Book of Fire (3 page)
Virginity and the celibacy of the priesthood were ‘not states approved by God’, and were inferior to wedlock. The Church was ‘nothing but a synagogue of Satan’; none should be baptised by priests, and purgatory was an invention. Forgiveness of sins flowed from belief, ‘because, as they say, whatever is stands in faith, as Christ said to Mary Magdalene, “Thy faith hath made thee whole.”’ Lollards held many Church rituals to be magic and the craft of the devil. ‘Exorcisms and hallowings, made in the Church, of wine, bread and wax, water, salt and oil and incense, the stone of the altar, upon vestments, mitre, cross and pilgrims’ staves, be the very practice of necromancy, not of holy theology …’
As yet only England was affected by these ideas. Here, they aroused such fear of civil unrest that Arundel was able to press the king and parliament for powers to pursue and execute heretics. In 1401, at the archbishop’s urging, parliament passed an act whose Latin title displayed its lethal intent,
De Haeretico Comburendo
, On the Burning of Heretics. The English bishops were empowered to arrest Lollards and try them by the canon law of the Church. Prisoners convicted of heresy by the Church courts were to be handed to a secular court, which would ‘cause [them] to be
burnt that such punishment may strike fear to the minds of others’.
No heretic had been burnt in England since a deacon was convicted of converting to Judaism almost two centuries before. This laxness was swiftly remedied. Even before the legislation had been enacted, a special parliamentary sanction was granted in March 1401 for the execution of the Lollard William Sawtrey, a priest from Lynn in Norfolk. Sawtrey was defiant. ‘I, sent by God, tell thee that thou and thy whole clergy, and the King also,’ he told Archbishop Arundel during his trial, ‘will shortly die an evil death …’ He was burnt, alive and in public, at Smithfield in London.
Arundel now turned on the Lollard Bible. He created the Constitutions of Oxford in 1408 to deal with translations of the scriptures. ‘It is a dangerous thing, as witnesseth blessed St Jerome,’ the Constitution said of the translator of the Vulgate, ‘to translate the text of the holy Scripture out of one tongue into another, for in the translation the same sense is not always easily kept … We therefore decree and ordain, that no man, hereafter, by his own authority translate any text of the Scripture into English or any other tongue, by way of a book, libel or treatise; and that no man can read any such book, libel or treatise, now lately set forth in the time of John Wycliffe, or since, or hereafter to be set forth, in part or in whole, privily or apertly,
sub pena maioris excommunicationis
, upon pain of greater excommunication …’ The penalty was comprehensive; it condemned its victims ‘to be accursed eating and drinking, walking and sitting, rowing and riding, laughing and weeping, in house and in field, on water and on land … Cursed be their head and their thoughts, their eyes and their ears, their tongues and their lips, their teeth and their throats …’ If they relapsed, they were to be burnt.
Arundel ordered that all Wycliffe’s works be burnt, and sent the pope a list of 267 heresies and errors ‘worthy of the fire’ that had
been found in them. He described Wycliffe in the covering letter as the ‘son of the Serpent, herald and child of Antichrist’; his worst sin, so the archbishop said, which ‘filled up the measure of his malice’, was to devise ‘the expedient of a new translation of Scripture into the mother tongue’.
The Council of the Church that met at Constance in 1414 had good reason to take good note of these comments. Wycliffe’s heresies had passed from the Lollard villages of England to Prague and Bohemia. From here, the brilliant preacher John Huss spread them through the central European heartlands. He was summoned to Constance on an imperial safe conduct to explain himself. There were now three popes. John XXIII, who had summoned the council, was Antipope to two rivals. Gregory XII, although nearing ninety, clung to office, pawning his papal tiara to pay off his gambling debts; Benedict XIII endured imprisonment in the papal castle at Avignon rather than abdicate. John himself was an impoverished Neapolitan aristocrat who had restored the family fortunes through piracy before adopting an equally remunerative and less stressful career in religion. He was not ordained until the day before his papal coronation; he was said never to have confessed or to have taken the sacraments. Cynics chanted a new version of the creed: ‘I believe in three holy Catholic churches.’
The need for reform, stressed by Wycliffe and by Huss, was obvious. The council was in no mood to grant it. Despite his safe conduct, ‘John Huss, the Wycliffite, … was taken into custody to prevent his further teaching of that doctrine.’ Wycliffe himself was condemned to the exhumation later carried out at Lutter -worth by Bishop Fleming. Huss was convicted of a catalogue of heresies: the ‘accused not does believe in the transubstantiation … despises the belief in the infallibility of the Pope … disputes the power of absolution by a vicious priest and confession to him … rejects the absolute obedience to worldly superiors … rejects the prohibition of marriage for priests … calls the indulgence a
simony, sinning against the Holy Spirit’. He was led from the cathedral of Constance, past a bonfire of his writings that had been set alight in the cemetery, to a stake that had been prepared for him on the banks of the Rhine.
A remarkable Herefordshire knight gave a final twist to the Bible men. Sir John Oldcastle was rich, a soldier, and so close to the future Henry V that Shakespeare dubbed him Prince Hal’s ‘boon companion’ and based the character of Falstaff on him. Oldcastle abandoned a brilliant career for rebellion and heresy, using his wife’s fortune to support Lollard preachers and to have Lollard Bibles copied and distributed. He was arrested and brought before a Church court in 1413, which declared him a ‘most pernicious and detestable heretic … against the faith and religion of the holy and universal Church of Rome’. He was committed to the secular power for execution.
He escaped from the Tower of London before the sentence was carried out. From hiding, using secret emissaries, Oldcastle planned an uprising. Informers disclosed a plot to stage a mumming, a play to entertain the court, and ‘under colour of this mumming to destroy the king and the Holy Church’. Foiled in this, Oldcastle then arranged for a great muster of Lollards to take place in St Giles’ Fields in London on a January night in 1414. A number of conspirators, seized at an inn at Bishopsgate, revealed the plans for the rebellion. Henry V led armed men to the Fields and fell upon the rebels, thirty-eight of whom were hanged or burnt.
Oldcastle escaped to become the most wanted fugitive in the country. Freedom from taxation and a reward of 1000 marks was offered to the city or borough that discovered him. Judges, justices of the peace and sheriffs were required to take an oath to put down ‘heresies and errors commonly called Lollardies’. The possession of any biblical manuscript in English was taken as evidence
of Lollardy. Oldcastle survived in hiding for more than three years. He was captured in Wales at the end of 1417 and taken to London. He was convicted of heresy and treasonable conspiracy to kill the king and the bishops. He was laid on a hurdle and dragged to St Giles’ Fields, and suspended in a stout chair from a gallows while a fire was lit beneath him.
As he was hanged for his treason, he was simultaneously burnt for his heresy. A particular quality of horror was thus attached to the translation of the scripture into English. Here, in England, it was a heresy punishable by the fire under the terms of
De Haeretico Comburendo
, and it was also a harbinger of sedition and rebellion.
‘Lollards’ towers’ were prepared for the imprisonment of the Bible men, in the palaces of the English bishops and in the archbishop of Cantebury’s great palace at Lambeth; and ‘Lollard pits’ were assigned as the places where they were to be burnt.
‘This picture represents, as far as art could, William Tyndale’: so runs the Latin inscription beneath this portrait in the dining-hall of Hertford College, Oxford. No likeness dates from Tyndale’s lifetime. As a fugitive, even the roughest sketch would have helped his pursuers identify him, and he made sure none was made. By the time this portrait was made, after his death, it was safe to embellish it with the two Latin lines of Protestant propaganda that appear under his hand, which have been translated as:
To scatter Roman darkness by this light
The loss of land and life I’ll reckon slight
(Mary Evans Picture Library)
T
idy up his spelling, and in particular transpose ‘u’ and ‘v’, so that ‘euer’ becomes ‘ever’, and use ‘j’ for ‘i’, and the 1520s prose of William Tyndale is instantly familiar.
Those great rolling phrases that boom through the English-speaking mind – ‘the laste enemy that shalbe destroyd is deeth’, ‘blessid are they that mourne for they shalbe comforted’, ‘though I speke with the tonges of men and angels’ – are his. The English Paternoster – to which English-speaking people have instinctively turned for comfort down the generations – is his: ‘O oure father which arte in heuen, halowed be thy name …’ So is the sadness and rejoicing of the Eucharist: ‘this ys my bloude of the newe testamente, which shalbe shedde for many for the forgeuenes of synnes’.
In defying the Constitutions of Oxford, and translating the Bible, Tyndale fathered what is probably the best known and certainly the most quoted work in the English language. A complete analysis of the Authorised Version, known down the generations as ‘the AV’ or ‘the King James’, was made in 1998. It shows that Tyndale’s words account for 84 per cent of the New Testament, and for 75.8 per cent of the Old Testament books that he translated. The fifty-four divines appointed by James I to produce the
final work provided marginal notes and scholarly revisions to Tyndale’s existing translation, but the King James itself is, so
The Oxford Companion to Literature
states, ‘practically the version of Tyndale with some admixture from Wycliffe’.
However famous his writing, Tyndale himself is another matter. His work classified him as a heretic. As a result, he was chased and hunted – like Oldcastle, though for much longer – and his need to lie low means that our sightings of him are laced with
perhaps
,
possibly
,
most probably
.
It is in keeping with his life, and terrible death, that we can identify the date of his birth no better than as
in or about
1494, at a place said by his contemporaries to be ‘
about
the borders of Wales’.
We arrive at the date by working back from a fixed point, his award as a Bachelor of Arts at Oxford. A better idea of the place comes from the careers of his brothers Edward and John. The Tyndales were prosperous yeomen – Edward became a receiver of crown rents and a person of substance in the county, and John a London merchant – living where the western part of Gloucestershire falls from the Cotswold uplands into the Vale of Berkeley. The farmland of the vale borders the banks of the Severn, with the Welsh hills beyond.
Two houses that survive here have links with the family. Hunt’s Court stands outside the village of North Nibley, on a lane that runs up to the ancient Black Horse Inn, beneath the steep pastures and stands of beech and chestnut that tumble from the crest of Nibley Knoll. The house is rendered white, concealing its great age. The lintels in the ground floor rooms reflect its changing fortunes. In hard times, and during the period of the window tax from 1696, doors and windows were bricked up and the recesses used as cupboards, to be reopened as prosperity returned. It is a solid and utilitarian house, built on two sides of a farmyard, and facing old barns of stone patched with concrete breeze blocks. The grounds are now a garden centre with a nursery specialising in
roses. A rambler is named for William Tyndale, red, with violet flush and gold stains.
Tyndales lived in the house from early Tudor times until 1784. The original heiress of Hunt’s Court, Alice Hunt, married Thomas Tyndale during Henry VII’s reign. They had a son, William. The mid-Victorians, the first (and largely the last) generation to wish to honour the man who had brought them the scriptures in English, thought this William to be him. They built a cenotaph 111 feet high on Nibley Knoll, the high point of the escarpment above Hunt’s Court, and adorned it with carvings of the milestones in his life: the farewell to the Cotswolds, the betrayal at Antwerp, the martyrdom. The monument was completed at a cost of £1550 in 1866. Each workman was given a fine bound volume of the King James as a keepsake.
This would be a fitting memorial, and a compensation for the centuries of obscurity, had it been in the right place. It was not. Alice and Thomas could not have married before 1505, it was later established, and their son William was found to have been alive fifteen years after the translator had been executed.
The other candidate for our William’s birthplace is four or five miles to the west, in the village of Slimbridge, which lies in flat farmland close to a wild fowl sanctuary and the high banks of the Severn. Hurst Farm, a later plain brick-fronted house with flashings above the windows, is on a bend of the road beyond the high-steepled parish church of St John the Baptist. It is still a working farm, with barns, a cattle yard and looseboxes. Edward Tyndale, William’s brother, lived at Hurst Farm for many years, and he was buried in the Slimbridge churchyard in 1546.
This prosperous wool and cattle country has a special resonance because its dialect was Tyndale’s mother tongue. The Gloucestershire in him is only noticeable now in the odd word that has failed to gel into general English; in ‘toot-hill’, for example, in Genesis 31, ‘and this toot-hill which the Lord seeth’,
meaning a lookout hill. But he wrote for simple folk, for the ploughboy, he said, and the local sayings and idioms he used have passed through his writing into the language as a whole.
