Krapp, George Philip. “Bible and Prayer Book.” In The Rise of English Literary Prose, pp. 218-70. New York: Oxford University Press, 1915.

[In the following excerpt, Krapp identifies the principal English translations of the Bible as crucial factors in the formation of modern English prose.]

I

Most Englishmen were doubtless aware of the existence of such a book as the Bible before Wiclif's English version was made, but very few could have known any practical use of it. As an English book, the history of the Bible begins with the third quarter of the fourteenth century. But even this beginning was abortive, and not until Tindale published his New Testament in the first quarter of the sixteenth century did the Bible speak the language which ever since has been familiar to all whose native tongue was English. The Bible is the oldest and has always been the most widely distributed of popular English books. By its side, a little younger and less general in its interest, stands the English Prayer Book. Both are to be regarded as monuments of English literature, for whatever their origins, generation after generation of Englishmen has accepted them as possessions of the English people in no less degree than the plays of Shakspere or the allegories of Bunyan. Only the learned pause to think that these books have a history which passes beyond specifically English bounds.

But though Bible and Prayer Book are popular possessions of the race, they were at the beginning and have remained so in different degrees. The English Bible of the sixteenth century was really the growth of centuries. Its preliminary forms were many, and its adaptation to the English mind was gradual. Around it in time were gathered many popular aspirations and enthusiasms. It was fought for because it was wanted. In this slow process of development, the Bible became one of the ineradicable traditions of the English people. They appropriated it and incorporated it into the very structure of their being. It became the common law of a large part of their moral and social life. On the other hand, the Prayer Book from the beginning satisfied the thought and feeling of a more limited section of the English people. It came not in answer to a general popular demand, but to a large extent it was imposed upon the public by the organized authority of the Elizabethan establishment. English churches have seldom raised the question whether or not there should be an English Bible, but they have continually raised the question whether or not there should be a service-book, and non-conformist churches have usually answered this question in the negative. The Prayer Book expressed with dignity and elevation one mood or temper of the spirit of reverence, but it has never been adequate to satisfy all shades and degrees of religious feeling. Though second only to the Bible in the familiar knowledge of the English people, it has always been more or less tinged by the narrowing prejudices of sect and class in such a way as to deprive it of that universality of appeal which of all English books the Bible alone possesses. The Prayer Book was the child of the Established Church, but the English Bible sprang from that common ground of English character where sects and creeds disappear and where the literary and the artless, the learned and the unlearned, freely meet.

The story of the vernacular translation of the scriptures runs back almost to the beginnings of the English race in England. Even before any attempt at specific translation was made, the text of the scriptures was freely drawn upon by the poets who sang in the native tongue. According to Bede,¹ Cædmon composed a versified narrative of practically the whole Bible. Some of the poems of Cynewulf are based, directly and indirectly, upon the story of the New Testament. Besides these two, doubtless there were many other poets of the Old English period, not now known to us by name, who followed a general custom of paraphrasing Biblical narrative in the terms of native heroic poetry.

All this, however, was very different from translation in the specific sense. The purpose of Old English Christian poetry was literary and devotional, to a very slight extent doctrinal. There was no attempt in these poems to reproduce the text of the scriptures with any verbal exactness. Experiments in more exact translation were made, however, by a number of scholars. Bede, according to the well-known story, completed a translation into English of the Gospel of St. John upon his death-bed, of which unfortunately no manuscript has survived. An Old English translation of the Psalms, however, is still extant, and a number of Biblical manuscripts with glosses in the vernacular are further evidence of early attempts at translation. Towards the end of the Old English period came Ælfric's translation of parts of the Old Testament, and the more important translation of the Gospels into West Saxon by one, or perhaps several, unknown scholars. But there is no evidence of any attempt to translate the whole of the Bible in the Old English period, nor is there any evidence that such translations as were made were intended for popular use. Ælfric expresses his unwillingness to continue with his work of translation for fear that the English version of the text might be put to improper uses by the ignorant of both clergy and laity. And the numerous interlinear versions of and glosses on Latin texts were obviously intended as aids in the reading of Latin, not as a means by which those ignorant of Latin could dispense with the Latin originals.

In the years which immediately followed the readjustment of English life and affairs after the Conquest, no great change appears in the English attitude towards the scriptures. Popular interest continued to be satisfied by versified paraphrases of portions of the Old and New Testaments, which were hardly distinguishable from the general body of current legendary and hagiological literature. Bible paraphrases on a large scale after the manner of the Historia Scholastica of Peter Comestor, were written in French, but the nearest parallel to these works in English is the long poem entitled Cursor Mundi, to a great extent based upon the Historia Scholastica, but including much miscellaneous historical and legendary material. A century earlier, about the year 1200, was written another long poem known from the name of its author as the Ormulum, in which Orm intended to translate all the Gospels for the year, adding expositions on them. The book was designed for the instruction of the people in ‘holy Gospel's lore,’ but the poem, although it reaches ten thousand lines in length, does not carry the plan to completion. As it is, the pearls of the Gospel are almost completely lost in Orm's ocean of commentary.

Paraphrases of Genesis and of Exodus were also made in a popular metrical form, and at the beginning of the fourteenth century an English prose Psalter, the work of a not unskillful translator, appeared in the West Midland dialect. Biblical texts were of course freely inserted in homilies and sermons, many sermons being, as Wiclif complained, nothing more than a string of scriptural quotations with just enough connecting commentary to make it impossible for the hearer to tell where the scripture left off and the commentary began. Indeed the average layman down to the time when printed texts of the Bible began to be circulated must have had a very confused sense of what was scripture and what was not. He knew perhaps his Pater Noster and a certain number of texts, and undoubtedly he was familiar with a great number of Biblical stories, especially those of the more picturesque and dramatic kind. But he must have found it difficult, if the thought ever occurred to him, to distinguish the exempla of profane origin with which the preacher adorned his sermon from the authentic narratives of the scriptures. The seven deadly sins, the marvels of the Physiologus, in short all the store of pious legend and doctrine which he heard from the pulpit must have seemed to him of equal authority with the narrative of the creation or of the atonement and resurrection. For the scriptures as a book with a definitely limited content he could have had scarcely any appreciation until such time as the actual pages of the volume could be held in hand. Only then was it possible to make the Bible the single and all-sufficient rule of conduct for this life and the next which it was soon to become.

For the first attempt to construct an English version of the scriptures with a view to presenting the Bible as a whole, we must turn to the age of Wiclif. The conception of a complete popular translation of the scriptures probably originated with Wiclif himself, but before the Wiclifite version was finished, orthodox tendencies in the same direction had already manifested themselves. These orthodox experiments, however, differed from Wiclif's in that the translations were intended only for the use of members of religious orders and others who occupied some more or less officially recognized position in the church, and who found difficulty in reading the Latin and French versions already extant. They were not intended for the use of the common people. An interesting example of this more limited kind of translation is the version made in the latter part of the fourteenth century at the request of the members of some unknown religious house.² This book opens with a prologue giving a brief narrative account of the creation, of the fall of Lucifer, and of the story of Adam and Eve. It then takes the form of a dialogue between a “lewed and unkunnynge” brother and sister, that is, monk and nun, on the one hand, and their brother superior on the other. The brother superior acts as instructor and gives a running account of the Old Testament, and more briefly, of the teachings of the New Testament. Then follow translations of the Epistles, Acts, and the first chapter of Matthew. Perhaps the intention was to translate all the Gospels, and indeed this may have been done, although no such complete manuscript has survived. The significance of this translation lies in the fact that it was frankly intended for the orthodox unlearned in the church. The main purpose of the translator was to make the meaning of the text clear, and his English is in general simple and idiomatic. It is not an unreasonable supposition that if the Wiclifite version had not appeared under Lollard auspices and had not consequently brought to a focus and intensified the hostility of ecclesiastical authorities towards vernacular versions of the scripture, the church itself might soon have put forth, as it constantly maintained its intention of doing, an authorized and complete English Bible.

The exact extent of Wiclif's share in the translation which is usually known by his name, cannot now be determined. That the project was inspired by Wiclif was the common opinion of his day and likewise of his successors in the task of making an English Bible. It seems probable that the New Testament was taken up first, and this translation may have been made by Wiclif himself. The Old Testament was in part the work of Nicholas de Hereford, who translated as far as the book of Baruch, where the translation breaks off in the middle of a sentence. The probable date at which Hereford was interrupted in his work was the year 1382.³ The Old Testament was then completed by a different translator, who again may have been Wiclif himself. Shortly after Wiclif's death the whole translation underwent a revision, probably at the hands of John Purvey, Wiclif's successor in the leadership of the Lollard party. The extraordinary popularity of these translations, all made from the Latin of the Vulgate, is attested by the large number of manuscripts scattered throughout England which are still extant in various degrees of completeness;⁴ and these, it should be remembered, are probably but a relatively small number which survived the wear and tear to which popular books are always subject and the no less destructive zeal of the orthodox party in the early part of the fifteenth century.

Of the many hampering considerations which attended the translation of the scriptures in the fourteenth century, perhaps the most disturbing was the uncertainty which prevailed as to the proper balance to be maintained between literal translation and paraphrase. No such feeling existed when the question was one of the translation of monuments of profane literature into English. In such cases the universal method was that of paraphrase, the purpose of translation being assumed to be the transference of the sense of the original to the forms of English speech. The scriptures themselves had indeed often been paraphrased in this manner. But when it came to the question of translating the Bible as a book, a paraphrastic version of any man's conception of the content or sense of the book could not be regarded as satisfactory. The task before the translator was not that of interpreting the book, but of transferring it literally in body to another language. Two great opposing necessities therefore confronted him. On the one side he must take heed not to do violence to the almost sacred forms of speech in which the original was written, and on the other lay the necessity of making his translation at least intelligible, and if possible, natural and idiomatic. Deficiencies of vocabulary in the native speech and lack of parallelism in grammatical structure and word-order between English and Latin were the main obstacles in the way of the translator who should attempt to produce in English an exact equivalent of the Latin version. At a later period the task of translation was further complicated by questions of the doctrinal coloring of English words, but at the time the Wiclif versions were made, theological discussion had not advanced so far as to make these questions seriously felt. Wiclif's problem was the relatively simple one of finding the safe mean between the extremes of literal translation and of free adaptation of the Latin originals.

Three differing conceptions of the art of translation, which for convenience' sake we may ascribe to Wiclif, Hereford, and Purvey, with passing acknowledgment that the exact share of each in the specific work of translation is not altogether certain, may be distinguished in this first English Bible. Of these three, Hereford was the most literal, Purvey was the most idiomatic and free, and Wiclif occupied a middle ground between the two extremes. Hereford's version of the Old Testament is often extremely literal, in this respect going even farther than Wiclif, who not infrequently sacrifices English idiom for the sake of close correspondence between the English and Latin. The principles which Purvey followed in his revision of the whole “were designed to render the version more correct, intelligible and popular; and it manifestly becomes more easy and familiar as the translator advances.”⁵ In the Prologue to his revision, Purvey has set down some of the rules which governed him in his work. He tells how he first collated many “elde biblis,” taking into consideration the statements of the doctors and the glosses in the text in order to make “oo Latyn bible sumdel trewe.” Having collected his materials, he then studied them and took counsel of “elde gramariens and elde dyvynis of harde wordis and harde sentencis, hou tho miȝten best be undurstonden and translatid.” And finally he translated the text as clearly as he could, according to the significance, taking care to have “manie gode felawis and kunnynge at the correcting of the translacioun.” Purvey insists strongly upon the necessity of translating not too literally, but according to the thought of the original. The best translation from Latin into English, he says, is to translate “aftir the sentence, and not oneli aftir the wordis, so that the sentence be as opin, either [or] openere, in English as in Latyn”—but he adds the saving clause, “and go not fer fro the lettre.” If the letter may not be followed in translating, then let the thought be ever whole and open, for the purpose of words is to express thought and meaning, and if they do not serve this purpose, they are superfluous or false. Specific instances are then cited by Purvey of ways in which the English translation may legitimately vary from the Latin original in order to make the thought more clear. Ablative absolutes may be translated as finite clauses, “the maistir redinge, I stonde” being rendered “while the maistir redith, I stonde,” or “if the maistir redith,” etc., or “for the maistir,” etc. Sometimes the construction may be rendered by whanne or aftirward, as in “whanne the maistir red, I stood,” or “aftir the maistir red, I stood,” or it may even be rendered by an independent clause, arescentibus hominibus prae timore being translated, “and men shulen wexe drie for drede.” In a similar way, a participle, present or past, active or passive, may be resolved into a verb of the same tense, dicens being translated “and seith” or “that seith.” Or a relative may be resolved into a phrase containing a conjunction and the antecedent of the relative, “which renneth,” for example, being equivalent to “and he renneth.” When the Latin order of words would be obscure in English, the English order is to be preferred; thus the Latin sentence Dominum formidabunt adversarii ejus, would read literally in English, “the Lord hise adversaries shulen drede,” but, continues Purvey, “I Englishe it thus bi resolucion, ‘the adversaries of the Lord shulen drede him.’” In translating words which may have several meanings in Latin, care should be used to choose the English word which accords with the thought of the sentence in which the Latin word occurs. The Prologue insists a number of times that an English translation may be as clear, or even clearer than the Latin original. It also comments on the necessity of taking figurative speech figuratively, adding the caution that “autouris of hooly scripture usiden moo figuris, that is, mo fyguratif spechis, than gramariens moun gesse, that reden not tho figuris in holy scripture.” Purvey then announces the less tenable position, that whatever thing in God's word may not be referred properly to honesty of virtues or to the truth of faith, “it is figuratyf speche.”⁶ Spiritual interpretations, finally, are commended, but it is pointed out that the literal understanding of the scriptures is the foundation of all spiritual interpretation.

Such were some of the problems to be considered by a fourteenth-century translator of the scriptures who would realize the proper mean between an exact literal translation and the more familiar medieval method of paraphrase. In the light of the later development of the translation of the scriptures into English, the modern reader will feel that neither Wiclif nor Purvey went far enough in accommodating their versions of the Latin to the English idiom. In many instances the later revision improves greatly upon the earlier text, as, for example, in the translation of Mark i, 31-33, where the earlier version reads:

And he cummynge to [Vulgate accedens], reride hir up, the hond of hir taken [apprehensa manu ejus], and anoon the fevere left hire and she mynystride to hem. Forsothe the evenynge maad [vespere autem facto], whenne the sone wente doun, thei brouȝten to hym alle havynge yvel and havynge develis.

This is more idiomatically, and indeed quite adequately, expressed in the revised version:

And he cam nyȝ, and areride hir, and whanne he hadde take hir hoond, anoon the fever left hir, and sche servede hem. But whanne the eventid was come, and the sonne was gon doun, thei brouȝten to hym alle that weren of male ese, and hem that hadden fendis.

Often, however, even Purvey's revision is not carried far enough, especially in the books of the Old Testament. Translating Genesis i, 11, the earlier version reads:

Burion [burgeon] the erthe grene erbe and makynge seed [facientem semen], and appletre makynge fruyt [faciens fructum] after his kynd, whos seed ben in hym silf, upon the erthe; and maad it so [et factum est ita].

Purvey's translation is only slightly better:

The erthe brynge forth greene eerbe and makynge seed, and appil tre makynge fruyt bi his kynde, whos seed be in it silf on erthe; and it was doon so.

The inadequacies of the revised translation arise less from the difficulties attaching to words in themselves, for the words of the Vulgate usually find a fairly satisfactory English or Latinized English equivalent, but rather from a disregard of the native idiom. Thus the definite article is often omitted, as in Matt. v, 13, “Ye ben salt of the erthe” [Vos estis sal terrae]. In verse 11 of the same chapter the English revision reads, “whanne men schulen curse ȝou … for me,” where “for me” renders the Vulgate propter me. In Matt. v, 25, “Be thou consentynge to thin adversarie soone,” the English is a literal translation of the Vulgate, Esto consentiens adversario tuo cito. The unidiomatic “Nyle ȝe” is frequently used as an imperative, translating Latin nolite, e.g. Matt. vi, 19, “Nile ȝe tresoure to ȝou tresouris in erthe, where ruste and mouȝte destrieth.” Such passages as these are not sporadic, but are so persistent as to give the general tone to the translation. As a work of literary art the Wiclifite Bible cannot be said to have established a new and high standard of English style, nor does it seem probable that it could ever have become a genuinely popular Bible. Nevertheless the work was nobly conceived, and it was carried out with respect for the highest standards of scholarship and of dignity in expression which were possible in its time. Its errors were all on the safe side of caution, and when one considers the difficulties and constraints which must have attended any attempt to translate the scriptures in Wiclif's day, the wonder is not that it failed to be a permanently satisfactory translation, but that it should be as good as it is.

Further growth in the form of this first English version of the Bible was checked shortly after its completion by the hostility which it aroused on the part of the clerical and anti-Lollard authorities in church and state. The attitude of the conservative element in English society towards the vernacular translation of the scriptures is well illustrated by the frequently quoted remarks of the contemporary chronicler, Henry Knighton. Wiclif, he says, has translated the Bible, which Christ gave to clerks and teachers of the church, so that now it is better known to lay men and women who can read than formerly it was to learned clerks. “In this way the pearl of the Gospel is scattered broadcast and trodden under foot by swine. And thus, what is wont to be esteemed by clerks and laity as precious is now become as it were the common joke of both; the jewel of the clerics is turned to the sport of the lay people.”⁷ Wiclif himself frequently commented on the hostility of the friars towards English versions of the Bible and explicitly defended their use.⁸ He often insisted also on the necessity of presenting the Gospel to humble people and dwellers in “litil touns,” following the example of Christ who himself “wente to smale uplondishe touns, as to Bethfage and to Cana in Galile.”⁹ Rich men might possess copies of the English scriptures for themselves, but the inhabitants of the villages and of country communities were dependent upon the poor priests, many of whom doubtless carried with them in their wanderings more or less complete copies of the Wiclifite Bible. In this way the laity not only became acquainted with the idea of an English Bible, but also with a considerable body of the text itself. A movement was thus set on foot which, if it had not been checked, must soon have resulted in further revisions of the English scriptures, and perhaps in the production of a version more completely in accord with the popular feeling for idiomatic expression than was possible in the first experiments of Wiclif, Hereford, and Purvey. Powerful influences were brought to bear, however, to obstruct the popular movement thus begun. In the year 1408 were issued the famous Constitutions of Archbishop Arundel, in which the use of vernacular translations was forbidden, sub majoris excommunicationis poena,¹⁰ unless the translation had been approved by a provincial council of the church. More specifically this prohibition was directed against Wiclif, who is mentioned by name.

There is no reason for supposing that at this early period the use of vernacular translations of the scriptures was absolutely forbidden by the authorities of the church. Men of high position and members of religious orders probably met with little difficulty in obtaining approved copies of translations of at least parts of the Bible, if they wanted them. But the evidence is conclusive that the orthodox party did not itself father an English translation of the Bible, and that it powerfully discouraged the use of any such translation by common folk and the laity. Sufficient confirmation of this is found in the fact that in the many trials of Lollards for heresy which were held in the early fifteenth century, the possession of a copy of the English Bible, or even attendance upon readings of it, was regarded as damnatory evidence. In 1431, John Stafford, the bishop of Bath and Wells, “threatened with excommunication any who translated the scriptures or copied such translations.”¹¹ In the face of such opposition, the use of the Wiclifite Bible necessarily became more and more limited, and, at least so far as the common people were concerned, more and more furtive. With the gradual changes in English speech which took place in the fifteenth century, important changes in vocabulary, in inflections and in syntax, the language of the Wiclifite Bible must also soon have needed revision in order to make it intelligible to readers of later times. This lack of authoritative support and of revision are in themselves causes sufficient to account for the fact that the Wiclifite Bible did not become the foundation of the English Bible of the Reformation, that by the end of the fifteenth century it was remembered mainly as having established the tradition of an English Bible, and that when Tindale set about the task of creating a new popular version, he carried on his work in almost complete disregard of what Wiclif and his assistants had already done. The influence of Wiclif's English Bible must be sought not by the way of any immediate literary successors, but in the hidden current of popular thought and feeling which it set in motion and which for many years it secretly fed. In a later generation the popular tradition thus established exerted a powerful influence upon the minds of the public leaders of men in politics and religion and upon the forms of English literary art.

Over a hundred years were to pass after the completion of the Wiclifite Bible before another successful attempt could be made to translate any considerable portion of the scriptures into English. The story of the translation and the publication of Tindale's New Testament, obscure in some minor details, is on the whole clearly known. Tindale submitted himself to a long period of preparatory discipline before he undertook the task which was to be the chief labor of his short life. After a residence at Oxford and Cambridge which covered a period of at least ten years, he removed in 1521 to the country, where he became tutor in the family of a Gloucestershire gentleman. It was not long before his advanced opinions with respect to the use of the scriptures led him into conflict with some of the local clergy, and it was at this time that he is reported to have made his famous answer to one who declared that it were better to be without God's law than the pope's: “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the scripture than thou doest.”

In pursuance of this purpose, two years later Tindale journeyed to London with the expectation of finding support from Tunstall, the bishop of London, as a scholar and one interested in the translation of the New Testament. As testimony of his ability, he bore with him a translation into English from the Greek of Isocrates. But Tunstall received him coldly and could find no place for him in his household. His hope of episcopal support having proved vain, Tindale soon realized the impossibility of completing in England the work which he had undertaken. “I … understode at the laste,” he wrote later, “that there was no rowme in my lorde of londons palace to translate the new testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all englande.”¹²

In 1524 he sailed for Hamburg, and soon after passed on to Wittenberg, where he almost certainly saw Luther.¹³ The work of translation advanced apace, and in 1525 a part of the New Testament was printed at Cologne. Forbidden to continue the printing of the text by the civil authorities of Cologne, Tindale escaped to Worms, where the printer Schoeffer was successful in carrying the work of printing to completion before the end of the year. With the aid of certain of those liberal-minded merchants who throughout were Tindale's chief supporters and patrons, copies were straightway sent over to England and distributed. Tunstall, in a sermon preached at Paul's Cross, October 24, 1526, bitterly denounced the translation, declaring that he had found three thousand errors in it. The translation was condemned to be burned by a conclave of bishops, and this sentence was executed upon as many copies as could be discovered. In this, says Tindale, the bishops did not otherwise than he expected. Having completed his New Testament, Tindale turned his attention to the other parts of the scriptures, publishing a translation of the Pentateuch in 1530, and one of the Book of Jonah in 1531. He also added to a revised edition of his New Testament in 1534, the Epistles from the Old Testament, which included passages from the historical books of the Old Testament as well as from the Pentateuch. No more of Tindale's Old Testament was printed during his life, but his manuscript translation of the books from Joshua to 2 Chronicles was probably used by his friend Rogers in the preparation of the so-called Matthew Bible. A second slighter revision of the New Testament appeared in 1535, and this brought to an end Tindale's work in the English version of the scriptures. He died at Antwerp, at the martyr's stake, in October, 1536, young in years but with the realization of a great task carried nearly to completion.

Two endeavors, not easily combined, were constantly before Tindale in the preparation of his English Bible. On the one side, the ideal of scholarly exactness demanded a truthful, though not a literal, reproduction of the original, and on the other, the translation could be effective, as Tindale meant it to be, only by being intelligible and, still more, by being interesting to the simple folk in whom Tindale was mainly interested. Tindale was convinced that it was impossible “to stablysh the laye people in any truth, excepte the scripture were playnly layde before their eyes in their mother tonge, that they might se the processe, ordre and meaninge of the texte.”¹⁴ And this thing only, he declares, moved him to translate the New Testament. At another place he sets forth in greater detail the reasons which justify an English translation of the scriptures.¹⁵ His main points are as follows:

(1) The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, not a learned tongue but the speech of the people: why then may we not have both the Old and the New in our tongue?

(2) “They will say haply, the scripture requireth a pure mind and a quiet mind: and therefore the lay-man, because he is altogether cumbered with worldly business, cannot understand them. If that be the case, then it is a plain case that our prelates understand not the scriptures themselves: for no lay-man is so tangled with worldly business as they are.”

(3) Another objection was that if the scriptures were in the mother tongue, every man would understand them after his own way. “Wherefore serveth the curate,” answers Tindale, “but to teach him the right way? Wherefore were the holy days made, but that people should come and learn? Are ye not abhominable schoolmasters, in that ye take so great wages, if ye will not teach?”

(4) The apostles preached in their mother tongue, and if one preach a good sermon, why may it not as well be written?

(5) St. Jerome translated the Bible into his mother tongue, and why may we not do the same?

(6) “They will say it cannot be translated into our tongue, it is so rude. It is not so rude as they are false liars. For the Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than with the Latin. And the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin.”

(7) People are wont to follow different authorities, i.e. the various doctors of the church. “Whereby shall I try and judge them [the doctors]? Verily, by God's word, which only is true. But how shall I that do, when thou wilt not let me see the scripture? … Nay, say they, the scripture is so hard, that thou couldst never understand it but by the doctors. That is, I must measure the mete-yard by the cloth. Here be twenty cloths [i.e. doctors] of divers lengths and of divers breadths: how shall I be sure of the length of the mete-yard by them?”

(8) They will say that you cannot understand the scriptures without philosophy, without a knowledge of Aristotle. “Aristotle saith, ‘Give a man a law, and he becometh righteous with working righteously.’ But Paul and all the scripture saith, ‘That the law doth but utter sin only, and helpeth not: neither hath any man power to do the law, till the Spirit of God be given him through faith in Christ.’” Teaching of the scriptures, says Tindale, should be the teaching of God's law, and not the philosophies of nominalists and realists, with their “predicaments, universals, second intentions, quiddities, haecceities, and relatives.” Diversity of teaching among the doctors is to be corrected by return to the pure word of the scriptures. “Now whatsoever opinions every man findeth with his doctor, that is his gospel, and that only is true with him, and that holdeth he all his life long; and every man, to maintain his doctor withal, corrupteth the scripture, and fashioneth it after his own imagination, as a potter doth his clay. Of what text thou provest hell, will another prove purgatory; another limbo patrum; and another the assumption of our lady; and another shall prove of the same text that an ape hath a tail.”

(9) “Finally that this threatening and forbidding of the lay people to read the scripture is not for the love of your souls (which they care for as the fox doth for the geese) is evident, and clearer than the sun; inasmuch as they permit and suffer you to read Robin Hood, and Bevis of Hampton, Hercules, Hector and Troilus, with a thousand histories and fables of love and wantonness and of ribaldry, as filthy as heart can think, to corrupt the mind of youth withal, clean contrary to the doctrine of Christ and of his apostles.”

(10) “A thousand reasons more might be made, as thou mayest see in Paracelsi Erasmi, and in his preface to the Paraphrase of Matthew, unto which they should be compelled to hold their peace or to give shameful answers.”

The form and manner of expression which Tindale settled upon as adequate to realize his conception of an English Bible for lay readers were of his own invention. He had no predecessors in English who served him as models. In the Epistle to the Reader at the end of the Worms edition of his New Testament, he begs that his readers be not offended at the rudeness of the work and he asks them to consider 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 before time. … Count it as a thing not having his full shape, but as it were born before his time, even as a thing begun rather than finished.”¹⁶

Comparison of Tindale's translation with earlier English versions of the Bible, or parts of it, bears out Tindale's claim to independence. The style of his first New Testament is altogether new in the development of English translations of the Bible; but it was not rudely or imperfectly conceived. By the time Tindale began the actual task of translation he had definitely established the principles of his work, and from these he never greatly departed. The style which he accepted was above all simple and popular. He avoided, not altogether, but with rare exceptions, the use of unidiomatic Latinisms in syntax, and also the use of unfamiliar Anglicized Latin words. Long words were not cultivated as a means of elevating the style, nor were the rolling cadences of liturgical prose imitated. Obvious ornaments of style, such as alliteration, the heaping of synonyms, puns, antitheses, and similar mechanical devices of wordplay, were not called for by the original and were not added by Tindale. More striking is his avoidance of the quaint and pointed picturesque style of familiar colloquial origin which was the almost universal possession of writers and translators in sixteenth-century England and which Tindale himself frequently employed in his freer and easier prose writings. He made no effort to reach his readers by bringing his translation down to a low level, to color it, as Sir Thomas North did his Plutarch, by broad suggestions of the familiar realistic sides of English life. Striking a happy balance between simplicity and dignity, between the artful structure of a learned style and the easy informality of colloquial speech, Tindale attained a form of expression, simplex munditiis, unsurpassed for his purposes. The limits of faithful translation to be sure imposed certain restrictions upon any tendencies towards stylistic exuberance which he may have had, and the quiet tone of the originals from which he translated provided useful models of restraint and propriety in expression. It was no small merit in Tindale, however, that he was content to work within the bounds which his originals and his own purpose established for him. So completely did he realize these limits that he produced a translation which has all the idiomatic propriety and the vitality of original composition. Translation with him became a creative process.

Although Tindale in his first translations of the New Testament had already struck the note which was to become ever afterward the form of expression peculiar to the English scriptures, he did not cease to alter and improve. Many changes were made in the edition of 1534, some for the sake of more exact correspondence in meaning between the English and the originals, some for the sake of brevity, and a multitude of minute corrections for the sake of “more proper English.” The great majority of the changes of this latter sort were made in order to avoid a certain meagerness of phrasing, and also to correct rapid and awkward transition from one thought to another. The style which lay at the base of Tindale's translation was the easy, polysyndetic, and naïve style of simple narrative. In his revisions he carefully corrected locutions which interrupted this simple rhythm, and he very often added connectives which improved it. Very frequently he merely added an and to a sentence to soften an abrupt beginning, or the simpler logical relations were indicated by other conjunctions, such as but, or, if, and though. Sometimes also he changed the order of words, as, for example, John viii, 45, beleve ye nott me (1525), which becomes the more idiomatic, ye beleve me not (1534); or again he simplified by omission, as in Luke xiv, 28, which of you is he that is desposed to bilde a toure (1525), which reads in the revision, which of you disposed to bilde a toure (1534). Numerous changes were made for grammatical reasons, and words more appropriate to the meaning were substituted for others. Nowhere is there any indication that Tindale translated with the desire to interpret the scriptures by paraphrase in favor of any particular set of doctrines. His purpose was above all to make the meaning clear as he understood it, and he translated always “of a pure intent, singly and faithfully.”¹⁷ As to vocabulary, he used in the main words which had established themselves in the language and which were in general use. He avoided learned Greek and Latin coinages. His attempts to replace conventionalized ecclesiastical terms by words of familiar and fresher value, such as seniors or elders for priests, congregation for church in the sense of the membership, not the physical structure, of the church, love for charity, are few in number and by no means violent. Sir Thomas More declared that Tindale's New Testament was full of heretical translations, maliciously inserted. But though he charges that over a thousand texts are mistranslated, More limits his illustrations to a very few examples of the kind just mentioned. The truth is that Tindale was not doctrinaire in his translation, and seldom or never forced unusual meanings into words. The differences of opinion between Tindale and More were such as affected ideas and institutions, not merely words, and these differences would have been the same whether the institutions were called by one name or another. In fairness to himself Tindale could not have done otherwise than use the terms which expressed most clearly his understanding of the ideas which the words were supposed to designate. The proof of the essential justice and sanity of Tindale's translation is to be found in the fact that, both in general tone and very largely in detail, it was followed in all important later English versions of the Bible. The Authorized Version derives not merely phrases from Tindale's translation, but whole connected passages. In the history of English prose the origin of the English Bible is consequently to be dated not from the early years of the seventeenth century, but from the second quarter of the sixteenth century when the work in its essentials was both conceived and executed.

The question was formerly much discussed whether Tindale's scholarship was adequate for translation from the Greek of the New Testament and the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and it was often assumed that he translated only from the Vulgate or from Luther's Bible. But this question is now happily and finally settled. It is certain that Tindale was a competent Greek scholar before he began the work of translation, and certain also that he acquired sufficient command over Hebrew to undertake independent translations from that language. His main sources were the original Greek and Hebrew texts. In the mechanical arrangement and in the marginal glosses which accompanied the first fragmentary edition of the New Testament, Tindale followed the model of Luther's Bible. “Tyndale's New Testament is Luther's in miniature; the general appearance of the page is the same; the arrangement of the text is the same; and the appropriation of the margins, the inner one for parallel passages, and the outer for glosses, is also the same.”¹⁸ But this statement of the dependence of Tindale upon Luther does not apply to his text. Tindale's New Testament is primarily based on the Greek text of Erasmus, the third edition of which appeared in 1522, accompanied by a Latin translation, occasionally followed by Tindale in preference to the Greek. After Erasmus, Luther seems most to have influenced Tindale's translation, and after Luther the Vulgate. His method in translation was more or less eclectic, but on the whole he followed the most authoritative source for the text, which was the Greek of Erasmus. In the Old Testament as well, comparison of Tindale's translation with the Hebrew, with the Vulgate, and with Luther shows that the Hebrew original was not only consulted, but was carefully studied and followed as the final authority. Tindale's translations have, therefore, not only the distinction of being the first acceptable version in the English idiom, but also of being the first to rest upon an adequate scholarly understanding of the originals.¹⁹

After the publication of Tindale's translations, the further history of the English Bible must be followed in several directions. In the immediate line of succession come the various adaptations and modifications of Tindale which resulted finally in the Authorized Version of 1611. Before these are discussed, however, it will be convenient to consider several efforts that were made to produce a different kind of English Bible from Tindale's. It was Tindale's desire that every reader, no matter how simple, should understand the text of the scripture without the aid of special knowledge of any kind. So far as possible, therefore, he made his translation speak the language of the normal daily life of English men and women. At heart in sympathy with this theory of translation, Sir Thomas More was in some instances unable to reconcile his feeling for the special and traditional value of the scripture with Tindale's practice. For this reason he protested when Tindale translated the traditional words church, priest, grace, confession, charity, penance by congregation, elder, favor, knowledge, love, repentance, words in Tindale's mind of a fresher and clearer significance to English people than the ecclesiastical traditional terms, which to the pious implied many irrelevant connotations, and to the thoughtless had lost almost all significance because they were so familiar. This feeling of Sir Thomas More that the Bible by reason of its special distinction among books demanded a form peculiar to itself was shared by many others, and all through the sixteenth century was cherished by the advocates of a more learned and exclusive Bible than the popular English Bible of Tindale. Naturally the higher dignitaries of the church, and in general the conservative theorists in matters of church polity, were the chief opponents of the popular English Bible. Frequent protests were uttered by the bishops against the various popular translations as they were made, and promises of a version of their own were given. In the year 1534 the bishops presented a petition to the king for an English Bible to be made “by certain upright and learned men,” closing their petition with a request that no layman for the future be permitted to discuss the articles of faith publicly or the scripture and its meaning.²⁰ What such a Bible would have been if it had ever been made in the spirit of the more conservative scholarship of the time may be inferred from Gardiner, the bishop of Winchester's proposals for the revision of the Great Bible in 1542. At a meeting of Convocation held in that year, Gardiner presented a list of a hundred Latin words which “for their genuine and native meaning, and for the majesty of the matter in them contained” ought to be retained either in their original form, or “fitly Englished with the least alteration.”²¹ Some of these words were already in general use in slightly Anglicized forms, such as justice, glory, mystery, communion, prudence, society, apostle, and others. But apparently Gardiner would have had the Latin origin of even these words show more plainly, perhaps to distinguish the ecclesiastical from other uses of the words. Many of the words in the list, however, whether in a Latin or in an Anglicized form, would have been unintelligible to most English readers, and a translation of the Bible made in accordance with the principle Gardiner announces would have been in almost as great need of official interpretation as the Greek or Latin originals.

The fullest exemplification of this theory of an ecclesiastical English Bible was to appear a generation later, not under Anglican but under Roman auspices. The Rhemish New Testament, first published in 1582, and the Douai Old Testament, finished earlier but not published until 1609-10, were prepared under the same general direction in order to supply English Roman Catholics with an approved text of the Bible in their native tongue. The translation was published not “upon erroneous opinion of necessitie, that the holy Scriptures should alwaies be in our mother tonge, or that they ought, or were ordained by God, to be read indifferently of all, or could be easily understood of every one that readeth or heareth them in a knowen language,” or for any of a number of similar reasons which are specified, but merely as a practical and expedient measure, “profitable and medicinable now, that otherwise in the peace of the Church were neither much requisite, nor perchance wholy tolerable.”²² For reasons which are given in detail, the translation was made from “the old vulgar Latin text, not the common Greeke text.” The method of the translation was carefully considered and it is specifically defended. The translators declare that they are very precise and religious in following their copy, not only in sense, but also in the very words and phrases, which may seem at first “to the vulgar Reader & to common English eares not yet acquainted therewith, rudenesse or ignorance,” but which in time will become familiar and then will be more highly esteemed than if the words were “the common knowen English.” From this feeling of the sacredness of the text, the retention of many words in untranslated form is defended. If the older English Bibles retain Hosanna, Raca, and Belial untranslated, why may not the same be done with Corbana and Parasceve? “But if Pentecost, Act. 2. be yet untranslated in their bibles, and seemeth not strange: why should not Pasche and Azymes so remaine also, being solemne feastes, as Pentecost was?”²³ And if proselyte remain, why not also neophyte, if phylacteries be allowed, why not prepuce, paraclete, and such like? The verb evangelizo must be translated evangelize, not “as the English Bibles do, I bring you good tydings, Luc. 2. 10.” “Therefore we say Depositum, 1 Tim. 6. and, He exinanited him self, Philip. 2. and, You have reflorished, Philip. 4. and, to exhaust, Hebr. 9. 28. because we can not possibly attaine to expresse these words fully in English, and we thinke much better, that the reader staying at the difficultie of them, should take an occasion to looke in the table folowing, or otherwise to aske the ful meaning of them, then by putting some usual English wordes that expresse them not, so to deceive the reader.”²⁴ Moreover, continue the translators, we presume not in hard places to mollify the speeches or phrases, but religiously keep them word for word, and point for point, “for feare of missing or restraining the sense of the holy Ghost to our phantasie.” If the meaning is not transparent in the Latin or Greek original, according to the logic of the translators, there is no reason why it should be made clear in an English translation. The extreme learned bias of the translators is emphatically expressed in this concluding remark: “And why should we be squamish at new wordes or phrases in the Scripture, which are necessarie, when we do easily admit and folow new wordes coyned in court and in courtly or other secular writings?”²⁵

If the translation were to be used only by learned and courtly readers there was indeed little reason why the translators should not invent as many learned words as they pleased. And in fact the authors of the Rhemish Bible are much less extreme in their treatment of vocabulary than many a contemporary secular writer with a passion for aureate diction. The important question in this instance was not whether this or that new word should be accepted, but whether the whole project of a learned English Bible should be approved. In answering this question, by the end of the sixteenth century theoretical considerations carried little weight. By that time it had been determined once and for all that the accepted English Bible for protestant readers was to be a popular and not a learned book, that the text was to be as frank and open as possible, not recondite and cryptic. In justice to the Rhemish translation it should be said, however, that the effect of the whole is not as grotesque as might be inferred from the more extreme examples of learned locutions just cited. Consecutive passages of some length are frequently found which differ but slightly from the earlier English translations based on Tindale, and many readings which differ in the Rhemish translation from the earlier translations are familiar to us now because they were incorporated in the Authorized Version of 1611. The Rhemish Bible was an unsuccessful, but not an uninfluential experiment. In a revised form it remains to this day one of the standard English Bibles for Roman Catholic readers, but it has never been regarded as a fountain of pure English in the same degree as Tindale's popular English Bible.

Several other translations which fall outside the main line of descent of the English Bible must be noticed. In general the tendency in the development of English translations was in the direction which the Rhemish translation followed to the extreme, that is, in the direction of more exact and scholarly translation. Several efforts were made, however, to develop an English biblical style which should be more popular, or at least less learned, even than Tindale's. The first of these found expression in the English Bible of R. Taverner, published in 1539, the year of the Great Bible. A lawyer by profession and a not incompetent Greek scholar, Taverner makes no pretension to being an original translator. His work is based upon the so-called Matthew Bible, and his alterations are mainly made for the purpose of securing what he regarded as a more idiomatic English phrasing and vocabulary. Thus in I John ii, 1, where the other versions read advocate, Taverner uses the native word spokesman; and in the following verse, where the earlier versions follow Tindale in translating [UNK]λαsμ[UNK]s by he it is that obtaineth grace for our sins (the Rhemish version followed by the Authorized Version reading, he is the propitiation for our sins), Taverner invents an entirely new native word, he is a mercystock for our sins. Similar changes are the substitution of wickedness for iniquity (Matt. xiii, 41); ended for finished, (Matt. xiii, 53); break for transgress (Matt. xv, 2); lodged for had his abiding (Matt. xxi, 17); and because of the abundance of wickedness, the charity of many shall wax cold for Tindale's and because iniquity shall have the upper hand, the love of many shall abate (Matt. xxiv, 12); age for generation (Matt. xxiv, 34); nailed to the cross for crucified (Matt. xxvi, 2); to the forgiveness for for the remission (Matt. xxvi, 28). Taverner's Bible, however, is interesting merely as an experiment; it was crowded out of use by the Great Bible and it seems not to have exerted any influence upon later revisions of the text.²⁶ Another experiment similar to that of Taverner, though much more extreme, was the English translation of St. Matthew and the beginning of St. Mark, made by Sir John Cheke, in his own day regarded as the chief defender of the purity of the English language as opposed to those who would enrich, or according to the purists, corrupt, the language by freely borrowing words of foreign origin. This translation was never published in Cheke's lifetime,²⁷ and it is interesting mainly as an illustration of the form which extreme respect for the native idiom took in the time when it was made. Cheke's endeavor was to use only such words as had an immediately intelligible meaning in the English language. The older ecclesiastical words he consequently translates by means either of popular native words, or frequently by means of new coinages made up from native elements. Thus he translates apostle by fro-sent, parable by by-word, regeneration by gain-birth, resurrection by uprising or gainrising, money-changers by tablers, publicans by tollers, proselyte by freshman, crucified by crossed, centurion by hundreder, founded by groundwrought, etc. Though Cheke's strange vocabulary is for the most part readily intelligible, the general effect produced by it is of an artificial and unidiomatic language, in its way quite as pedantic as the English of the extreme Latinists. Cheke was the victim of a theory in the making of his translation, and his fantastic English brings out the more clearly the effectiveness of Tindale's simple and natural Biblical style.

After Tindale the next important figure in the development of the English Bible from the point of view of its literary form was Miles Coverdale. In his own Bible, published in 1535, Coverdale for the first time presented to the English people a complete Bible in their native tongue between two covers. This translation Coverdale declares to have been made with the help of “sondrye translacions, not onely in latyn, but also of the Douche interpreters.”²⁸ At another place he states that he has “with a cleare conscience purely & faythfully translated this out of fyve sundry interpreters, having onely the manyfest trueth of the scriptures before myne eyes.”²⁹ The Latin version which Coverdale followed was the translation of Pagninus, 1528, though he used also the Vulgate; and his German interpreters were first of all the Swiss-German version of Zwingli, known as the Zurich Version, completed in 1529, and secondarily, Luther's Bible. The Zurich version provided the basis for Coverdale's Old Testament, and Tindale, who was probably the fifth of the interpreters mentioned by Coverdale, is closely followed in the New Testament. Coverdale also used such parts of the Old Testament as Tindale had already published, that is, the Pentateuch and the Book of Jonah. Coverdale's Bible can consequently lay claim to no distinction from the point of view of original translation. Its merit consists first of all in assembling the different parts of the Bible into one complete volume, and secondly in the addition of a multitude of minute changes which do not indeed replace Tindale's Biblical style with a new one, but which in many instances result in a freer and ampler manner of expression than Tindale, severe because of his earnestness, permitted himself.

But Coverdale's influence upon the text of the English scriptures was exerted also through another channel. Following the publication of the Matthew Bible in 1537, a compilation made by Tindale's friend, John Rogers, from the translations of Coverdale and Tindale, the next important Bible was the Great Bible of 1539, the second edition of which, appearing the following year with a preface by Cranmer, is often referred to as Cranmer's Bible. It was the first authorized English Bible, and is thus often known as the Bishops' Bible. The work of revision in the Great Bible was intrusted to Coverdale, who returned more or less to the originals in the formation of his text, but who in the main revised on the basis of his own earlier translations and of Tindale's.

This list of the important revisions of the text is completed by the two later versions, the Genevan version of 1560 and the Authorized Version of 1611. The Genevan Bible was the joint work of a number of Puritan exiles temporarily resident at Geneva during the reign of Queen Mary. The revision was thorough, both for details of scholarship and for style, but the basis of it was the Great Bible and the effort in the preparation of it was distinctly not to make a new translation, but to revise the old one. Like the Genevan version, the Authorized Version was the work of a number of different scholars, “to the number of four and fifty,” according to King James' letter of instructions,³⁰ who carried on the task of revision more or less independently but following a set of principles agreed upon beforehand. First of all they agreed that “an entirely new version was not to be furnished, but an old version, long received by the Church, to be purged from all blemishes and faults; to this end there was to be no departure from the ancient translation, unless the truth of the original text or emphasis demanded.”³¹ “Truly (good Christian Reader),” the translators declare in their Preface, “wee never thought from the beginning, that we should neede to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one … but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principall good one, not justly to be excepted against; that hath bene our indeavour, that our marke.”³² Their task was to make the gold of the English scriptures shine more brightly, “being rubbed and polished.” The text of the Great Bible, accepted as standard, was continually before them, and departures from it, though numerous, were made only for good and definite reasons. On the whole one must admire the restraint of these four and fifty scholars, who zealously guarded the language of the scriptures to the end that they might “bee understood even of the very vulgar.” It was one of the avowed principles of their translation not to use words in special and limited ecclesiastical senses. They would not say to certain words, “Stand up higher, have a place in the Bible alwayes, and to others of like qualitie, Get ye hence, be banished for ever.” Niceness in words they counted to be the next step to trifling. How easy it would have been for them to indulge in literary preciosity, the fine writing of their own Preface clearly shows. “In a word,” so runs their panegyric on the Bible, “it is a Panary of holesome foode, against fenowed traditions; a Physions-shop (Saint Basill calleth it) of preservatives against poisoned heresies; a Pandect of profitable lawes, against rebellious spirits; a treasurie of most costly jewels, against beggarly rudiments; Finally a fountaine of most pure water springing up unto everlasting life.”³³ Only in the last clause of this sentence were the authors of this Preface subdued to that in which they worked.

Reviewing these several stages through which the English Bible passed, one finds that after Tindale the most significant contributions to it were made by Coverdale. Especially in the Old Testament Coverdale treated the text very freely, at times, under the influence of the Zurich version producing paraphrase rather than translation. Most of Coverdale's expansions have been replaced in the Authorized Version by more exact translations, and the scholarly Genevan version occupies an important middle position between Coverdale's Old Testament and the Authorized Version of 1611. Coverdale did not think of himself as primarily a scholar, but in the modern term, as a popularizer. A variety of translations does not, he declares, make for “divisyon in the fayth and in the people of God.”³⁴ On the contrary, the more translations the better. One man cannot always hit the mark, but now this shooter and now that comes nearest. In accordance with this spirit of eclecticism, Coverdale varied his translation, sometimes using Tindale's words, sometimes the traditional ecclesiastical words of the conservative translators. The particular mark which Coverdale himself attempted to hit was not so much that of literal exactness as ease and fluency in phrasing. Unlike Tindale, Coverdale was an experienced and successful popular preacher and exhorter, and some of the feeling for the round style of spoken discourse may be observed in his modification of Tindale's compact and sometimes angular English. Many of these stylistic expansions were removed by later, especially by the Genevan translators, but in the Psalter of the Prayer Book they have persisted to the present day. The psalms in the Prayer Book were originally taken directly from the Great Bible, and on the ground that Coverdale's psalms were “smoother and more easy to sing” than any of the later revisions, they have remained unaltered in the Prayer Book. One notes in these psalms not only a fuller phrasing than that of the version of 1611, but also a slightly stronger flavor of the broad popular style, as in Psalm x, 14, Tush, thou God carest not for it, which the Authorized Version renders more sedately, thou wilt not require it (Ps. x, 13).

In the New Testament Coverdale followed the model of Tindale very closely, but even here he made a great many minor additions which in a surprising number of instances were retained in the version of 1611. A few illustrations from the first Gospel will show how Tindale's texts were gradually made more easy and pliable.

Tindale, in Matt. i, 25, reads, tyll she had brought forth hir fyrst sonne, and called hys name Jesus, but Coverdale, translating the Greek πρωτότο[UNK]ον more at length, has fyrst borne sonne. This is changed in the Great Bible to hyr fyrst begotten sonne, but the Authorized Version returns to Coverdale's first rendering. In Matt. iii, 4, Tindale translates, This Jhon had hys garment of camels heer and a gerdell of a skynne aboute his loynes, where Coverdale, again more literally and also more smoothly, reads, a lethren gerdell. The Great Bible, the Genevan and the Rhemish New Testament all return to Tindale's rendering, but the Authorized Version retains Coverdale's first translation. A striking illustration of the gradual formation of a smooth phrasing is afforded by Matt. vi, 34. Tindale reads here: Care not then for the morow, but let the morow care for it selfe: for the daye present hath ever ynough of his awne trouble. In Coverdale's Bible of 1535 this last clause reads, Every daye hath ynough of his owne travayll, which is improved in the Great Bible: Care not then for the morow, for to morowe day shall care for it selfe: sufficient unto the daye is the travayle therof. The Genevan New Testament alters the first half of the verse for the better: Care not then for the morow: for the morow shal care for it selfe: The day present hath ever inough to do with it owne grief. The Rhemish version changes slightly: Be not careful therfore for the morow. For the morow day shal be careful for it self: sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. And the Authorized Version, accepting the best from the preceding versions and giving the whole a somewhat ampler rhythm, reads: Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of it selfe: sufficient unto the day is the evill thereof. A further illustration may be cited from this Gospel. In Matt. xxv, 21, Tindale reads: Then his master sayde unto him: well good servaunt and faithfull. Thou hast bene faithfull in lytell, I will make the ruler over moche: enter in into thy masters ioye. Coverdale's rendering, as represented by the Great Bible, is as follows: His lorde saide unto him: well thou good and faithfull servaunt. Thou hast bene faythfull over fewe thinges. I will make the ruler over many thinges. Entre thou into the ioye of thy lorde. The Genevan Testament returns to Tindale, but the Rhemish version, with slight modification, follows Coverdale. And the Authorized Version, with one helpful change, also follows Coverdale: His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithfull servant, thou hast bene faithfull over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. In Luke xviii, 13, Tindale reads: And the publican stode afarre of and wolde not lyfte up his eyes to heven, a close translation of the Greek. Coverdale, in the Great Bible, followed by the Rhemish and the Authorized Versions, changes the syntax for the sake of rhythm: And the publycan stondyng a farre of, wolde not lyfte up hys eyes to heaven. The play of the texts back and forth is interestingly illustrated by the translations of Luke xviii, 23. Tindale reads here: When he heard that, he was hevy: for he was very ryche. The Great Bible changes hevy to sory, which becomes in the Authorized Version, very sorowfull. The Genevan translation reads very hevy and marvelous ryche, and the Rhemish version is different from all others: He hearing these things, was stroken sad: because he was very riche. But in the succeeding verse the Authorized Version owes its reading, How hardly shal they that have riches, enter into the kingdome of God? mainly to the Rhemish translation, Tindale reading here, with what difficulte shall they that have ryches enter into the kingdome of God? It is interesting to note, however, that the Rhemish version reads money instead of riches, agreeing in this with the Great Bible. In Luke xviii, 26, Tindale translates, rather awkwardly, Then sayde they that hearde that, which reads more smoothly in the Great Bible and the Authorized Version, And they that hearde it sayd. One final illustration of the minute changes by means of which stylistic effect was gained may be cited from Luke xviii, 38. Tindale gives here a literal translation of the Greek, except that the pronoun subject of the verb is only implied in the form of the Greek verb, not specifically expressed: And he cryed sayinge: Jesus the sonne of David, have thou mercy on me. The Great Bible gains in dramatic force: And he cryed, sayinge: Jesu thou sonne of David, have mercy on me. The Genevan version as usual follows Tindale except that it changes the first word to Then. The Rhemish version also agrees with Tindale except that it omits the vocative pronoun altogether. And the Authorized Version follows the Great Bible exactly.

These illustrations have been cited to show the changes which Coverdale and the Authorized Version made in the text of Tindale's translation. Compared with the whole, they are relatively slight, and it is much easier to find passages in which the later versions agree with Tindale than passages in which they differ. Verse after verse of the Authorized Version follows Tindale almost without change, and such changes as are made, though as a whole they are improvements both in style and scholarly exactness, do not greatly alter the character of the book as it was first established by Tindale. Of a good book the later revisers made a better, as it was always their purpose to do, not a new translation.

II

The conception of a complete service-book in the native tongue for the use of the whole congregation of the church was of much later origin than the conception of a complete English Bible. Even Cranmer, to whom the final formulation of the Book of Common Prayer “after the use of the Church of England” is supposed to owe most, arrived at such a conception only slowly and gradually. His first plans contemplated only a remodeling of the traditional Latin service-books of the church. Later he approved the use of English for parts of the service, those parts which have to do with “mysteries” being still given in Latin. And finally, when the lay members of the church were granted that highest of all privileges, the privilege of partaking personally in the service of communion, even this last stronghold of Latin was given up by Cranmer. A complete English service-book, which differed in no respect from that in the hands of the officiating priest, was then for the first time put into the possession of the people.

Although the English people prior to the Reformation had nothing equivalent to the Book of Common Prayer, they had certain books in English which were intended in some degree to take the place of an English service-book. Of this character was the Lay Folks Mass Book, as the work is called by its modern editor.³⁵ This was not a translation of the missal, though several parts of the service of the mass were retained, but rather an independent work with rubrics and devotions which run parallel to the mass and which were to be read silently by the lay people at the same time that the priest was celebrating the office aloud. The book is in English verse, and with the exception of the celebration of the sacrament of communion, in which the laity had no share, it provides a substitute for the various parts of the mass.

Another popular book of devotion was the Primer, or lay-folk's service book. Primers were written both in Latin and in English, and they were used not only as books for private devotions, but also as school-books for the instruction of children. Certain portions of the Primer were learned by heart, and, with the help of an alphabet often prefixed, at the same time the student learned how to read.³⁶ The contents of the Primers varied considerably, though they were originally derived mainly from the Hours of the Virgin. Other devotional matter was gradually added to the Hours, such as Psalms, a litany, certain occasional offices, and prayers, until the book became a kind of shortened breviary for the use of those who could read Latin or English, but who were not themselves clerics. One of the earliest English Primers extant was made about the year 1400. This Primer is extensive so far as its content goes, but in style it is crude and rudimentary. The same difficulties which confronted the translators of the Wiclifite Bible had also to be met by the compilers of a vernacular service-book. Such renderings as the following can hardly be counted satisfactory, or even intelligible English: “As it was in the bigynnynge and now and evere, in to the werldis of werldis,” a literal translation of Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum; or the translation of the phrase from the Venite exultemus, praeoccupemus faciem ejus in confessione by “biforeocupie we his face in confessioun.”³⁷

But the Primer, unlike the Wiclifite Bible, continued in general use and underwent numerous revisions from time to time. It thus represents a gradual growth in the adaptation of the vernacular to the needs of the services of the church. In the second quarter of the sixteenth century, when the champions of the Reformation in England began to fight more in the open, it was natural that they should send forth certain Primers which were intended to serve as popular manuals of instruction in Protestant doctrine. Issued first without authority, these Primers were soon to receive episcopal and royal sanction. In the latter years of the reign of Henry VIII, three different versions of the Primer in English were printed, the first known as Marshall's Primer in 1534, the second in 1539 at Cromwell's direction. The third was known as the King's Primer, because it was published with Henry's sanction, in 1545, and with the command that no other was to be used throughout all his dominions. In these Primers we approach very near to the form of the Prayer Book by which they were soon to be supplanted. Marshall's Primer was the work of William Marshall, who translated and published various reform writings. In the first edition of his “Prymer in Englysshe” he had omitted the litany, but he adds it in the second edition “for the contentation of such weak minds” as were disturbed by not finding it in the first edition. “Right doubtful it is, as I think,” so he continues, “to pray unto all those that be mentioned, named and called saints in the common primers in Latin.”³⁸ Besides the longer devotions for adults, Marshall's Primer contains a shorter primer for children, called A fruitful and a very Christian instruction for children. In this are given various prayers, the creed, graces before and after meals, at rising, at retiring, and for other occasions. The King's Primer was published first in English, being a “determinate form of praying in their own mother tongue, to the intent that such as are ignorant of any strange or foreign speech, may have what to pray in their own acquainted and familiar language with fruit and understanding.”³⁹ To the English version was later added a Latin translation, and those who thought they could make their prayers with a more fervent spirit in that tongue, were given permission to use it. But King Henry's Primer was intended to supplement and not to replace the traditional service-books of the church.

With the accession of Edward VI a new impulse was given to that reformation of both doctrine and formula which had begun in the reign of his predecessor. Following the lead of the Continental ecclesiastic, Cardinal Francisco de Quiñones (Cardinal Quignon), Cranmer had already made experiments looking to the reformation and simplification of the Latin breviary. In the first years of Edward's reign a commission was appointed, with Archbishop Cranmer at its head, to examine the whole question of the formal services of the church. The conference met at Windsor, “a good number of the best learned men reputed within this realm, some favoring the old, some the new learning,”⁴⁰ and the results of their deliberations, laid before Parliament in 1549, were immediately accepted. These results were embodied in the First Prayer Book of Edward VI, and by the Act of Uniformity passed at the time, it was decreed that the “great diversitie in saying and synging in churches within this realme” which had prevailed hitherto, should now give place to this one use of the independent church of England. Three years later, in 1552, a revision, mainly doctrinal, of the First Prayer Book was made which brought it more into harmony with Protestant teachings at certain points. Queen Elizabeth's Prayer Book of 1559 represents a second revision, which differs but little from the First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI. Later revisions were made by James I, in 1604, and a final one by Charles II, in 1662; but the changes in all these later revisions are relatively slight, and the book remains essentially as it was, so far at least as its literary character is concerned, when it left the hands of Cranmer and his associates in the days of Edward VI.

When one regards the Prayer Book from the point of view of the earlier traditional services of the church, the two most important steps taken by the authors of the book seem astonishingly radical. In the first place, a great mass of ritual observance which had gradually grown up in the course of centuries was ruthlessly set aside. The medieval church had developed an elaborate system of services, ordinary and occasional, for which appropriate forms had been devised. To control all the various service-books needed in the celebration of the different services taxed the capacity even of learned clerics, to say nothing of inexperienced laymen. Merely to turn the pages of the book was “so hard and intricate a matter that many times there was more busines to fynd out what should be read, then to read it when it was founde out.”⁴¹ With the reformed service, “the curates shal nede none other bookes for their publique service, but this boke and the Bible.” By an heroic act of compression, some of the traditional daily services of the church were omitted altogether, and the three services of matins, lauds, and prime were combined to form the service called matins in the First Prayer Book and morning prayer in the Second Book; and vespers and compline were united to form the only other daily service of the reformed church, called evensong in the First Prayer Book and evening prayer in the Second. But the services were not only few in number, they were also simple in outline. From a confused medley, rich in detail as a medieval cathedral, the reformers extracted a few leading principles, not much more than the skeleton of the mass-book, as Milton scornfully declared, the almsbasket of the prayers of the Roman church.⁴² But the new service-book had this advantage, that it was comprehensible in its entirety, not only to the instructed clergy, but to every intelligent layman.

The second radical step of the authors of the Prayer Book was the choice of the vernacular for the language of the book. As was the case with the simplification of forms, the way for the use of English in all the services of the church had long been preparing. Through their layfolk's catechisms, mass-books, and primers, the popular mind had grown accustomed to the expression of devotional ideas in the mother tongue. And with the gradual acceptance of the notion of a democratic church, in which the priestly orders were the ministers and not the rulers of the congregation, it was logically necessary that the great barrier of language should be removed so far as possible between priest and people. Nevertheless it was an act of great courage on the part of the learned men gathered at Windsor to set aside so completely the only language in which their ancestors had said the divine services for centuries and in which they themselves had been accustomed to hear them from the earliest days of their childhood. And it is all the more remarkable if, as Cranmer declares, it was agreed by all, “without controversy (not one saying contrary) that the service of the church ought to be in the mother tongue.”⁴³ For the translation of the scriptures many precedents, from St. Jerome down, might be adduced, but in the defense of the native tongue as the appropriate language for a national church, the English church was making and not following precedent. The production of the English Prayer Book was but one more step in that slow progress towards complete national realization and expression which the English people for two centuries had now been entered upon.

Although the exact methods by which the English Prayer Book was produced seem not to have been recorded, it is certain that the moving personality, both in the construction and perhaps also in the actual composition of the book, was Archbishop Cranmer. Unlike Tindale's New Testament, the Prayer Book from the beginning enjoyed the good fortune of royal and episcopal favor. Something of the genial glow of the circumstances of its composition is reflected in the book itself. The task which lay before the commission assembled at Windsor was not one merely of devising a service-book intelligible to the plowman and the simple folk of England; in the mind of a scholar and writer of Cranmer's experience, the demands of simplicity and intelligibility were to be taken for granted. Equally important was the necessity of fashioning a book which should adequately express the dignity of a great national church, and which should have due regard to the feeling for form which had been fostered for generations by the stately services of the medieval church. It was not enough that the services of the reformed church should be simple and uniform, they must also be beautiful in themselves. In satisfying this demand, with rare discretion Cranmer and his associates avoided the extravagances of the fashionable and ephermeral literary styles of the time, and fixed their attention upon the purer and more permanent models of liturgical expression long traditional in the Latin services of the church.

The dignity of Cranmer's office and of the services which long familiarity must have made second nature to him raised him above petty mannerisms of style. In his homilies, published two years before the Prayer Book, for the use of licensed preachers in the church, Cranmer writes in a restrained, even manner, serene but not cold, and unfailingly appropriate to the somewhat formal purpose for which the homilies were intended. He eschews all obvious ornaments of style, such as alliteration, puns, doublets, fine words, and popular picturesque phrases. He never rises to heights of fervid eloquence, nor on the other hand, does he ever descend to a loose or careless or popular manner of writing. One admires throughout the homilies the evenness of tone and the fine feeling for words and for the cadences of phrasing in which the artist in language is revealed. This same disciplined and chastened literary feeling appears again in the composition of the Prayer Book.

It was no easy task to produce a book in the English language which should be popular, and at the same time compete in dignity and stateliness with the familiar Latin services. No literal translation would answer the purpose, for a literal translation of the Latin is cold and bare. The Latin services are both compact and at the same time large and dignified in the outline of their phrasing. The Latin words in themselves have a richness of flavor not often paralleled by an English equivalent, and a word for word substitution of English terms for the Latin makes the latter seem what they are not, hard and meager. On the other hand, mere ornament, compared with the severity of the Latin, must have seemed to Cranmer and his associates an unworthy and meretricious substitute for something better. The main problem before the authors of the book was therefore that of finding the proper cadences in English. By Cranmer's time the language was sufficiently rich in vocabulary to make the transference of ideas from one language to the other comparatively easy. But English words were prevailingly monosyllabic and were wanting in the sonority and fullness of the many-syllabled inflected words of the Latin. In the lack of exact equivalents in English, a substitute for the Latin words must be found.

This was done mainly by a process of expansion. The foundations of the Prayer Book, not only in content but in the spirit of the phrasing as well, were the older Latin service-books of the church, primarily the Salisbury Use, which was the one followed at Canterbury, and, after 1542, generally throughout the southern province of England. But the same principles of compression which were followed in the general structure of the services of the new Prayer Book could not be followed in the details of their expression. The brevity of the new services were compensated for in some measure by their warmth and breadth of feeling. So far as vocabulary is concerned, the authors of the first Prayer Book made use in the main of simple English words. Their diction is only slightly more Latinized than that of Tindale's New Testament. The English “almighty” is preferred to “omnipotent,” “everlasting” to “sempiternal,” and in general the effort of the authors of the Prayer Book seems to have been not to elevate the tone of the service-book by the employment of aureate terms, but to keep it as far as possible upon the plane of the current and generally intelligible speech. The stylistic devices which they did employ were various. What would have seemed abrupt in a literal translation of the Latin was often softened by the insertion of an exclamation at the opening of a sentence, e.g. Domine, labia mea aperies, which reads in the First Prayer Book, “O Lorde, open thou my lippes.” And such additions are frequently made where the Latin has merely a vocative, or even where there is no vocative. Vivacity is also given to the English frequently by the expression of a pronoun which is merely implied in the Latin, as in the above and in Benedicite omnia opera Domini Domino, which becomes “O all ye workes of the Lorde, speake good of the Lorde.” Or the bare name of the deity in the Latin is often amplified by the addition of some adjective like “almighty” or “everlasting.” In general, however, the versicles are remarkable examples of compressed and faithful translation. Expansions like that of the opening sentence of the Litany, Pater de coelis Deus, miserere nobis, translated “O God the father of heaven, have mercy upon us miserable synners,” are rare in the versicles and responses. In the prayers and collects, however, the changes are more numerous and striking. The English often becomes more concrete than the Latin, as when qui contritorum non despicis gemitum in the second prayer of the Litany becomes “that despisest not the syghyng of a contrite heart.” A compact phrase of the Latin is often expanded; in this same prayer, the phrase diabolicae fraudes is rendered “the crafte and subteltie of the devyll.” This habit of rounding out the phrasing of the English version by the pairing of almost synonymous words is well illustrated by the collect for the fourth Sunday in Advent. The Latin is extremely compact: ut per auxilium gratiae tuae quod nostra peccata praepediunt, indulgentia tuae propitiationis acceleret. This becomes in the English version: “that whereas, through our synnes and wickednes, we be soore lette and hindred, thy bountifull grace and mercye, through the satisfaccion of thy sonne our Lord, may spedily deliver us.” Another illustration may be cited from the collect for the first Sunday after the Epiphany: Vota, quaesumus, Domine, supplicantis populi coelesti pietate prosequere; ut et quae agenda sunt, videant; et ad implenda quae viderint, convalescant; “Lorde we beseche the mercyfullye to receive the praiers of thy people which cal upon thee; and graunt that they maie both perceave and knowe what thinges they ought to do, and also have grace and power faithfully to fulfill the same.” Sometimes phrases are introduced for which the original offers no equivalent, such as the words “in al our daungiers and necessities,” in the collect for the third Sunday after the Epiphany; or when the last clause of the collect for Ascension Day, ipsi quoque mente in coelestibus habitemus, is rendered, “so we may also in heart and mind thither ascende, and with him continually dwell.” The collect for the twelfth Sunday after Trinity is considerably expanded, but one phrase only need be cited: effunde super nos misericordiam tuam, which reads, “Powre downe upon us the aboundance of thy mercy.” Similar illustrations of the way in which a compact and somewhat stern phrasing of the Latin service has been expanded in order to produce equivalent cadences in English might be cited indefinitely, but space permits only one more, the first of the group of collects which stand at the close of the communion service. This reads as follows in the original: Adesto, Domine, supplicationibus nostris: et viam famulorum tuorum in salutis tuae prosperitate dispone: ut inter omnes viae et vitae hujus varietates, tuo semper protegantur auxilio. Admirable in phrasing and diction as this prayer is, it cannot be said that the English version falls short of it: “Assist us mercifully, O Lord, in these our supplicacions and praiers, and dispose the way of thy servauntes toward the attainement of everlasting salvacion, that emong all the chaunges and chaunces of thys mortall lyfe, they maye ever bee defended by thy moste gracious and readye helpe.”

Such was the spirit in which the authors of the Prayer Book set about the task of composing a common service for the use of the English people. The book which they constructed and the tone which they set in it have remained essentially unaltered since their day. Some additions were made in the first revision of 1552, notably the Exhortation and General Confession near the beginning of morning and evening prayer, with their familiar word-pairs, “acknowledge and confess,” “synnes and wickedness,” “dissemble nor cloke,” “assemble and mete together,” “erred and strayed,” “devises and desyres,” and others like these. But the tone of these original contributions to the Prayer Book, as they seem to be, does not differ from that established by the authors of the first version; nor do the changes and additions of Queen Elizabeth's Prayer Book of 1559, or the final revision of 1662, present anything new from the literary point of view. As a literary achievement the Prayer Book in its essentials is to be credited to Cranmer and his associates. And if we had no other testimony than that of time, we should have to grant that their work was well done. The latter clause of the statement attributed to James I, that the “Liturgie was taken out of the Masse Book, onely spoyled in the translation,” has never found many supporters. It is true that Queen Elizabeth's dream of “an uniform uniformity” in the services of the English church has never been completely realized. From the days of its first composition, there were Puritan non-conformists who would have nothing to do with a prelatical Prayer Book, and there have always been numerous congregations of devout worshipers who have refused to accept the established forms. In spite of this, no single influence except that of the Bible has been so great as the influence of the Prayer Book upon all English devotional expression, whether public or private. Implicitly the Prayer Book has been accepted as a standard, and upon it have been modeled many varying, but not essentially different, forms of worship. The First Prayer Book of Edward VI expressed permanently one of the constant moods of the English people. It put an end to the period of experimentation by its invention of an adequate and satisfactory form of expression for the devotional feeling, and it became thereby one of the fixed stars in the literary firmament for the guidance of later generations of English people.

The English Bible and the English Prayer Book have a peculiar significance as the first classics of modern English literature. The Morte Darthur and the Utopia might suggest themselves as possible competitors for this distinction. But Malory is more medieval than modern, and is to be grouped rather with Chaucer than with Spenser. And the Utopia, originally written in Latin and never turned into English by its author, has persisted less as a classic of English literature than as one of universal literature. Neither the Morte Darthur nor the Utopia has enjoyed the permanent general interest of the relatively few great classics of the language, nor does either occupy one of those central pivotal positions in the development of English letters which lends to other works unusual historical significance. The Bible and the Prayer Book are to be regarded as the earliest English classics in the sense that they are the earliest books in the English tongue which have been uninterruptedly and generally read since the time of their composition, and which have been read substantially in the form which was given them in the middle of the sixteenth century. Whether we accept Tindale's New Testament or the Great Bible of 1539 as establishing the form of the English scriptures, we must recognize that this form was fixed and generally acknowledged two generations before it received final sanction in the Authorized Version. The Version of 1611 merely confirmed a tradition and did not establish it. In the same way the Prayer Book as an expression of the English genius must be dated from the year of the First Prayer Book of Edward VI. Official recognition helped to conserve what popular feeling would probably have maintained as tenaciously without public authority. The combination of the two, popular approval and public authority, resulted in the establishment of both Bible and Prayer Book in positions of extraordinary influence and power. The value of these two books in the maintenance of standards of propriety and sanity in English expression can hardly be overestimated. In the sixteenth century the English people were creating for themselves a new literary speech. They were driven to experimentation and to imitation which often led, in the absence of a standard literary idiom, to great extremes of literary styles. The scholars would have turned English into a kind of Anglicized Latin. The courtly experimenters, the Euphuists and Arcadians, would have exalted rhetorical artifice at the expense of naturalness and breadth of appeal. The advocates of a literary speech based entirely upon the native idiom would have sacrificed all dignity and variety of expression in the interests of a homely and often grotesque popular style. From all of these experiments much good resulted in the formation of the literary speech which the sixteenth century passed on to the seventeenth. But what was needed above all in the welter of experimentation was some sense of moderation, some feeling for a strong central idiom which should enable the writer of English to avoid both the extreme of artistic fantasy and of an ignoble Saxon bluntness. This need of a safe standard was supplied by the English Bible and the English Prayer Book. They were popular in the sense that they were intelligible to the great public and were cast in the forms of normal English speech. But they were literary, also, in that they were elevated above the ephemeral colloquial language, and in that they satisfied not only the intelligence of their readers, but also their feeling for propriety, and for dignity and beauty of expression. The direct influence of the Bible and the Prayer Book upon certain writers of the sixteenth and of later centuries has been very great. The ultimate significance of the books is to be found, however, in something deeper than the occasional and specific influence which they have exerted upon the style of individual writers. It is to be found in the fact that they were, for all Englishmen, unquestioned achievements of the English language. They became a great steadying, unifying tradition, and by their popular acceptance, one of the implicit conditions of all later use of English speech.

Notes

1. Historia Ecclesiastica, Lib. IV, Cap. 24.

2. Paues, A Fourteenth Century English Biblical Version, p. xxiv.

3. Forshall and Madden, The Holy Bible, p. xvii.

4. Forshall and Madden, I, xxxix-lxiv, give a list of 170.

5. Forshall and Madden, I, xxix.

6. St. Augustine expressed the same principle, De Doctrina Christiana, Lib. 3, tom. 3, p. 53; Tillotson, Works, II, 424.

7. Chronicon Henrici Knighton, ed. Lumby, II, 151-152; quoted by Paues, p. xxxi, whose translation of Knighton's Latin is here followed.

8. See above, pp. 47-48.

9. Arnold, Select English Works, I, 197.

10. Wilkins, Concilia, III, 317.

11. Capes, The English Church in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, p. 129.

12. Preface to Genesis, Parker Society, p. 396.

13. Tindale's name, however, is not found in the Table-Talk and Letters of Luther. A year before the printing of Tindale's first fragmentary New Testament at Cologne, Luther had “opened his hospitable house at Wittenberg to the English and Scottish refugees.” “Dr. Edward Lee writes to Henry VIII from Bordeaux, December 2, 1525: ‘An Englishman … at the solicitation of Luther with whome he is hathe the New Testament into English.’” This may have been Tindale. Cf. Flügel, Neuenglisches Lesebuch, I, 489, and References to the English Language in the German Literature of the First Half of the Sixteenth Century, Modern Philology, I, 19.

14. Preface, p. 394.

15. Obedience of a Christian Man, in Doctrinal Treatises, pp. 144 ff.

16. Doctrinal Treatises, p. 390.

17. Doctrinal Treatises, p. 390.

18. Demaus, William Tyndale, pp. 129-130.

19. Tindale's independence as a translator is amply demonstrated, with the aid of comparative tables of illustrations, by Cheney, The Sources of Tindale's New Testament, Halle, 1883, and by Westcott, The History of the English Bible, 3rd ed., edited by Wright, London, 1905, pp. 131 ff., 152 ff.

20. Pollard, Records of the English Bible, pp. 175-177, reprints the petition.

21. Moore, Tudor-Stuart Views on the Growth, Status and Destiny of the English Language, pp. 89-90. This list of words has been frequently printed, e.g. by Mr. Moore, and conveniently and better in Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation, II, 296.

22. Preface to the Rheims New Testament, in Pollard, Records, pp. 301-302.

23. Pollard, Records, p. 306.

24. Ibid., pp. 307-308.

25. Pollard, Records, p. 310.

26. The above illustrations are taken from Westcott, History of the English Bible, pp. 208-211.

27. First printed and published by Goodwin, Cambridge, 1843.

28. Pollard, Records, p. 203.

29. Ibid., p. 201.

30. Pollard, Records, p. 331.

31. Report on the Making of the Version of 1611 Presented to the Synod of Dort, in Pollard, Records, p. 339.

32. Preface, in Pollard, Records, p. 369.

33. Pollard, Records, p. 348.

34. Ibid., p. 203.

35. Simmons, E.E.T.S., LXXI, 1879.

36. See Watson, The English Grammar School to 1660, pp. 31-37.

37. The Prymer, ed. Littlehales, Pt. I, p. 17.

38. Three Primers Put forth in the Reign of Henry VIII, p. 124. Marshall's Primer was suppressed on the complaint of Convocation, cf. Watson, The English Grammar Schools to 1660, p. 33.

39. Three Primers, p. 440.

40. Gasquet and Bishop, Edward the VI and the Book of Common Prayer, p. 137.

41. Preface, in the First Prayer Book.

42. Prose Works, ed. Symmons, I, 45, 262.

43. Gasquet and Bishop, p. 137.