Wycliffe and the First English Bible

John Wycliffe taught theology at Oxford and held the parish of Lutterworth (Gregory XI, Bull to Oxford (1377)). In 1377 Gregory XI wrote to the university that this “Professor of the Sacred Scriptures” was preaching errors that struck at the whole state of the church, and ordered his arrest (Gregory XI, Bull to Oxford (1377)). In May 1382 Archbishop William of Canterbury called bishops and doctors of theology and law to the house of the Friars Preachers in London, and they condemned a list of conclusions taken from his teaching (Fasciculi Zizaniorum p. 272). The twenty-four conclusions hold that the substance of bread and wine remains after the consecration, deny that a bishop or priest in mortal sin can ordain, consecrate or baptise, and attack church endowments and the friars. None of them concerns the translation of the Bible (Blackfriars Council (1382)).

It is a hostile chronicler who connects Wycliffe with the English Scriptures. Henry Knighton, writing under the year 1382, says that Master John Wycliffe translated the Gospel from Latin into English, so that it became common and more open to laymen, and to women who could read, than it had been to learned clerks; the pearl of the Gospel, he complains, was scattered and trodden by swine (Knighton, Chronicle vol. 2, pp. 151–152).

The translators’ own voice is heard in the prologue attached to the English Bible. Its writer does not give his name. “A symple creature hath translatid the bible out of Latyn into English,” he says, and he describes the work: collecting old Latin Bibles and commentaries to establish a sound text, studying it with the gloss, consulting grammarians and theologians on hard words, and translating by the sense, with many learned companions to correct the result. He cites Jerome’s saying that holy writ is the scripture of peoples, made so that all peoples should know it (Wycliffite Bible, General Prologue chapter 15).

John Foxe, writing in the sixteenth century, says that Wycliffe died at Lutterworth on St Silvester’s day, 31 December, and enters the death under the year 1384 (Foxe, Acts and Monuments vol. 3, p. 53). A constitution of Archbishop Arundel, printed by Foxe under the year 1409, forbade anyone to translate any text of Scripture into English on his own authority, or to read any such translation made in Wycliffe’s time or since, until the bishop or a provincial council had approved it (Foxe, Acts and Monuments vol. 3, p. 245). In 1415 the Council of Constance condemned forty-five articles drawn from his writings, declared him a heretic and ordered his bones dug up and removed from church ground (Council of Constance, session 8). Foxe reports that this was done forty-one years after his burial and that the bones were burned and the ashes thrown into a river (Foxe, Acts and Monuments vol. 3, pp. 94–96).

The conclusions condemned in 1382 do not mention the translation; it was Arundel’s constitution that restricted it. The same council that condemned Wycliffe’s memory went on to try Jan Hus, and its sentence calls Wycliffe the root from which Hus’s teaching grew (Council of Constance, session 15).