William Tyndale — Storied No. 011

In the England of the 1520s it was a crime to read the scriptures in your own language. The Bible was Latin, the priest was its gatekeeper, and a man who translated it without licence could be burned. William Tyndale — a Gloucestershire priest with Greek, Hebrew and a temper — asked the Bishop of London for a room and a salary to do the work properly. He was refused. So he left England in 1524 and never came back, working out of Cologne, Worms, Hamburg and Antwerp, one step ahead of the men hired to find him.

He was caught in the end, held in a castle near Brussels for some five hundred days, and killed at about forty-two. But the words survived him. When the King James translators sat down eighty-five years later, they kept so much of his phrasing that roughly five sentences in six of their New Testament are still, word for word, Tyndale's. Let there be light. The powers that be. The salt of the earth. My brother's keeper. He wrote English that a ploughboy could carry in his head — and four centuries of English writers have been carrying it ever since.

Gloucestershire to the stake

The lifeline

c. 1494

Born in Gloucestershire, in the Vale of Berkeley near the Severn

1515

Takes his MA at Oxford; later at Cambridge; ordained priest

1524

Refused a patron in London, he sails for Germany — and never returns

1526

The first printed English New Testament, at Worms; smuggled home in cloth bales

1530

Prints the Pentateuch — the first English scripture straight from Hebrew

1536

Strangled and burned at Vilvoorde, near Brussels, on 6 October

By the numbers

The measure of him

84%

Of the King James New Testament is still Tyndale's own wording, by one word-by-word count

3

Known copies of his 1526 New Testament survive, from a print run in the thousands

~500

Days held in the castle at Vilvoorde before his execution

1

Letter survives in his own hand — asking for a warmer coat and his Hebrew books

What he made

The work

1525

The Cologne fragment. Printing is raided part-way through Matthew; he escapes up the Rhine carrying the sheets. A single fragment of that first attempt survives, in the British Library.

1526

The Worms New Testament. The first printed English New Testament translated from the Greek — small enough to hide, and shipped into England hidden in bales of cloth and sacks of flour.

1528

The Obedience of a Christian Man. His argument that a king answers to God, not to Rome — a book Anne Boleyn is said to have put into Henry VIII's hands.

1530

The Pentateuch. The first English translation made directly from Hebrew. To carry its idiom he minted words English did not yet have: Passover, scapegoat, mercy seat, atonement.

1534

The revised New Testament. His masterpiece, made in Antwerp — the text the King James committees would sit with, and largely keep.

Still spoken

The phrases. Let there be light · the powers that be · the salt of the earth · my brother's keeper · a law unto themselves · fight the good fight · the signs of the times · eat, drink and be merry.

Hunted, then inherited

Recognition

In his lifetime

Bishop Tunstall refused him house-room for the work — then bought up his New Testaments and burned them at St Paul's Cross
Thomas More attacked him in print at enormous length; Tyndale answered
Declared a heretic and pursued across the Low Countries by English agents
Betrayed in Antwerp in 1535 by Henry Phillips, a man he had befriended
Executed at about forty-two, his name absent from the Bibles built on his work

Today

Within a year of his death, Henry VIII licensed an English Bible that was largely Tyndale's
His wording carries through the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible and the King James of 1611
In 1994 the British Library paid over £1 million for a copy of his 1526 New Testament
Historians of the language rank his influence on written English beside Shakespeare's
A monument 111 feet high stands above his home country in Gloucestershire

The country that made him

The Vale of Berkeley

He came from the flat green country between the Cotswold edge and the River Severn — a cloth-trading district whose merchants shipped wool to Antwerp, the very route his smuggled Testaments would later travel in reverse. As tutor at Little Sodbury Manor he argued theology at his employer's table with visiting clergy, and it was there, by tradition, that he made his famous vow about the ploughboy. Above the village of North Nibley, on the hill he would have known, a tower was raised in his name three centuries later.

1866

The Tyndale Monument completed on Nibley Knoll, above the Severn vale

111 ft

Its height — a stone tower visible for miles across the valley

12

Years he lived in exile, from leaving England in 1524 to his death in 1536

"If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost." — William Tyndale, to a learned cleric, c. 1523 As recorded a generation later by John Foxe