In the last programme, we looked at the way in which English had begun to oust
French as the language of law and government, and how there was a new
confidence in English literature.
We are fulfilling your bidding to fulfil.
Nine months past the plane since we were born to pay.
But during the 14th and 15th centuries, there began a movement to return English
to its central place in society.
This fight was often a violent one.
It was as much a political story as a linguistic one, and it starts right at the
top, for late medieval Britain was above all a religious society.
The Catholic Church controlled and pervaded all aspects of life, and it was
in the Church that this struggle for access and power would be fought.
English set out to become the language of God.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God.
God created the heavens and the earth.
Now the earth was formless and empty.
And God said, let there be light, and there was light.
Through him all things were made.
Without him nothing was made that has been made.
In him was life, and that life was the light of men.
Number 12 in your hymn book, and then stand up, ready to really sing as well as
you possibly can.
All over the world, the Spirit is moving.
All over the world, as the prophet said it would be.
All over...
In the beginning was the Word, but not if you lived in 14th century
England and couldn't speak Latin.
Power in words lay in the Bible.
There was no Bible in English.
In formal terms, God spoke to the people in Latin.
Six centuries ago, the Bible stories were commonly enjoyed, but not the Bible
itself.
To the vast majority, it was a closed book.
Both Oseer and Eseer prayed that a prince with wooden pair should descend down in a
lardy, to make man keen clearly, to late them that are long, and in
Badland, Herby, shall that sound barn be born.
These are the mystery plays, first performed in York around 1376,
and still being performed today.
They tell the Christian story, from the mystery of God's creation to the
birth, death, and resurrection of Christ.
They are religious plays, but they're not the Scriptures.
They're a sort of biblical soap opera, at the same kind of removed from the
original source as our nativity plays are today.
If you wanted to hear the real thing, you'd have to go in there, in the Minster,
and hear it in Latin.
Out here, you'll get the strip cartoon version in English.
Only one play each year is now performed in the original language, the language of
the time of Chaucer.
It may not sound marvellous, a man, if fully you be hit.
But it should mean, that what not ye, for all ye can gap and gong, ye can sing
it as well as they.
And on a say, it shall soon be proved all we pass.
If ye will help, hold on, for thus it was.
This year, it's The Shepherd's Play, the story of the three shepherds seeing
the angelic host coming and preparing for the newly born Jesus.
This was a merry note, be the dead that ye shall see.
It hath so cracked in me throat, that me lip is only green.
An angel brought, whose tithing is new, a barb in Bethlehem should be born.
Of whom, then, spark o'er prophecy true, and bar does mate him there this morn.
That was the language of the streets, immediate and direct.
But in God's house, Latin ruled.
Anybody who is brought up in the ways of the Church of England, as I am,
would find a medieval church service linguistically a strange and remote
affair.
When you went to church then, and everybody had to, it was compulsory,
there was no familiar English hymnal, hymns ancient and modern, or even a book
of common prayer.
Everything was in Latin, and at best you'd only have understood the odd word of it.
Only the clergy were allowed to read the word of God, and they did even that
silently.
A bell was rung to let the congregation know when the priest had reached the
important bits.
For the authority of the Catholic Church, it was vital that a priest and a language
stood between a believer and the Bible.
But all that was about to change dramatically.
In the 14th century, there was the beginnings of a counter-movement that was
going to turn the English-speaking world on its axis.
It would eventually tear the Church in two.
It would mark the end of the Middle Ages, and would cost many, many lives.
It was the battle for the language of the Bible.
The English, some of them, wanted access to the Kingdom of Heaven in the language
of the streets.
They wanted a Bible that belonged to them, and they were prepared to fight for it.
It was the boldest way for English to become the language of real power.
The prime mover was John Wycliffe, who at the age of 17 was admitted here,
to Merton College, Oxford.
Wycliffe was a charismatic scholar, fluent in Latin, and therefore familiar
with the Bible.
He was a major philosopher and theologian, who believed passionately that his
knowledge should be shared by everyone.
And he was fiercely opposed to the power and wealth of the Church.
When men speak of the Church, he said, they usually mean priests, monks,
canons, and friars.
But it should not be so.
Were there a hundred popes, he wrote, and all the friars turned to cardinals,
their opinions in matters of faith should not be accepted, except insofar as they
are founded on the Scripture itself.
The Church in Wycliffe's time was often lazy and corrupt.
Bible reading, even among the clergy, was surprisingly rare, for often they
didn't have the Latin.
When the Bishop of Gloucester surveyed 311 deacons, archdeacons, and priests of the
diocese, he discovered that 168 were unable to repeat the Ten Commandments,
31 didn't know where those commandments came from, and 40 couldn't repeat the
Lord's Prayer.
Wycliffe railed at the corruption and complacency of the Church.
His overriding thought was summed up in his passionate belief in the right of
every man, whether cleric or layman, to examine the Bible for himself.
This meant a full English Bible.
But it wasn't an easy task.
It was unauthorized by the Church, and so potentially heretical, even
seditious.
It had to be done in secrecy, for its aim was to overthrow the powerful.
With words.
We know that by the beginning of 1380, Wycliffe had organized the translation
from the Latin of the first English Bible.
The work took place here, in Oxford, probably with a number of translators.
And it wasn't only the mammoth task of translation that faced them, their Bible
had to be disseminated too.
Once the translation was done, the new Bible was reproduced.
Hundreds were copied in scriptaria, production lines turning out handwritten
copies.
170 of these Bibles survive, a huge number for a 600-year-old manuscript,
which tells us there must have been armies of people secretly transcribing it,
copying it, and passing it on.
And here it is, the first English Bible, laboriously copied out in perfect script.
Look at it.
The first thing that strikes me is how like the Lindisfarne Gospels it is.
The tradition went on.
Of this book you can fairly say it literally changed the world, and later,
for the sake of this book, hundreds would be martyred, dying the most horrible
deaths.
But this was the most radical cause of its day, one, some thought, worth dying for.
God's word in English.
Here it is in modern speech.
In the beginning, God made of naught heaven and earth, forsooth the earth was
idle and void, and darkness were on the face of depth, and the Spirit of God was
born on the waters.
And God said, Light be made, and light was made.
And God saw the light that it was good, and he departed the light for all
darkness, and he kept the light day, and the darkness night, and the even tide
and morrow tide was made one day.
There was a problem with Wycliffe's Bible.
It wasn't an easy translation.
Many familiar phrases do have their origin here.
Woe is me, an eye for an eye.
And words such as barbarian, birthday, canopy, childbearing, cock crow,
communication, crime, dishonor, envy, frying pan, godly, graven,
humanity, injury, jubilee, lecture, madness, menstruate, middleman,
mountainous, novelty, oppressor, philistine, pollute, puberty, rampart,
schism, tramp, unfaithful, visitor, and zeal.
You read them first in Wycliffe's Bible from the 1380s onwards.
But on the whole, Wycliffe and his team were so in awe of the sacred nature of the
Latin scriptures that they did a translation word for word, even keeping
the Latin word order.
So it contains phrases like, Lord go from me, for I am a man sinner, and I forsooth
am the Lord thy God strong jealous.
These were people still nervous with their own language, anxious that it could carry
the weight of God's word.
One result was that there are over a thousand Latin words that turn up for the
first time in English, whose use in English is first recorded in Wycliffe's
translation.
Quite ordinary ones, like emperor, justice, profession, city, cradle,
suddenly, angel, multitude, and glory, a good word for this Bible.
This was still a difficult language to Wycliffe's contemporaries, but at least it
wasn't Latin.
By the standards of the day, it was the bestseller.
The church condemned him for it, maintaining that he'd made the scriptures
more open to the readings of laymen and women.
Thus the jewel of the clerics is turned to the sport of the laity, and the pearl of
the gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine.
Wycliffe had begun to organize and train what amounted to a new religious order of
itinerant preachers, whom he dispatched around England.
Their purpose was to spread the word, literally, in English.
It was like a guerrilla campaign.
They were determined to win the battle for God.
In the highways, byways, taverns, inns, and village greens, they preached
against church corruption and proclaimed Wycliffe's anti-clerical ideas.
They read from his English Bible, and they became known as Lollards.
The name might be derived from lollia, meaning weeds, or from lollen,
to whisper, murmur, or hum.
They were a secret but influential movement, and hated by the Catholic
establishment.
They went straight to the source of God's teaching, and cut out the priests.
Blessed be poor men in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
Blessed be mild men, for they shall wield the earth.
Blessed be they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed be they that hunger and thirst rightwise, for they shall be fulfilled.
Blessed be merciful men, for they shall get mercy.
Blessed be they that be of clean heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed be they that suffer persecution for rightfulness, for the kingdom of
heaven is theirs.
So shine your light before men, that they see your good works and glorify
your Father that is in heaven.
The church wasn't going to stand for this.
It cut at its very authority.
On this spot, Blackfriars, in London, on May the 17th, 1382, a special synod
made up of eight bishops, various masters of theology, doctors of canon and civil
law, and 45 friars met to examine Whitcliffe's works.
It was a show trial.
The conclusion was preordained.
And two days into their meeting, they drafted a statement condemning
Whitcliffe's pronouncements as outright heresies.
The synod also condemned Whitcliffe's assertions.
It ordered the arrest and prosecution of itinerant preachers throughout the land.
Eventually, it secured a parliamentary ban on all English language Bibles.
On the 30th of May that year, the synod instructed every diocese to publish the
verdict.
Whitcliffe became ill.
The stress defeated him, and he was paralyzed by a stroke.
Two years later, he died.
Whitcliffe's death didn't signal the end of the movement, though afterwards,
Lollards were at constant risk of their lives.
They met in hidden places, especially in Hereford and Monmouthshire.
They managed to elude the agents of the church and keep their faith alive.
One contemporary chronicler said that every second man he met was a Lollard,
and they went all over England, luring great nobles and lords to their
fold.
It's most unlikely that there were that numerous, but nevertheless, this was a
national, political movement, and its cause was the English language.
In summer season, when soft was the sauna, he shook me into a shroud as he shaped
well.
But in a Maya's morning, on Malvernahulles, me befell a fairy,
a fiery mythochter.
This is the West Midlands dialect of William Langland's Piers Plowman.
It's a religious poem, the most popular poem of its day.
It's the first time we know of that the English language was used to express a
personal, Christian, spiritual vision, and it's evidence of a native tradition
that's a real and growing alternative to the established religious culture.
It came to Langland in a series of dreams, the first here on the Malvern Hills.
It's written in a literative verse, itself a form which harks back to the old
English of Beowulf, and it's an allegory of the Christian life, and of the
contemporary corruption of the Christian church.
And as he beheld into the est, and heich to the sauna, he saw a tour on a
toft, trelliche he makeht, A deep dale beneath, a dungun therein, With deop ditch
and derk dreadful of sicht, A fair feld full of folk fond he there betwen,
Working and wandering as the world asketh, Some putten hem to the pluch, pleiden full
selden, In setting and in sowing, swonken full harde.
He fond there freres, all the four ordres, Preaching the peple for profit of her
wombes, Glossing the gospel as hem good liketh.
But the parish priest and the pardoner parteth the selver, That the poor peple of
the parish should have yif that herne were.
English here is being used to form not just a literary language, but one which is
an alternative to the received authority passed down either through French or
Latin.
This is plain speaking for plain folk, it seems to say.
This is real experience.
This is the language of an individual relationship with God.
It prefigures books like Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost.
It would bestir the pilgrim fathers and in good time become the Protestant language
of the English Reformation.
But meanwhile the church was not satisfied with Wycliffe's death.
It continued to burn Bibles, it burned people and it ordered Wycliffe to be
posthumously burned.
In 1414, the most imposing council ever called by the Catholic Church condemned
Wycliffe as a heretic and in the spring of 1428 ordered his bones to be exhumed and
removed from consecrated ground.
With the primate of England looking on, Wycliffe's remains were disinterred and
burned by a little bridge that spanned the river Swift, a tributary of the Avon.
His ashes were scattered into the stream.
So officially the Bible remained in Latin.
But there was a Lollard prophecy of the time which ran, The Avon to the seven
runs, the seven to the sea, and Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad, wide as the
waters be.
The prophecy was right.
English would eventually have its Bible, but the church would not give way before
the new force of English until the state had buckled first.
The battle for an English Bible was a battle literally for the soul of England.
But before it could be won, the heart and mind of the country had to be persuaded
too.
And that process began here in 1417 in France with Henry V.
Right trustee and well-beloved brother, right worshipful fathers in God,
and trustee and well-beloved brother, for as much as we know well your desire
were to hear joyful tidings of our good speed, we signify unto you that of our
labor has sent good conclusion.
In the early 15th century, Henry was campaigning around northern France,
winning French territory in famous battles, especially at Agincourt.
It seems a small thing, but it was of quite extraordinary significance that
after his victory, Henry V broke with 350 years of royal tradition and wrote his
dispatches home in English.
This was an astute move.
English kings had begun to speak English under his father Henry IV, but all court
documents had hitherto been written in French, as they had been since the Norman
conquest.
Henry's English letters are deliberate pieces of propaganda to be spread
throughout the land.
Here's his letter announcing peace.
Upon Monday, the 20th day of May, we arrived in this town, Troyes,
and the accord of the peace perpetual was here sworn by the Duke of Burgundy,
and semblably by us in our own name.
The letters forthwith sealed under the great seal, copies of which we send to be
proclaimed in our city of London, and through all our realm, that our people
may have knowledge thereof for their consolation.
Signed, Henry, by the grace of God, King of England.
Henry's motives may have been the exploitation of anti-French fervour,
but once he returned from the campaigns, he continued to write in English.
And in doing so, he made the first major step towards the creation of an official,
standardised English that everybody could read.
The Houses of Parliament, where I am now, are also called the Palace of Westminster.
That's a reminder that on this site, the Kings of England once had their
principal London residence.
This hall is all that survived the Great Fire, and somewhere round here,
when the King was in residence, would have been the first circle of his
government.
This was called the Signet Office.
It wrote personal letters on behalf of the monarch, which carried the royal seal,
and, in ways familiar to us today, once Henry decreed that the Signet Office
should use English, it was inevitable that the rest of the country would come to do
the same.
The problem was, which English?
Across the country, people still spoke a mass of different dialects, and would have
had trouble understanding one another.
For instance, the word stjern, or stain, in the north, was stone in the
south.
The ing participle, as in running, was said as and in the north, end in the
East Midlands, and ind in the West Midlands.
So, running could also be said as runand, runind, and runend.
But that was nothing compared to the variety of spellings in use.
Because England had traditionally used French or Latin as its written languages,
there had never been any need to agree on a common linguistic standard, or even how
to spell particular words.
But now, there was.
Take the word church, for instance, one of the most common and important in
the language.
In the north of England, it was commonly called a kirk, while the south used
church.
However, kirk could be spelt k-y-r-k, k-y-r-k-e, k-i-r-k-e, k-e-r-k,
k-i-r-c, and k-e-r-k-e.
Church was variously c-h-u-r-c-h-e, c-h-e-r-c-h-e, c-h-i-r-c-h-e, c-h-e-r-c-h,
c-h-y-r-c-h, c-h-e-r-g-e, c-h-y-r-c-h-e, and s-c-h-y-r-c-h-e.
Fortunately, from the language's point of view, there was a big engine of state that
could deal with this unruly tongue.
It was the Chancellery, reduced to Chancery, the civil service of the day,
because it was crucial that a document produced in London could be read in
Carlisle.
We needed a common written language.
This is the Public Records Office, where the official documents of the 15th
century are kept.
As Chancery began to use the English language, it had to make hundreds of
decisions about which form of a word and which spelling to adopt.
We don't know how these choices were made, but we do know that they stuck.
Thousands of documents were painstakingly written out and sent all over the country.
Many had legal status, so they had to be exact and consistent.
And under the influence of Chancery, the language starts to look more modern
and more even.
Words like any, but, many, not, such, ought, and even I, previously Ike,
I-C-H-E had also been allowed, find their modern forms at Chancery.
Lond becomes land, and church, Kirk, and all the others become church.
During the decade 1469 to 1479 alone, for instance, the modern word shall starts
as xal, then shal, and finally settles into its modern form, shal.
The word writhe becomes wright, hath and doth become has and does.
By 1500, under the influence of Chancery, the language is becoming recognisable to
us.
Is there anything else in common with the plurals?
Some end in s, some end in e-s, some end in i-e-s.
Anyone know why?
Is there a reason why they all end in different endings?
Is it because it's just the English language?
It's just the English language.
That's a very good answer.
OK.
But just because everyone began to spell the same way, it didn't mean the language
became any more logical.
Look at this.
Why English is so hard.
We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes.
But the plural of ox is oxen, not boxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese.
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a whole load of mice, but the plural of house is
houses, not heis.
If the plural of man is always called men, then why shouldn't the plural of pan be
called pen?
And it goes on, and it goes on, and it goes on.
What's the poet trying to tell us?
That English is confusing.
Hands up if you agree with Ola.
OK, hands down.
Ask any foreigner, in fact ask any pupil about mastering English spelling and its
inconsistencies, and they'll say, what have we done to deserve this?
A lot of it is just to do with the mongrel nature of English, and a lot of it is to
do with accidents of usage from centuries ago.
But some of it was deliberate.
Hands up if you think that English is so hard to learn.
Around the time English was being standardised by Chancery, there was much
debate about the best way to spell things.
Broadly, there were reformers who wanted to spell words according to the way they
were pronounced, and traditionalists who wanted to spell them in one of the ways
they'd always been.
When it's something like anchor, you don't notice if it's a H or a K.
The traditionalists won.
It is confusing.
How are you going to know?
Because the silent letter is silent.
They couldn't help tampering though.
In a desire to make the roots of the language more evident, words that had
entered English from French, for instance, were given a Latin look.
The letter B was inserted into debt and doubt.
The letter C into vittles.
Words that were thought to be of Greek origin sometimes had their spelling
adjusted, so that throne and theatre acquired their H.
Rhyme, on the other hand, was given an H just because rhythm had one, even though
it's etymologically absurd.
On a similar principle, an L was inserted in could because it had become silent,
but it was still present in should and would.
The same with H in words like whole, were and welk.
And like anybody who tries to rationalise English, they really messed it up.
You feel confused.
Who do you blame?
Me?
OK.
Let's carry on.
Let's have another look at the second verse.
The cow is a plural, making cows all kind.
But the plural of vow is vows not vine.
And I speak of foot, and you show me your feet.
But I give you a boot, would a pair be called feet?
Stay here.
Be on television.
The right would be quiet.
OK?
Right.
You can all stand there.
I've got the point.
Let's go.
As if to prove the folly of trying to bring reason into the language,
the English promptly decided to pronounce everything differently anyway.
Around this time, and nobody really knows why, a sea change took place in the way
English sounds.
This is called the Great Vowel Shift.
And it happened comparatively quickly.
We think over a generation or two.
Before it, English was pronounced in a way that sounds foreign to us now.
Might used to sound rather like today's meat, which in turn was said something
like mit.
So the sentence, I might go and buy some meat, once sounded like, I meat go and boy
some mit.
That was the Great Vowel Shift.
It made 15th century English recognisable to the modern ear.
But it didn't change the spelling.
What really gives all languages their uniformity is, of course, writing.
And what gives writing its huge modern power is the invention and spread of
printing.
Printing was invented in Gutenberg, Germany, around 1435.
It's often regarded as the most seismic technological change Western culture has
gone through.
Printing marks the beginning of the Information Age.
It's extraordinary, looking at this simple piece of technology, to think of what a
revolution it brought about.
This isn't 15th century, but it worked in exactly the same way.
And because this device made it easy to manufacture books in large numbers,
it became very hard indeed to control the spread of ideas.
And print favoured the language of the people.
English was pressed into service.
And although Latin was still the language of religion and scholarship, when Caxton
introduced printing to England, he got straight on with making books in
English.
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Mallory's Tales of King Arthur were his best
sellers.
But English was still a fluid and regionally difficult monster, and Caxton
worried about how to achieve a common standard that would be understood and read
by all.
Certainly it is hard to please every man because of diversity and change of
language.
For in these days, every man will utter his communication in such terms that few
man shall understand them.
But in my judgement, the common terms that be daily used been lighter to be
understand than the older and ancient English.
Caxton tells us that he is translating Virgil from a French version, but he
doesn't know which English word to use for eggs.
He tells a story of some merchants from Northumberland who are away from home and
visit a house in Kent to buy food.
One asks the woman for eggies.
She tells him she doesn't speak French.
Another asks for the same thing with a different plural, eren, which means eggs
in the dialect of Kent, and he gets them.
So which word should Caxton choose for his translation?
He settles for eggies, and so now do we.
So it's printers as much as teachers and writers who decide on a lot of words and
their spellings.
And although it was writers like Chaucer and Wycliffe who had established a
dominant dialect, it was Caxton's publications that consolidated the gains.
Gains which would eventually be made permanent by the English Bible,
which in Tudor times, thanks to printing, reached everyone who could read.
The scene was set for the creation of probably the most influential book that's
ever been in the history of language, English or any other.
Early in the reign of Henry VIII, the new king was still promising the Pope
to burn any untrue translations.
So he wrote Wycliffe's Bible, relentlessly circulating in hand-copied editions,
and he sent his Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, to hunt down and burn all
heretical books.
On the 12th of May 1521, a huge bonfire of confiscated heretical works was made
outside the original St. Paul's Cathedral.
It was said that the flames burned for two days.
That same year, a young man who was Oxford educated, and an ordained priest,
became tutor to a large household in Little Sodbury, Gloucestershire,
where he started to preach in the commonplace called St. Austen's Green,
in front of the church.
His name was William Tyndall, and his Bible was to bring about a radical change,
both in the English language and in English society.
He's had more influence on the way we speak than anyone except Shakespeare,
and he had to leave the country to do it.
Tyndall was in the mould of Wycliffe a hundred years on.
To a cleric who challenged him, he answered,
You may say he finished Wycliffe's business.
He believed passionately in an English Bible.
In 1524, aged 29, Tyndall left England, never to return.
He settled in Cologne, and began the work of translating the Bible into English.
He began translating the New Testament into English, not from Latin, but from the
original Hebrew and Greek.
By 1526, 6,000 copies had been printed abroad, and were about to be smuggled into
England.
Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey, whose spies had alerted them, were
terrified of this perceived threat, and the whole country was put on alert.
Naval ships patrolled the coastal waters, boats were stopped and searched,
and a great many of the Bibles were intercepted.
For the state, this was a serious struggle.
Latin was the language not only of God, but the state's authority rested on it
too.
The enemy had to be beaten off, an enemy that would eventually give the
English language so magnificently to the English people.
But first tens, and then hundreds of these Bibles began to get through.
The Bishop of London tried another attack.
He sought to buy the entire print run through an intermediary.
Oh, he will burn them, Tyndale is supposed to have said when he heard this.
Well, I am the gladder, for I shall get the money of him for these books,
and the whole world shall cry out upon the burning of God's Word.
And that's what happened.
The Bishop bought and burnt his books, and Tyndale used the money to prepare and
print a better version at church expense.
And this is what the conflict was about, a Bible for the people in their spoken
language.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed be they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be
filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they which suffer persecution for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven.
Ye are the salt of the earth.
It's hard, it's impossible to overpraise the quality of Tyndale's writing.
Its rhythmical beauty, its simplicity of phrase has penetrated deep into the
bedrock of English as we still know it today.
Tyndale's work formed 85% of the later King James Bible, the one we all know.
And we all use his phrases still.
Scapegoat, let there be light.
The powers that be, my brother's keeper.
Filthy looker, fight the good fight.
Sick unto death, flowing with milk and honey.
The apple of mine eye, a man after my own heart.
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
Sign of the times, ye of little faith.
Eat, drink, and be merry.
Broken-hearted, clear-eyed, and hundreds and hundreds more.
Words like beautiful, fisherman, landlady, seashore, stumbling block,
taskmaster, two-edged, viper, zealous, and even Jehovah and Passover come to us
from Tyndale.
By this stage in the adventure of English, we're coming across words that carry our
ideas and emotions and feelings even today.
Words that not only tell us about the external world we live in, but about the
inner nature of our condition.
Then God said, let there be light.
And God saw the light, and that it was good.
And he divided the light from the darkness and called the light day and the darkness
night.
And so of the evening and morning was made the first day.
Before long, there were thousands of copies of Tyndale's Bible in England.
In his happy phrase, the noise of the new Bible echoed throughout the country.
Produced in a small, pocket-sized edition that was easily concealed, it passed
through the cities and universities into the hands of even the humblest men and
women.
The authorities, especially Thomas More, still railed against him for putting the
fire of Scripture into the language of plowboys.
But the damage was done.
The English had their English Bible, legal or not.
The hunt for Tyndale continued, however.
In 1535, two hired assassins entrapped him in Antwerp and smuggled him out of the
city to Vilvoorde Castle, where he was imprisoned.
In his last letter, Tyndale asked that he might have...
A warmer cap, for I suffer greatly from the cold.
A warmer coat also, for what I have is very thin.
A piece of cloth with which to patch my leggings.
And I asked to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening, for it is wearisome to sit
alone in the dark.
But most of all, I beg and beseech your clemency that the commissary will kindly
permit me to have my Hebrew Bible, grammar and dictionary, that I may
continue with my work.
And continue his work he did.
Phrases like, a prophet has no honour in his own country.
A stranger in a strange land.
A law unto themselves.
We live and move and have our being.
And let my people go.
All come from Tyndale's pen.
In August 1536, Tyndale was found guilty of heresy by a court in the Netherlands.
And on October the 6th, he was strangled, then burned at the stake.
His last words were, Lord, open the King of England's eyes.
In fact, events had already opened the King's eyes.
Henry VIII had tried to divorce Catherine of Aragon, and that had brought him into
confrontation with the Pope.
Now he too was opposed to papal supremacy.
Henry's mood had changed, and scripture was suddenly more important than church
authority.
Thomas More had been executed for refusing to see things the King's way.
And his new advisors, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer, keen to keep their heads,
moved on ecclesiastical reform.
And that reform came with the split from Rome and the English Reformation.
Now England needed the scriptures to be available in its own tongue.
English was to become at last the language of power.
Henry's change of mind came too late to save Tyndale, even supposing he gave his
fate any thought at all.
But by the time of Tyndale's martyrdom, Henry had already authorized this,
Coverdale's Bible, which was translated from the German and was the first legal
Bible in England.
That was in 1535.
In 1537, Matthew's Bible, an amalgam of Coverdale's and Tyndale's, was allowed to
be printed in England.
In 1539, we have the Great Bible, designed to be the official version for
newly Protestant England and to be placed in every parish church in the land.
After centuries of suppression, three Bibles are approved and published
inside six years.
And it goes on.
The Geneva Bible, the Bishop's Bible, the Ream's Bible.
The English language has suddenly flowered.
It's already returned to the palaces of court and state, like this one,
Lambeth Palace in London.
It's again become the language of a vivid and vigorous national literature.
And now, with a split from Rome, it's conquered the last and highest
bastion, the church.
It was the spirit of Protestantism that the Bible be available to everyone.
In 1530, Thomas More had ranted about the shame of it being read by plowboys.
But the Great Bible of 1540 came with a preface by More's successor, Cranmer,
which commended it to all.
Here may men, women, young, old, learned, unlearned, rich, poor,
priests, laymen, lords, ladies, officers, tenants and mean men,
virgins, wives, widows, lawyers, merchants, artificers, husbands and all
manner of persons of what estate or condition so ever they be, learn all
things, what they ought to believe, what they ought to do, as well as
concerning Almighty God as themselves and all others.
And so, we've come full circle.
Where the medieval Catholic Church kept the Bible from the people, Henry's new
church set out to get the Bible to as many people as possible.
It's had an extraordinary influence on the spread of our language.
By the end of the 16th century, there were so many competing versions that
King James I ordered a standardised version, which we now know as the King
James Bible of 1611.
The writers drew on all the previous versions, but mostly on Tyndales.
Interestingly, they made no attempt to update the language that was now 80 years
old.
So even though by 1611 English had undergone further revolution, the King
James translators would still use ye sometimes for you, as in ye cannot serve
God and mammon, even though nobody said ye in common speech anymore.
They used thou for you, got for got, spake for spoke and so on.
In other words, the King James version was deliberately archaic, even then,
and that's part of its extraordinary power.
It was designed to feel as if it had the authority and resonance of speech from the
past.
It was meant to sound ancient, antique, like the very words of God.
And above all, the men who made this version listened to their final drafts
being read aloud over and over again, and altered them accordingly, so that they
had the right rhythm and balance.
This makes the authorised English Bible par excellence a preacher's Bible.
It was written to be spoken, to be heard, to be understood.
It was written to spread the word.
English at last had God on its side.
The language was authorised by the Almighty himself.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made.
In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.