I Bell chiming]
[Indistinct conversations]
[Mediaeval folk music playing]
BRAGG: 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.
MAN: Father, we are full fain Your bidding to fulfil.
Nine months past and plain Since we were put to pain.
BRAGG: But during the 1 4th and 1 5th 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 mediaeval 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.
Subtitling made possible by Acorn Media
WOMAN: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
And 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."
WOMAN: "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."
Right, find number 1 2 in your hymnbook
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 the world #
# There's a mighty revelation #
# Of the glory of the Lord #
In the beginning was the Word,
but not if you lived in 1 4th-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.
Bothe Osye and Isaye,
Preued that a prins withouten pere
Shulde descende doune in a lady,
To make mankynde clerly,
To leche tham that are lorne.
And in Bedlem hereby Sall that same barne by borne.
BRAGG: These are the Mystery Plays,
first performed in York around 1 3 7 6
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 remove 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.
[Women singing in Old English]
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.
Itt menes some meruayle us emang,
If fully you behete.
[Laughs]
What it shulde mene that wate not yoee.
For all yoe can gape and gone.
I can synge itt alls wele as they,
And on asaie itt sall sone be Proued or we passe.
If yoe will helpe, halde on, for thus it was.
[Sings to "Tempus Adest Floridum" in Old English]
BRAGG: This year it's the "Shepherds' Play,"
the story of the three shepherds seeing the angelic host
coming and preparing for the newly born Jesus.
[Laughs]
This was a mery note, Be the dede that I sall dye,
I have so crakid in my throte That my lippis are nere drye.
I trowe thou royse.
An aungell brought vs tythandes newe
A babe in Bedlem shulde be borne,
Of whom than spake oure prophicie trewe...
And bad us mete hym thare this morne.
[Women singing in Latin]
[Applause]
BRAGG: That was the language of the streets...
immediate and direct.
But in God's house, Latin ruled.
MAN: # Hallelujah #
[Men vocalising]
BRAGG: Anybody who was brought up
in the ways of the Church of England, as I was,
would find a mediaeval 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 the Book of Common Prayer.
Everything was in Latin.
And, at best, you'd only have understood the odd word of it.
[Men singing in Latin]
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.
[Singing continues]
[Ringing]
For the authority of the Catholic Church,
it was vital that a priest and a language
stood between a believer and the Bible.
[Singing continues]
But all that was about to change dramatically.
In the 1 4th century,
there was the beginnings of a countermovement
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 1 7 was admitted here...
to Merton College, Oxford.
[Organ music playing]
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 1 00 popes," he wrote,
"and all the friars turned to cardinals,
their opinions in matters of faith
should not be accepted
except insofar as they're 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 3 1 1 deacons, archdeacons,
and priests of the diocese,
he discovered that 1 68
were unable to repeat the 1 0 Commandments,
3 1 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 unauthorised 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 1 380,
Wycliffe had organised 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 a translation was done, the new Bible was reproduced.
Hundreds were copied in scriptoria,
production lines turning out handwritten copies.
1 7 0 of these Bibles survived...
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 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 borne 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 through darkness.
And he kept the light day and the darkness night.
And the eventide and morrowtide 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," "cockcrow,"
"communication," "crime,"
"dishonour," "envy," "frying pan,"
"godly," "graven," "humanity,"
"injury," "jubilee," "lecher,"
"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 1 380s, 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, "l, 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 "glorie"... 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 best seller.
The Church condemned him for it,
maintaining that he had 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 organise 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 anticlerical ideas.
They read from his English Bible,
and they became known as Lollards.
The name might be derived from "lolia," 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."
BRAGG: The Church wasn't going to stand for this.
It cut at its very authority.
On this spot... Blackfriars in London...
on May 1 7, 1 382,
a special synod made up of eight bishops,
various masters of theology, doctors of canon and civil law,
and 45 friars met to examine Wycliffe's works.
It was a show trial.
Their conclusion was preordained.
And two days into their meeting, they drafted a statement
condemning Wycliffe's pronouncements
as outright heresies.
The synod also condemned Wycliffe's associates.
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.
Wycliffe became ill.
The stress defeated him, and he was paralysed by a stroke.
Two years later, he died.
Wycliffe'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 they were that numerous,
but nevertheless this was a national political movement,
and its cause was the English language.
MAN: In a somer sesun, whon softe was the sonne,
I schop me into a shroud, as I a scheep were;
Bote in a Mayes morwnynge on Malverne hulles
Me bifel a ferly, of fairie, me-thoughte.
BRAGG: 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 alliterative 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.
MAN: And as I beheold into the est an heigh to the sonne,
I sauh a tour on a toft, tryelyche i-maket;
A deop dale bineothe, a dungun ther-inne,
With deop dich and derk and dredful of sighte.
A feir feld full of folk fond I ther bitwene,
Worchinge and wandringe as the world asketh.
Summe putten hem to the plough, pleiden ful seldene,
In settynge and in sowynge swonken ful harde,
I fond there freres, all the foure ordres,
Prechinge the peple for profyt of heore wombes,
Glosynge the Gospel as hem good liketh,
For the parisshe preest and the pardoner parten the silver
That the povere of the parisshe sholde have if they ne were.
BRAGG: 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 1 4 1 4 the most imposing Council
ever called by the Catholic Church
condemned Wycliffe as a heretic
and in the spring of 1 428 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 Severn runs, the Severn 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 1 4 1 7 in France, with Henry V.
MAN: Right trusty and well-beloved brother,
right worshipful fathers in God and trusty and well-beloved,
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 labour has sent good conclusion.
BRAGG: In the early 1 5th century,
Henry was campaigning around northern France,
winning French territory and 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.
MAN: "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.
[Bells chiming]
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 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 "stiene" or "stane" 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 "runnand," "runnind," and "runnend."
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...
"Church" was variously...
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 1 5th 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 those 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 "l"...
previously "Iche" had also been allowed...
find their modern forms at Chancery.
"Lond" becomes "land."
And "chirche," "kirk," and all the others become "church."
During the decade 1 469-1 4 79 alone, for instance,
the modern word "shall" starts as "xal," then "schal,"
and finally settles into its modern form, "shall."
The word "rithe" becomes "right."
"Hath" and "doth" become "has" and "does."
By 1 500, under the influence of Chancery,
the language is becoming recognisable to us.
WOMAN: Is there anything else in common with the plurals?
Some end in "-s." Some end in "-es."
Some end in "-ies."
Anyone know why?
Is there a reason why they all end in different endings?
CHILD: Is it because it's just the English language?
"It's just the English language."
That's a very good answer. Okay.
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 oxes.
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 lot of mice.
But the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man...
...is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?"
And it goes on and it goes on and it goes on.
WOMAN: What's the poet trying to tell us?
English is confusing.
That English is confusing. Hands up if you agree.
Okay. 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!
WOMAN: Hands up if you think that English
is so hard to learn.
BRAGG: 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 know if it's an "h" or a "k."
BRAGG: The traditionalists won.
It is confusing. How are you going to know?
Because a 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 "victuals."
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," "where," and "whelk."
And like anybody who tries to rationalise English,
they really messed it up.
You feel confused. And who do you blame?
- You. - Me. Okay.
Let's carry on.
Let's have a look at the second verse, okay?
"The cow in a plural may be cows or kine,
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 beet?"
Stay here to be on television, I'd advise you to keep quiet.
Okay? Right.
MAN: You can all stand there.
They've got the point. Let's go.
Hi! [Laughs]
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 "meet,"
which in turn was said something like "mit."
So the sentence "I might go and buy some meat"
once sounded like "I meet goe and boy some mit."
That was the Great Vowel Shift.
It made 1 5th-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 Mainz, Germany,
around 1 435.
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 1 5th century, but it works 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 Malory'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.
MAN: Certaynly it is harde to playse every man
by cause of dyversite and chaunge of langage.
For in these days,
every man wyll utter his commynycacyon in suche termes
that fewe man shall understonde theym.
But in my judgemente,
the comyn terms that be dayli used
ben lighter to be understonde
than the olde and auncyent englysshe.
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 "eggys."
She tells him she doesn't speak French.
Another asks for the same thing
with a different plural, "eyren,"
which means "eggs" in the dialect of Kent,
and he gets them.
So which word should Caxton choose for his translation?
He settles for "eggys," 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
there's ever been in the history of language...
English or any other.
Early in the reign of Henry Vlll,
the new king was still promising the pope
to burn any "untrue translations."
He meant Wycliffe's Bible,
relentlessly circulating in hand-copied editions,
and he set his Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey,
to hunt down and burn all heretical books.
On the 1 2th of May 1 52 1,
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 common place called St. Austin's Green"
in front of the church.
His name was William Tyndale,
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.
Tyndale was in the mould of Wycliffe, 1 00 years on.
To a cleric who challenged him he answered,
"Ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth a plough
to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost."
You may say he finished Wycliffe's business.
He believed passionately in an English Bible.
In 1 524, aged 29, Tyndale left England never to return.
He settled in Cologne and began the work
of translating the New Testament into English...
not from Latin, but from the original Hebrew and Greek.
By 1 526, 6,000 copies had been printed abroad
and were about to be smuggled into England.
Henry Vlll 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 tack.
He sought to buy the entire print run
through an intermediary.
"O 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.
MAN: "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 lucre,"
"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,"
"brokenhearted," "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 are 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."
BRAGG: 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 ploughboys,"
but the damage was done.
The English had their English Bible, legal or not.
The hunt for Tyndale continued, however.
In 1 535, two hired assassins entrapped him in Antwerp
and smuggled him out of the city to Vilvorde 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 ask 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 1 536, 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 Vlll 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 authorised this...
Coverdale's Bible...
which was translated from the German
and was the first legal Bible in England.
That was in 1 535.
In 1 53 7, Matthew's Bible...
an amalgam of Coverdale's and Tyndale's...
was allowed to be printed in England.
In 1 539, 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 Bishops' Bible, the Rheims 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 vigourous national literature,
and now, with the 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 1 530, Thomas More had ranted
about the shame of it being read by ploughboys.
But The Great Bible of 1 540
came with a preface by More's successor, Cranmer,
which commended it to all.
MAN: "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 soever 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 have come full circle.
Where the mediaeval Catholic Church
kept the Bible from the people, Henry's new Church set out
to get the Bible to as many as possible.
It's had an extraordinary influence
on the spread of our language.
By the end of the 1 6th 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 1 61 1.
The writers drew on all the previous versions,
but mostly on Tyndale's.
Interestingly, they made no attempt to update the language,
that was now 80 years old.
So even though by 1 61 1
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," "gat" 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."
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