William Tyndale

John Foxe tells that Tyndale said he would make the boy who drives the plough know more of Scripture than a learned opponent, that he sought and failed to find a place with the bishop of London, and that he left for Germany and afterwards lived mostly at Antwerp (Foxe, Acts and Monuments vol. 5, pp. 117–119 (Cattley)). His New Testament was printed at Worms in 1526. In its closing address he says that he had no earlier English version to follow and asks the learned to amend what is amiss (Tyndale, New Testament (1526) epistle to the reader (Parker Society edition, p. 390)). Two years later he argued that Scripture ought to be in the mother tongue and that Greek agrees better with English than with Latin (Tyndale, Obedience of a Christian Man preface (Parker Society edition, pp. 144–148)).

The Catholic writer Johannes Cochlaeus called him an apostate and his book Luther’s New Testament (Cochlaeus, Commentaria under the year 1526 (Arber, pp. 20–24)). Foxe relates that he was betrayed, held at Vilvoorde for a year and a half, condemned under the emperor’s decree, and strangled and burned there in 1536 (Foxe, Acts and Monuments vol. 5, pp. 123 and 127 (Cattley)). See Tyndale’s English New Testament.