The English Bible Before Tyndale

There is no disputing William Tyndale’s greatness as a Bible translator, in terms of both his sources (working from the original Greek and Hebrew) and his influence. He was not, however, the first man to give the biblical story to the English people in their own language.

In the era of the Anglo-Saxon or Old English language, the poet Caedmon (flourished around 657–84) turned several biblical accounts into English poems. The Venerable Bede wrote concerning Caedmon:

In the Monastery of Abbess Hilda there dwelt a certain brother especially distinguished by the grace of God. It was his custom to compose religious poems, so that whatever was related to him out of Scripture, he swiftly turned into poetic expressions of great sweetness and humility in Old English, his native language. By Caedmon’s poems many minds were often inspired to a contempt of this world, and an aspiration toward heaven.

Very shortly after Caedmon, Bishop Aldhelm of Sherborne (d. 709) translated the Psalms into Old English, although there are no surviving copies. More famously, Bede himself (d. 735) translated John’s gospel into Old English. Sadly, this too has not survived. Both Aldhelm and Bede almost certainly worked from the Latin Vulgate.

Bishop Aldhelm’s Psalter did not stand alone; a number of copies of the Psalter in Old English are known to have existed after his time. The most important is the Vespasian Psalter, named after the Vespasian collection of old manuscripts collected by Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631). Dating from the ninth century, the Vespasian Psalter is another example of an interlinear translation; the Latin text of the Psalms is translated line by line into the Kentish or Mercian dialect of Old English. A complete manuscript copy survives, located in the British Library. It is the oldest known Latin-English version of any biblical book. The product of a monastic community near Canterbury, this Psalter seems to have been intended as a local study and teaching aid for the monks.

Toward the end of the ninth century, King Alfred the Great (r. 871–99) published his Book of Laws for the governance of his kingdom. Written in Old English, the book contains extensive biblical material—not a strict translation of the Vulgate, but more like a paraphrase— constituting roughly one-fifth of its content. Still, it presented the teaching of the Bible in Old English as the basis for Alfred’s laws. The biblical material encompasses the Ten Commandments, a selection of laws from chapters 21–23 of Exodus, the decrees of the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:23–29), and the Golden Rule of Matthew 7:12. It has been argued that this is the first example of biblical translation used for legislative purposes in the history of Western Europe.

The middle of the tenth century gives us an early example of an interlinear biblical translation. This was in the form of a Latin text of the Lindisfarne Gospels, accompanied by a line-for-line translation into Northumbrian Old English by Aldred the Scribe. A manuscript copy survives and is located in the British Library. The manuscript says that its translation has been done by “Aldred, unworthy and most wretched priest,” who, “with the assistance of God, St. Cuthbert, and Bishop Eadfrith, added the English meaning above the Latin.” Aldred’s interlinear would not have been widely known outside regional monastic circles. But at least it meant that some monks were studying the four Gospels in English as well as in Latin. The fact that Aldred made this translation seems to indicate that he was fulfilling a need.

A little later than Aldred’s interlinear came the Rushworth Gospels (late tenth century). These were another Northumbrian Old English interlinear; Matthew was translated by Farman of Harewood, while Mark, Luke, and John were translated by Owun. Farman and Owun were both priests. There is a complete surviving copy of this interlinear in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. Like Aldred’s interlinear, however, the Rushworth Gospels almost certainly had a very limited circulation.

The period 990 to 1050 saw the production of the Wessex Gospels. As students of English history will recollect, Wessex was the English kingdom made famous by Alfred the Great, covering southwestern England, with its capital at Winchester. We do not know who was responsible for the Wessex Gospels; they seem to have been produced by a body of scholars, based in either Winchester or Canterbury. Unlike the work of Aldred, Farman, and Owun, the Wessex Gospels were not interlinears but straight translations of the Vulgate text of the Gospels into the West Saxon dialect of Old English. Also unlike the earlier interlinears, the Wessex Gospels likely had a significant circulation, certainly among the monasteries of Wessex. This is borne out by the fact that we have five complete or nearly complete surviving manuscripts, plus other fragments and partial copies. The complete manuscripts are found in the British Library, Oxford’s Bodleian Library, and Cambridge University’s Corpus Christi Library.

Shortly before the Norman Conquest of 1066, a scholar named Aelfric of Eynsham (together with others) translated the Vulgate version of the Heptateuch (Genesis to Judges) into Old English. It is also known as the Aelfric Paraphrase. Aelfric was a Benedictine priest-monk, the abbot of Eynsham Abbey near Oxford. His translational work seems to have been an aspect of a reform movement then current in English monasteries. One almost complete manuscript of the Old English Heptateuch survives, lodged in Oxford’s Bodleian Library; several other partial manuscripts also exist. It was probably intended for study purposes by English monks and priests rather than for general use.

After the Norman Conquest, and the shift from Old English to Middle English, the tradition of translating the Psalter continued. We have, for example, the West Midland Psalter (early fourteenth century) and the Kentish Psalter (mid-fourteenth century). There is a complete surviving copy of the West Midland Psalter in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, and of the Kentish Psalter in the British Library. They were almost certainly translated within monastic or priestly circles for devotional purposes, with a limited circulation. In addition, we have a text known as the Ormulum, a collection of expositions of the set texts for each Sunday in the church’s lectionary. The only surviving copy in the Bodleian Library contains thirty-two homilies, in which biblical material (lessons from the Gospels) is paraphrased into metrical verse. The work is named for its author, Orm, an Augustinian canon from the Lincolnshire area, in the period 1175–1200. He wrote it to provide material for fellow priests on which to base sermons.

That brings us to the greatest work of Bible translation before Tyndale, the Wycliffite Bible. Stemming from the work of the proto-Protestant reformer John Wycliffe (d. 1384), this was the first complete English Bible, albeit in Middle English, which is quite hard for modern readers to understand. Wycliffe had become convinced that the Bible was the only infallible authority within the church and that it should not be locked up inside the Latin language but should be made available in the native tongue of a country’s people. After his expulsion from Oxford University in 1381, Wycliffe retired to the parish of Lutterworth, where he carried on his reforming activities by (chiefly) organizing a team of translators to produce a complete English version of the Vulgate.

There were two versions of the Wycliffite Bible. The first, from 1382, is a very literal translation of the Vulgate, accurate but stiff and wooden. The second, from the period roughly 1388–95, by Wycliffe’s disciple John Purvey (c. 1354–c. 1414), is a far more fluent translation, using a more natural style of English. Since the established church in England had condemned Wycliffe, his Bible could circulate only in secret, among those sympathetic to his teaching. Yet within those constraints, it circulated relatively widely. This is evidenced by the fact that some 250 manuscript copies have survived—a remarkably high number for an English text from the era before the printing press. (The printing press in England arrived a couple of generations before the Reformation, but no press in Roman Catholic England would print the “heretical” Wycliffite Bible, so it had to continue circulating in manuscript form.)

Wycliffe also organized a body of itinerant preachers, the “Poor Priests,” to evangelize in a context in which many parish priests were not necessarily doing much on Sundays beyond celebrating the Mass. The more learned among the Poor Priests probably took with them copies of the Wycliffite Bible, from which they would deliver their sermons. Since most people at that time in English history were illiterate, this would have been their only opportunity to hear the Bible being read to them in their own language.

Despite the condemnation of Wycliffe, there is some evidence that versions of his Bible were occasionally found in Roman Catholic circles. For example, some version of a Wycliffite Bible seems to have been used for devotional purposes in the circles of the devout King Henry VI in the mid-fifteenth century. Henry’s royal status would have made this a safe practice, whereas ordinary folk sympathetic to Wycliffe’s reforming stance were likely to be punished for owning a Wycliffite Bible.

Before William Tyndale produced his New Testament translation in 1526, the situation was as follows: There was as yet no printed translation of the Bible. The only complete translation of the Bible was Wycliffe’s, which circulated in manuscript form among his followers, who were an underground movement. The established English church, owing to its paralyzing dread of Wycliffite heresy, was never likely to produce an English translation (it might have seemed an admission that Wycliffe had done a good thing).

Consequently, Tyndale represented a new dawn for biblical scholarship and popular piety, translating the New Testament into recognizable Modern English. But we should not forget the Old English and Middle English antecedents of his noble work.