Book of Fire (13 page)

Cochlaye, A little praty foolish poad;

But although his stature was small

Yet men say he lacketh no gall,

More venomous than any toad.

Tyndale later made it clear that he suffered Roye because he had to. He found him ‘somewhat crafty when he cometh into new acquaintance … As long as he had no money, somewhat I could rule him; but as soon as he had gotten him money, he became like himself again. Nevertheless I suffered all things till that was ended, which I could not do alone without one both to write, and to help me compare the texts together.’ As soon as that task was ended, and the Testament had been edited in Worms, ‘I took my leave, and bade him farewell for our two lives, and, as men say, a day longer.’

Both Rinck and Cochlaeus warned that the affair was not finished. Cochlaeus wrote to Henry VIII, Wolsey and Fisher to advise them to keep strict watch on all English ports, since the ‘pernicious merchandise’ might reappear from another press. He also dedicated a volume of Rupert of Deutz to the king. He felt he had already rendered Henry as great a service as Mordecai had to King Ahasuerus when he warned him of the plot against him; whereas Mordecai had been rewarded with a place next in rank to the king, Cochlaeus complained bitterly, Henry had not even acknowledged his help.

6

‘Lyfe, love, faveour, grace, blessinge …’

O
ther rumours reached England that Tyndale had not abandoned his project. Edward Lee, the king’s almoner and a future archbishop of York, heard them as he passed through Bordeaux on his way to become ambassador to Spain. ‘I am certainly informed,’ he wrote to the king on 2 December 1525, ‘that an Englishman, your subject, at the solicitation and insistence of Luther, with whom he is, hath translated the New Testament into English, and within a few days intendeth to arrive with the same imprinted in England.’ Lee added that ‘I need not advertise your grace what infection and danger’ an English Bible represented.

Lee’s informant mislocated Tyndale and was a little premature. Tyndale and Roye had not returned to Wittenberg from Cologne. They had gone to Worms, the city in which Luther had braved the imperial diet in 1521. The diet was unimpressed – ‘the devil in the habit of a monk has brought together ancient errors in one stinking puddle and invented new ones’ – and it passed an edict outlawing Luther and banning the sale of his books. The city had gone over to the Lutheran cause in 1524, however, and the Englishmen were safe here. The cost of shipping the Testaments to
England was marginally higher than from Cologne, for Worms was further upriver, but it had a considerable literary asset for Tyndale. He had determined to translate the Old Testament from the original Hebrew, a field in which Europe still had few scholars. Worms had a noted Jewish community, whose stone synagogue on the Hintere Judengasse was the oldest in Europe; their reputation for learning had been founded by the great Talmudic scholar Rabbi Schlomo. With the break-up and expulsion of the sophisticated and erudite Jewish communities of Spain, Worms was as good a place to study Hebrew as any in Christendom.

Its leading printer was Peter Schoeffer, the son of the Mainz pioneer printer, and it was he whom Tyndale commissioned. Neither printer nor translator was identified, but the type and some of the watermarks and woodcuts were used in other books that bear Schoeffer’s colophon. Tyndale could have completed a quarto edition by using the Cologne sheets he had brought with him for the opening chapters. It mattered little if Schoeffer did not have a type to match the Gothic black used by Quentell, for this was a book designed to be read in secret, not displayed in a collection. Instead, Tyndale chose to distribute the Cologne material as unfinished sheets, and to print an entirely new octavo edition, without prologue or glosses.

Haste, and cost, must have dictated this. A press was not in itself expensive, as we have seen, and creating type was time-consuming but needed little investment if the printer cast his own fonts. Paper accounted for at least two thirds, and sometimes more, of the production cost of a book.

The paper industry was sophisticated. The Le Bé family, with mills near Troyes, sold their famous ‘B’-watermarked paper to Worms, Cologne and Leipzig, the Low Countries, and as far as England. But it was pricey. Vellum, usually shaven and treated sheepskin, was far too expensive to be used in the quantities needed for printing. Even a short book would use up a dozen
skins per copy, so that a print run of hundreds of copies would devour many flocks of sheep. Paper had been invented two centuries before. It made printing viable but it was still laborious and costly to make. The raw material consisted of old rags, collected by specialist dealers, the ‘rag and bone’ men of nursery rhymes. Flimsy white rag was needed for quality paper. This was cut up into small pieces and left soaking in cellars to ferment. Fatty substances were forced out as the cellulose gradually separated into a raw stuff that the collector brought to the mill.

Most mills were water mills converted to paper-making from corn-grinding. Paper-making was an Italian technology that was often financed elsewhere in Europe by Italian bankers. In the manufacture of paper, small wooden mallets, some fitted with nails or small spikes, ran from the main shaft to strike up and down on the treated rags in beating troughs. A quantity of soap was then added to the beaten rags to produce a pulp, which was mixed in turn into a vat of warm water. Next, a form, a wooden frame encasing a lattice of cross wires, was dipped into the vat. These wires retained the pulp in the shape of a sheet as the water drained off, and the form was shaken to produce an even surface. The sheet was then pulled off the form and pressed between layers of felt to absorb more surplus water. The sheet was taken to a ‘little’ hanging room to air and was then coated with a ‘size’, a thin coating of wax and clay that would prevent the printing ink from soaking crudely into it. After further drying in a ‘great’ hanging room, the sheet was finished by rubbing it with a flint. It was delivered to the printer in reams of twenty-five sheets each.

Paper-making needed pure water in enormous quantities. The best mills were situated upstream of large towns on rivers with a low iron content, to avoid discolouring. A ready supply of rags, or old hemp rope for lower-quality paper, was also essential. The paper-making industry thus favoured sea and river ports, to which rags could be shipped, and linen-making and hemp-growing
regions, such as the Vosges and Champagne. Carters from the Vosges roamed far and wide, paying for old clothes in cash, pins and crockery, driving their wagons to major fairs to sell their loads to wholesalers. Fortunes were being made in the 1520s; Antoine de Laugerière, the king of French collectors, was selling rags by the ten tons. German ragmen profiteered so audaciously that papermakers in Germany lobbied town councils to declare zones around each major printing centre, in which they alone had collecting rights.

The difference in labour costs between quarto and octavo sheets was not great; the compositors had the same volume of words to set, and the pressmen, although they had more sheets to handle with the large format, would not earn substantially more. The paper cost of the Worms octavo edition was half that of the Cologne quarto, however; sixteen pages were printed from each sheet instead of eight, and the saving was immediate. By doing without the Cologne prologue and the glosses, Tyndale reduced both composition and paper costs, of course, and also saved much time. It was laborious to add marginal notes and glosses to each page. It required careful copy-editing to ensure that text references were correct, and for Tyndale there was the added complication that his compositors were German-speakers. A skilled man could set type accurately enough by sight alone, character by character, but the setting of glosses ideally required an understanding of what was being said, which the Worms compositors lacked.

Octavo was an ideal format for an illegal book. Copies were also pocket-sized, easy to conceal – in the sleeve or lining of a cloak, for practical pockets were not in fashion – and easy to smuggle.

It had taken four months to print Luther’s September Testament at Wittenberg in an edition of five thousand copies in 1522, with two and latterly three presses working flat out. Tyndale’s Testament
was, of course, almost the same length; a trifle shorter, in fact, due to the economy of English over German, and the absence of glosses. He had Roye to help him, and the two must have spent their waking hours in the print shop, supervising the compositors and urging on the pressmen. The printers did them proud. Finished copies were being loaded on to Rhine barges by February 1526, less than six months after Tyndale arrived in the city.

He was as discreet and anonymous as his Testament. No word of what was afoot in Worms leaked out until after the event, and then only in a single diary entry by Spalatin, the Lutheran secretary of the elector of Saxony. During a supper party in neighbouring Speyer the following summer, Spalatin was told that six thousand copies of the New Testament had been printed in English at Worms. It was the work of ‘an Englishman … who is so skilled in seven tongues, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, French, that whichever he speaks, you would think it his native tongue’. Spalatin added that the book was likely to be a bestseller, ‘for the English,’ he was told, ‘despite the opposition and unwillingness of the king, so long after the gospel, that they affirm that they will buy the New Testament, even if they must pay 100,000 pieces of money for it’.

No accurate figure can be put on the Worms print run. Only three copies survive, two in England and one newly found in Germany. The English have not always, it must be said, treated it with the respect that Spalatin suggested. The first copy, in the library of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, is missing seventy leaves. The copy in the British Library, which lacks the title page, was bought by the collector Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford, for 20 guineas (£21). At his death in 1741, the manuscripts in his Harleian Library were to pass to the new British Museum. His books were sold off, and the Worms New Testament was bought for 15s (75p) by Joseph Ames, the Wapping ship chandler who founded English bibliography with his work
Typographical
Antiquities
in 1749. It was sold to John White, a collector of early English Bibles, for fourteen and a half guineas (£15.22). White sold it for 20 guineas in 1776 to the Rev. Andrew Gifford, a Baptist minister who was an early assistant keeper at the British Museum. Gifford bequeathed the Testament to Bristol Baptist College in 1784. It was acquired by the British Library for a little over £1 million in 1994.

The title page of the first complete New Testament. Less elaborate than the abandoned Cologne edition, it was printed at Worms in 1526. A single copy with this intact title page survives. Long misdated, it passed through several libraries, including the Cistercian monastery of Schönthal, before it was correctly identified in 1996. As the work of a fugitive, the title page bore no name or identifying marks. But Tyndale’s prose rings out in the sharp message it bears. ‘Christ Jesus commaunded that they shulde preache it vnto al creatures,’ he wrote of the Testament. Did not ‘all creatures’ include English speakers? Was it not Christ’s command to give them God’s word in their mother tongue?

(Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart)

The only complete copy was discovered recently in Stuttgart. It was originally in the library of the Elector Ottheinrich of the Palatinate. The Elector’s bookbinder bound it in 1550, and stamped it with that date on the cover, rather than 1526 as the year of publication. It narrowly avoided being sent to nestle in the bosom of the enemy when the bulk of the Ottheinrich Library was transferred to the Vatican Library in Rome in 1623. It passed instead to the Cistercian abbey of Schönthal. From there it passed through the library of King Friedrich I and the university of Tübingen before reaching its present billet in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart in 1935. It continued to be catalogued as a 1550 copy until it was realised six years ago that its true provenance is 1526.

Its title page has no identifying marks – no colophon, no translator’s name – but it is an exercise in descriptive brevity:

The newe Testament

As it was written

and caused to be written

by them which her

de yt. To whom

also oure Saveoure

Christ Jesus

commaunded that they shulde pre

ache it vnto al

creatures.

‘Lyfe, love, faveour, grace, blessinge …’

It has a curious border, with columns embraced by youths and garlands of flowers, and a pediment on which lie a bearded male angel and a bare-breasted female.

It is nonetheless the original of the most fecund book printed in the English language. Pirate editions were being printed in Antwerp within a few months, and, repolished by King James’s panel of divines in 1611, it has echoed in the very crannies of the earth. Tyndale brought simplicity and force, and he was faithful to the Greek, without a trace of pedantry: ‘When I was a chylde, I spake as a chylde, I ymmagened as a chylde: but as sone as I was a man I put awaye childesshness.’ In the same passage, in I Corinthians 13, he used plain words to sustain a lyrical beauty of language: ‘Love suffreth longe and is corteous. Love envieth nott … swelleth not, dealeth not dishonestly, seketh not her awne … beleveth all thynges, hopeth all thynges, endureth in all thynges. Though that prophesyinge fayle, other tonges shall cease, or knowledge vanysshe awaye: yet love falleth never awaye.’ This was the finest English prose yet written, and it defined what was to come.