Lollards burned from 1401 to 1532, more than half of them after 1500, on a partisan list with known gaps.

In the spring of 1511 Archbishop Warham’s court sat at Knole on a group from the Weald of Kent. It laid twelve articles to five people, and all five burned. Nine concern doctrine, and the twelfth says they “have communed and talked of the said damnable errors heretofore, with divers other persons, and have had books concerning the same.” William Carder denied the articles, witnesses were brought, and he submitted, and Foxe, reading the register, observed that it “maketh no mention of any relapse.” He burned all the same, because the court held him too stiff-necked to have confessed of his own will and at once. Agnes Grebill, sixty years old, also denied them. Her husband, who Foxe says had already abjured, testified that she had held these opinions since the end of Edward IV’s reign, nearly thirty years before, and that he and she had taught the boys at about seven. Both sons said that their parents had taught these things at home for the past three years, “as well on holy-days, as working days.” She burst out, “as the register reporteth,” “that she repented the time that ever she bare those children of her body,” the only words of hers found. She was sentenced on 2 May 1511. Her husband and sons, the historian P. R. Cavill reports from Norman Tanner’s edition, were ordered to watch Carder burn. On the bench as Warham’s chancellor sat Cuthbert Tunstall, in whose house there would be no room twelve years later for William Tyndale.

So the working rule, as far as the surviving record shows it, had three branches. A first offense confessed and abjured meant penance. Refusing to abjure meant the fire, as the statute of 1401 said, and at Knole at least so did denial followed by proof from witnesses, even after a late submission. Relapse meant the fire. A book in the house of someone who had never sworn raised Lyndwood’s suspicion; in the house of someone who had, it proved a broken promise. No one in these records was sent to the fire for a plain English Bible alone, and most people found with books abjured. John Calle, a London chaplain, confessed nothing in 1428, yet with him was found a well-written book of the gospels in English, “Liber novae legis in Anglico.” He was sent to his bishop and disappears from the record. John Stilman hid Wycliffe’s Wicket and a book of the commandments in an old oak, abjured, went back for them about two years later, was taken with them years afterward in London, and burned at Smithfield on 25 October 1518, having also called Wycliffe a saint in heaven.

The Coventry burnings of 4 April 1520 are told on the King James page. They took six men and a widow, Joan Smith, and the principal cause of the arrests, says Foxe, was teaching their children and family the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments in English. The men were condemned for relapse, most of them having borne faggots before. The children were charged “upon pain of suffering such death as their fathers should” to meddle no more with those texts. Foxe’s story has the widow let go, and the summoner leading her home by the arm in the dusk when he “heard the rattling of a scroll within her sleeve.” It held the Lord’s Prayer, the Articles of the Faith and the Ten Commandments in English, and he took her back to the bishop, who condemned her. The court book shows that she had done penance in 1511. The bishop’s people, Foxe says, put it about that the seven had burned for eating flesh on Fridays, and he denies it on the word of a witness then alive, Mother Hall of Baginton.

Thomas Harding of Chesham and his wife Alice had abjured in 1506. For failing to name others under oath he was ordered in 1522 to wear for life, on his right sleeve, before and behind, a badge of green cloth embroidered like a faggot. About Easter 1532, when the town went to church, he walked out to the woods with a book of English prayers and sat on a stile. Someone saw him and ran to the officers, who went to his house and searched it, and under the boards of the floor they found “certain English books of holy Scripture.”

Longland condemned him for relapse. He was burned in a dell at the north end of Chesham on the eve of Corpus Christi, an old man past sixty, and Rowland Messenger, the vicar of Great Wycombe, who had charge of the day, turned to the crowd when it was over. “Good people! when ye come home, do not say that you have been at the burning of a heretic, but of a good true christian man.” Foxe had the account in writing from townspeople of Amersham, and he supposed that the vicar had not considered what he was saying. Then the vicar and his priests went to dinner.

1476–1526 · Fifty years of print

No Printer So Hot

People like these were passing manuscripts from hand to hand in a country that had printers. William Caxton brought his press to Westminster in 1476, and for the next fifty years, so far as anyone has shown, no English printer issued a book of the Bible. Forshall and Madden stated the negative flatly in 1850: the first New Testament printed in English was Tyndale’s in 1526, and the first whole Bible was Coverdale’s in 1535. Caxton believed there was something to print. In his preface to the Polychronicon in 1482 he says that John Trevisa, vicar of Berkeley, “atte request of one Sir thomas lord barkley translated this sayd book / the byble & bartylmew de proprietatibus rerum out of latyn in to englyssh.” Deanesly thought that “merely an unlucky guess” at the authorship of the Wycliffite versions, though Dove, as we saw, kept Trevisa among the translators. The next year Caxton printed the Golden Legend, and after its feast days the book says, “Here folowen the storyes of the byble.” They run from Adam to Judith, set to the Sundays from Septuagesima, and at Genesis 3:7 Adam and Eve sew fig leaves together “for to couere theyr membres in maner of brechis.” An English reader of the 1480s could buy Genesis in print, retold inside a book of saints. The primers and other small print of those years were not surveyed for this essay and may hold more.

Across the Channel the presses had moved much faster: a complete German Bible from Johann Mentelin of Strasbourg before 27 June 1466, two Italian Bibles at Venice in 1471, a French New Testament at Lyon about 1476, most of the Old Testament in Dutch at Delft in January 1477, a complete Catalan Bible at Valencia in March 1478, and a Czech Bible at Prague in 1488, at the cost of four citizens of the town. By 1522 there had been twenty-two Bibles in the Germanic tongues, and on the account of the historian Andrew Gow none of them was licensed.

More’s Messenger complains that the law “holdeth but here,” and the claim has become a commonplace: England alone was denied the Bible in its own language. That is wrong twice over. Other places had bans, some of them older and harsher than Arundel’s. Paris in 1210 ordered theological books in Romance handed to the bishops, “and that all their possessors shall be regarded as heretical.” Toulouse in 1229 denied lay people the Old and New Testaments even in Latin, psalter and breviary excepted. Tarragona, a few years later, said that “No man shall possess books of the Old or New Testament in Romance,” and gave the owners eight days to hand them over for burning. Those drafters had the word that Arundel’s left out. And other great vernaculars had no printed Bible in 1526. Castilian had none, and the Inquisition ordered the Catalan Bible of 1478 burned; one leaf survives, in New York. The Spaniard Francisco de Enzinas wrote in 1543 that in Spain was prohibited what was conceded to all other nations, the grievance the English had been voicing for a century and a half. A Lollard writer had put it in the mouth of John of Gaunt, who was dead by then and cannot be asked: “we wel not be the refuse of alle men; for, sithen other naciouns han Goddis lawe, wiche is lawe of oure byleue, in ther owne modur langage, we wolone haue oure in Engliche, who that euere it bigrucche.” Yet there was no universal ban either. No pope or council ever issued one, and at Constance, where Jean Gerson, chancellor of Paris, objected that many lay people had the Bible in the common tongue and said the scheme of reform proposed to abolish it, the council passed no such decree.

England had a restriction that held over a whole province for more than a century, with bishops examining suspects’ books, and no printed Bible arriving to swamp it. Gow, who calls the Roman ban one of the most persistent errors about the Middle Ages, makes fifteenth-century England his stated exception.

The one explanation found from the time for the printers’ silence is More’s, and it concerns money. Heretics, he says in the Dialogue of 1529, will lay their money together and make a purse among them to print a badly translated book, because each of them loses only his share if it is burned. “Yet I thynk ther wyll no prynter lyghtely be so hote to put eny byble in prent at hys own charge / wherof the losse sholde lye hole in hys owne necke / and than hange vppon a doutfull tryall whyther the fyrst copy of hys translacyon was made before Wyclyffys dayes or synnys. For yf yt were made synnys / yt must be approued byfore the pryntynge.” That is the clause of 1409, in the time of Wycliffe or since, turned into a commercial risk, and nothing in the text itself would tell a printer when it was made. Tyndale answered in 1531. “Why might not the bishops shew which were that lawful translation, and let it be printed? Nay, if that might have been obtained of them with large money, it had been printed, ye may be sure, long ere this.”

John Hacker, a water-bearer of Coleman Street in London, told Bishop Tunstall’s officers in 1528 that “John Stacy, of Coleman-street, bricklayer, kept a man in his house, whose name was John, to write the Apocalypse in English: and that one John Sercot, grocer, then dwelling in Coleman-street, bare the costs of the said writer.” The entry has no date of its own, and Hacker’s dealings in these papers run back about six years. A bricklayer’s house and a grocer’s money were producing English scripture by hand, on a private commission of a kind the surviving books do not show, in a city that had had printers for half a century.

1526–1531 · The old books meet the new

A Point for the Old Books

On 28 April 1528 John Tyball of Steeple Bumpstead in Essex made his confession before Cuthbert Tunstall, by now bishop of London, in the chapel of his palace, and it ends “The mark of John Tyball,” which need not mean he could not read. He had served as churchwarden of his parish and could argue Paul with its priests. Some seven or eight years before, he said, he had come by “certaine bookes of the iiii. Evangelistes in Englishe, of one holie John, and certayne Epistoles of Peter and Paule,” and by reading them, and one chapter to the Corinthians above all, he had fallen into his errors. Holy John may be a person, a nickname or an attribution; the record does not say.

In 1526 or soon after, he and Thomas Hilles, a tailor’s man from Witham, went up to London to buy a New Testament from Friar Robert Barnes at the Austin Friars. They found him in his chamber with a merchant reading and two or three others present, and they showed him their old books. “Which bookes the sayd Frear dyd litle regard, and made a twyte of it, and sayd, A poynt for them, for they be not to be regarded toward the new printed Testament in Englishe. For it is of more cleyner Englishe.” A twyte is a taunt, and a point was probably the tagged lace of a garment, a thing worth nothing. He sold them the Testament for three shillings and twopence and asked them to keep it close.

Hilles remembered the room differently. His deposition, printed by Edward Arber, has the visit at Whitsuntide where Tyball has Michaelmas, a young gentleman with a chain about his neck where Tyball has a merchant, and a Testament apiece at three shillings where Tyball has one between them at three and two. The extract in print says nothing of the old books. No other verdict on the two texts has been found from anyone who had both in front of him, and this one comes from a friar selling the new one, through a suspect under examination, about a year and a half later. Two frightened men were trying to recall the same afternoon, and the line depends on one of them.

It was a cash sale. The usual telling has the two men trading in their Wycliffite scriptures, and the depositions do not support it, because neither has the friar taking a book from them. Tyball says what became of his four Gospels and his epistles, which sound like the same books: “which he brent the same day at night, as he saithe, that Sir Richard Fox was tached.” Fox was his curate. Tyball destroyed those books on the night the curate was arrested, after keeping them for seven or eight years.

What the Lollards gave the new book was a market and a set of rooms. Retellings speak of a Lollard smuggling network, and the Tunstall papers show something smaller. Every supply line that can be traced in these papers starts outside the old groups, with a Harmond beyond the sea, a Mr Fyshe by the White Friars, the vicar George Constantine, an Austin friar, a Lombard of London. The Lollards bought, lent, read aloud and sold on in small numbers. Hilles read his copy in four named houses and sold it to the curate Fox. John Pykas, a Colchester baker, had a book of Paul’s epistles in English from his mother in Bury, who told him to live by it, and about two years before he was examined he bought a New Testament “of a Lumbard of London” for four shillings. When he heard that such Testaments were forbidden, he gave both books back to her. Robert Necton, a London dealer, read Tyndale aloud at Thomas Matthew’s house in Colchester while old Father Hacker, the water-bearer, talked of prophecies. The bishop’s articles asked Necton whether he had Wycliffe’s Wicket or the Apocalypse, as though it were all one trade.

How much these groups mattered to the Reformation is disputed. Hudson thought them a living sect to the end, Richard Rex, as his reviewers report him, finds the evidence for a large role thin, and the historian R. N. Swanson finds virtually nothing to suggest a national organization. Of the text he writes that “orthodoxy absorbed the Wycliffite Bible.”

The printers saw the use of the old writings at once. In Antwerp Johannes Hoochstraten, as the bibliographers identify him, signing himself Hans Luft of Marlborow in the land of Hesse, printed Tyndale’s Parable of the Wicked Mammon and Obedience in 1528 and his Genesis on 17 January 1530. That year the shop, under the same false address, brought out A compendious olde treatyse, the Lollard tract with Queen Anne’s gospels in it, and it also printed the examinations of Thorpe and Oldcastle. The preface to the treatise gives the reason: “That ye may knowe that yt is not Tyndales translacyon yt moueth them but only the inwarde malyce whiche they haue euer had ageynst the worde of God.” If a corrupt translation were the real objection, the editor adds, the idle bellies have had leisure enough to put forth a good one. A text its editor dated about 1400 had become evidence in the argument over Tyndale.

Whether Tyndale himself used the old translation is a separate question, and nothing read for this essay shows it either way. He wrote in 1526 that he “had no man to counterfeit, neither was helped with English of any that had interpreted the same or such like thing in the scripture beforetime,” which excuses a rough first attempt and does not deny that older English existed. A word search of his works finds him naming Wycliffe as a preacher and never as a translator, and when he wanted a precedent for an English Bible he reached past Wycliffe to King Athelstan. Foxe reports that Tyndale copied out and corrected William Thorpe’s Lollard examination in his own hand, and the bibliographers put a question mark beside that. The Victorian scholar Brooke Foss Westcott denied direct descent, and Hudson thought it could not be shown. The dozen shared phrases tested for this page all have other possible routes, through Old English or the Latin, and Tyndale was working from Greek where the Wycliffites had worked from the Vulgate. At Bethlehem they do not even agree on the building.

The printed book and the man who made it belong to William Tyndale’s page. The old text had a stranger end.

1536–1850 · What became of it

Begun Again

The reformers wanted the argument and left the translation in manuscript. The General Prologue reached print before any line of the Bible it was written for. John Gough printed it in 1536 as The dore of holy Scripture, calling it “a very auntyent thynge,” and in 1550 Robert Crowley issued it as “The true copye of a Prolog wrytten about two C. yeres paste by Iohn Wycklife,” found in an old English Bible, “Whych Bible remaynith now in ye Kyng hys maiesties Chamber.” That book is now Cambridge University Library Mm. 2. 15. In 1519 it had belonged to Stephen Tomson, a papal notary. In the reign of Edward VI somebody gave it a new title in a gold border, “The holy Bible, the lyuely worde of the lyueynge God,” and painted EDOVERDVS SEXTVS in gold on an inserted leaf. Thirty-six years after Dr Hed went through the same Prologue to condemn a dead man, it stood in the king’s chamber in the king’s name, and the translation behind it was still unprinted. Elizabeth Tyrwhit, a Protestant lady of the court, later owned the book, and she gave it away with a verse on paper stitched to the flyleaf, dated 1 January 1571: “Sethen I knowe my lyf is short, / And that my book and I must part, / to you my dere and faythful frende / My chefest juel I doo comend.”

Thomas Cranmer, Henry VIII’s archbishop of Canterbury, gave an official account in his preface to the Great Bible of 1540, the Bible set up in the churches. “It is not much above one hundred years ago,” he says, “since scripture hath not been accustomed to be read in the vulgar tongue within this realm,” and of the translation that followed the Saxon one many copies remain, “and be daily found.” Counted back from 1540 that lands in the 1430s, a generation after the law. He never names Wycliffe, and Deanesly thought he did not know whose it was. In 1571 Archbishop Parker had the West Saxon Gospels printed under Foxe’s name. Two modern scholars read that as a bid for an ancient precedent, one that skipped the Wycliffites altogether.

The old books went on being used. Queen Elizabeth received a New Testament as a New Year’s gift from her chaplain John Bridges, and “Elizabeth Regina” stands in a copy now at York Minster, in what the editors of 1850 took to be her hand. Robert Barker, the royal printer who would produce the King James Bible, gave a Wycliffite manuscript to Thomas Bodley’s new library in 1604. The men who made his Bible knew of such books: their preface says that “many English bibles in written hand are yet to be seen,” and it credits John Trevisa, and not Wycliffe. Families entered their children’s baptisms in them and handed them on. Robart Hornbe wrote in his that on 17 March 1543 “my mother hathe gyvin to me” this new testament. John Wyttone, a London embroiderer, bought a New Testament in two volumes in 1554 from a former parish clerk of St Dunstan’s and noted that it was reckoned three hundred years old, which overstates it by more than a century. Someone was still copying the text by hand in 1569, on paper, from a manuscript found at the suppression of Fotheringhay College. And a sixteenth-century reader left a slip in a Bible now in Dublin: “This ancient monyment of the holy scripture dothe show, how the Lord God in all ages and tymes wold haue his blessed woorde preserved.”

Print came late. John Russell of Merton College issued a prospectus on 1 August 1719, and by 1721 a whole Bible stood transcribed in thirteen quarto volumes, their title page reading “Finally transcribed for the press.” They are in the British Library, and they never reached one. John Lewis printed a New Testament in 1731, in 140 copies, and it was the Later Version under Wycliffe’s name. The whole text appeared in 1850, when Forshall and Madden finished the four volumes that had taken up a considerable part of twenty-two years, in the hope of removing “some portion of the disgrace which has long been attached to the English nation, for the continued neglect of its earliest versions of holy Scripture.” By then the King James had been in print for 239 years. There is still no complete modern critical edition, and an Oxford project has published only a partial trial. The name has done better than the text. A linguistic course that opened in an Arkansas farmhouse in 1934 took the name, and the mission agency that grew from the course still honors the man an encyclopedia of that state calls the first scholar to translate the entire Bible into English. No medieval scribe who copied it says that he did.

In a big Later Version Bible of about 1420 at the Queen’s College, Oxford, on a blank leaf after the table of lessons, a servant of the queen’s scullery wrote out what he had done with the book, and he wrote in Latin. “Ego Willm. Smyth, seruiens scutellie Dominae Reginae Elizabethae, incepi legere 2° die Octob. an°. 1561, et finem feci 10 die Junii a°. 1563; iterum relegere incepi 12° Junii an°. praedicto.” I, William Smyth, servant of the scullery of our lady Queen Elizabeth, began to read on 2 October 1561 and made an end on 10 June 1563; I began to read it again on 12 June of the same year. The Great Bible had been in print for more than twenty years and the Geneva for three. He had a book a hundred and forty years old, in an English that was going out of reach. A century earlier a woman had wanted two doctors to read this translation before she would buy it. He names no doctor. He took twenty months over it, rested a day, and went back to the beginning.

c. 1370 – 1850

The whole thing, in order

1. Early 1370sWork on an English Bible may begin at the Queen’s College, Oxford, on Mary Dove’s reckoning.
2. 19 February 1377Wycliffe is cited to St Paul’s, and the sitting breaks up over whether he may sit.
3. 1378On the Truth of Holy Scripture asks for preachers, and for no translation.
4. May 1382The Blackfriars council condemns twenty-four conclusions during an earthquake. None concerns the Bible.
5. 1 July 1382Nicholas Hereford is excommunicated at Canterbury.
6. 31 December 1384Wycliffe dies at Lutterworth, three days after falling at mass.
7. 10 August 1387A bishop of Worcester’s mandate is the first dated document found to use the word Lollard.
8. November 1389William Smith of Leicester is forced to hand over English gospels and epistles he had spent eight years writing out.
9. c. 1390Knighton complains that the pearl of the gospel is being trampled by swine.
10. By the 1390sTwo Oxford copies of the Early Version stop two words into Baruch 3:20, and a note in one names Hereford.
11. c. 1395The General Prologue, probably of these years, explains the Later Version in the voice of a simple creature.
12. December 1397The Pleshey roll: a Bible in English in two great books, forty shillings, among the romances.
13. c. 1401Oxford masters, almost certainly Ullerston among them, take opposite sides on whether the Bible may be translated.
14. March 1401William Sawtrey burns at Smithfield, and De heretico comburendo follows within days.
15. 28 November 1407Arundel’s clergy meet at Oxford. Article seven forbids translating and reading, and has no word for owning.
16. January 1409The Constitutions are published again at St Paul’s, among the papers of a meeting about the two rival popes.
17. 5 March 1410John Badby burns. A spider crosses his mouth in the register and is cut by Foxe.
18. 16 July 1410Archbishop Zbynek burns Wycliffe’s books at Prague to the sound of the Te Deum.
19. 1413Oldcastle’s quires are seized at a limner’s bench in Paternoster Row.
20. 19 February 1414Arundel dies at Hackington, struck in the throat.
21. 4 May 1415Constance orders Wycliffe’s bones dug up. It says nothing of fire.
22. 6 July 1415The 260 articles from Oxford are condemned, and Hus burns the same day.
23. August 1415John Claydon is condemned as relapsed, with a book in red leather that he could not read.
24. 1416Chichele orders sworn men to report anyone having suspect books in English.
25. 9 December 1427Martin V orders the bones burned, and no trace left.
26. 1428The bones are burned, and the ashes go into the nearest stream.
27. c. 1429Joan Clifland tells the Norwich court of a book read aloud by night.
28. c. 1430Lyndwood finishes the Provinciale: not a heretic, but a vehement suspicion.
29. 1431Bishop Stafford forbids anyone in Bath and Wells to possess English scripture.
30. Before 1471Two doctors read a New Testament before a woman buys it for six and a half marks.
31. 1476Caxton sets up at Westminster. No English printer is known to issue a book of the Bible for fifty years.
32. 2 May 1511Agnes Grebill is condemned at Knole on the evidence of her husband and sons, with Tunstall on the bench.
33. December 1514Richard Hunne is found hanged, and thirteen articles are drawn from the Prologue of his Bible.
34. 22 March 1517Dame Anne Danvers sends an Early Version New Testament to Syon, with her family’s names on the last leaf.
35. 4 April 1520Six men and a widow burn at Coventry.
36. 1521Bishop Longland’s inquiry in the Chilterns sets those who have abjured to name their families.
37. 1526 or soon after“A poynt for them,” says Friar Barnes, and sells two Essex men a printed Testament.
38. 28 April 1528John Tyball confesses before Tunstall and signs with his mark.
39. 1530One Antwerp shop prints Tyndale’s Genesis and an old Lollard treatise.
40. 1532Thomas Harding is taken at Chesham, with English scripture under his floor.
41. 1534Parliament annuls the statute of 1401, protesting at suspicion conceived of a bishop’s own fantasy.
42. 1536The General Prologue reaches print, before any of the Bible it introduces.
43. 1540Cranmer says the English Bible has been out of use for not much above a hundred years.
44. 1543A statute forbids most women, apprentices, servants and laborers to read the English Bible.
45. 1550Crowley prints the Prologue from a Bible in Edward VI’s chamber.
46. 12 June 1563William Smyth of the queen’s scullery begins his Wycliffite Bible again.
47. 1655Thomas Fuller is the first writer found to name the Swift.
48. 1721The whole Bible is transcribed for the press in thirteen volumes, and never printed.
49. 1731John Lewis prints the Later Version New Testament under Wycliffe’s name, in 140 copies.
50. 1850Forshall and Madden print both versions whole, over twenty-two years.

Who says so

A note on sources

This is a secondhand history, built on the books named below and on what could be read of the primary texts in printed editions, and where those disagree the disagreement has been left in the prose.

Much of what is said here about Lollard readers reaches us through one partisan. The court books of Bishops Longland and FitzJames are lost, so the Chilterns entries and Hunne’s articles depend on what John Foxe chose to copy from the registers. The Kent record survives in Archbishop Warham’s register, but Norman Tanner’s edition of it was not read, so the Kent articles here are Foxe’s too. The Norwich quotations are Foxe’s English of a Latin court book. His book was read in the nineteenth-century reprint and in scans of the editions of 1570 and 1583, and differences between editions have not been tested. What a suspect says in these records was said under examination to a clerk who wrote it down in his own way.

Other things stand on one witness, and those witnesses are named in the sentences on purpose. John Horn’s oath is the source for Wycliffe’s last days. A single Lollard tract is the only evidence for Arundel’s sermon on Queen Anne’s gospels. Tyball alone reports “more cleyner Englishe.” Lyndwood and Thomas Netter are the only writers of the time found to mention water at Lutterworth, and Netter’s sentence was read only in Workman’s English. Lyndwood’s gloss, which gives this page its title, was read in one printing, that of 1679, and has not been checked against a manuscript.

Several readings here are this page’s own and should be taken as such. The argument that Arundel’s letter to the pope pins the translation on Wycliffe’s posterity comes from the grammar of the Latin as printed by Wilkins, read on the page; it differs from how Deanesly and Hudson are reported to read it and from Dove’s account of the letter, and no Latinist has checked it for this essay. The three branches of the working rule in Five Chapters of St James are drawn here from the cases, with no scholar’s statement behind them; what they say of denial rests on one court in 1511, whose canon law was not checked, and Foxe held its refusal of a late submission unlawful. The figure of about fifty burnings is a count made here from Foxe, with known gaps, and no historian’s total was found. The thirty-one Bodleian records in forty-two is also a count made here, from a sample. The comparison of Agnes Ashford’s lessons with the Wycliffite versions was made here, and Hudson may have made it first. That the supply of Tyndale’s Testaments started outside the Lollard groups is an inference from the Tunstall papers, and the link between the bones and the war in Bohemia is an inference from the dates. The gloss on a point as a lace-tag is a guess, and scutellie is read here as the scullery.

Some of the most important modern work could not be read. Anne Hudson’s The Premature Reformation, the chapters of Mary Dove’s book after its introduction, Henry Ansgar Kelly’s study of 2016, Nicholas Watson’s article on censorship, Ian Forrest on the detection of heresy, Susan Powell on licensing, Chris Given-Wilson’s recent book on Arundel, Richard Rex on the Lollards, Henry Summerson on the books of Henry IV, Norman Tanner’s Norwich and Kent editions, Shannon McSheffrey and Tanner on Coventry, John Thomson’s The Later Lollards, David Daniell, Gerald Hammond and David Norton on Tyndale’s English, and Bennett’s edition of Fleming’s register were all known only from reviews, excerpts and quotation in other books. Where those scholars are named above, that is what stands behind the name. Hudson’s verdicts here rest largely on her short essay for the Tyndale Society, which was read, and Charles Kightly’s figures for the rising come from an unpublished thesis of 1975. Norwich and Kent could still add a case or change a date, and Fleming’s register could give the month. A second medieval note on the translators, naming N and J, is reported in print and was not traced.

The wording of the Wycliffite Bible is taken from Forshall and Madden, apart from the Corpus 147 lines, which were read on the page. The end of Bodley 959 was read in the Bodleian’s images of f. 332, and what it suggests about a stint is this page’s own reading; f. 250 of Douce 369 is not online, so its break is reported from the catalog and from Forshall and Madden. Their Early Version column is itself stitched from several manuscripts, so it is the editors’ text and no single scribe’s, and they print th where the manuscripts may have thorn. Early printed English keeps its spelling here, with most of the printers’ contractions written out.

Further reading

• Margaret Deanesly, The Lollard Bible and Other Medieval Biblical Versions (1920) — A century old and still the book that gathers the evidence: the wills, the catalogs, the Latin of the Oxford debate and the tract on Queen Anne. Wrong on some things this page corrects, and invaluable anyway. Freely available.
• Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions (1850) — Four volumes, both versions side by side, the General Prologue, and a list of 170 manuscripts that is still worth reading for its transcribed inscriptions. Freely available.
• Mary Dove, The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (2007) — The standard modern account. Her short article, The First English Bible: A Lost Opportunity, in the British Academy Review the same year, is free and has the Rylands note.
• Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (1988) — The great modern reconstruction of the movement, and the book a reader should go to next.
• Elizabeth Solopova, Manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible in the Bodleian and Oxford College Libraries (2016) — The catalog that moved the copying back toward the law. Its descriptions can be read in the Bodleian’s online catalog of medieval manuscripts.
• William Lyndwood, Provinciale (1679 edition) — The glosses are the source of the title of this page and of the nearest stream. Latin, in double columns around the statute.
• David Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae (1737) — The text of the Constitutions, of Arundel’s letter to the pope and of Badby’s spider.
• John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments, edited by Stephen Reed Cattley and George Townsend (1837–41) — Volumes three to five hold nearly every Lollard named here. The editing has its critics, and the reader should remember whose side Foxe is on. Freely available.
• Herbert B. Workman, John Wyclif: A Study of the English Medieval Church (1926) — Two volumes, old-fashioned and thorough, and the fullest narrative of the man and of the bones.
• R. N. Swanson, ‘Lollardy’, ‘Orthodoxy’, and ‘Resistance’ in Pre-Reformation England (2013) — A short open-access article, and the best quick corrective to the idea of a national movement.
• P. R. Cavill, The Grebills of Benenden, the Prior of Leeds, and the Heresy Trials of 1511 (2014) — One Kent family followed through the court and out the other side, down to what became of their land. Foxe places them at both Tenterden and Benenden.
• Andrew Gow, The Contested History of a Book: The German Bible of the Later Middle Ages and Reformation in Legend, Ideology, and Scholarship (2009) — Free online, and the clearest statement that there was no general medieval ban, with England as the exception.
• Edward Arber, The First Printed English New Testament (1871) — Prints Thomas Hilles’s deposition, and is the place to compare it with Tyball’s, which is in John Strype’s Ecclesiastical Memorials.

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