On the last day of October, the beginning of the Protestant Reformation (in 1517) is commemorated. However, 135 years earlier the Bible was translated for one of the first times into English by John Wycliffe—the morning star of the Reformation—in 1382.

Introduction: The Morning Star of the Reformation

The earlier form of the Wycliffe Bible was published in 1382, and, together with his numerous writings exposing the errors of the church of Rome, it made John Wycliffe known to succeeding generations as ‘the morning star of the Reformation’. Dean Hook wrote, ‘John Wiclif may be justly accounted one of the greatest men our country has produced. He is one of the very few who have left the impress of their minds not only on their own age, but on all time’.¹ He was highly esteemed by his contemporary, the poet Chaucer, whose description of ‘a poore parson of a town’ may well be a portrayal of Wycliffe—

‘He was also a learned man, a clerk,
That Christes gospel truely wolde preach;
His parishens devoutly would he teach …
This noble ensample to his sheep he gave,
That first he wrought, and afterward he taught.
Out of the Gospel he the wordes caught …
He waited after no pomp ne reverence,
He maked him no spiced conscience;
But Christe’s lore, and His Apostles’ twelve,
He taught, but first he followed it himselve.’

Wycliffe’s objective was a translation of the Latin Bible into the English of his time. He did not do all the work himself, but the impulse of his leadership was of vital importance. He organised an order of ‘poor preachers’ who travelled through England teaching his doctrines, and the translation of the Bible provided them with new and valuable equipment for their evangelism. The preaching of these ‘Lollards’, as they were called, and their spread of this first English Bible, exerted a profound influence on English life for the next hundred years. He did not live long enough to see the fruit of his labours and those of his fellow-workers, for he died just two years after the completion of the earlier version, ‘but he had planted a tree whose fruits, spiritual and literary, were to be the joy and the exultation of the common people down through the centuries’.²

Opposition to Wycliffe and the New Translation

The evidence from friends and foes alike is unanimous for Wycliffe’s responsibility for the translation. Archbishop Arundel wrote to Pope John XXIII in 1411, ‘This pestilent and wretched John Wycliffe, of cursed memory, that son of the old serpent ... endeavoured by every means to attack the very faith and sacred doctrine of the Holy Church devising—to fill up his malice—the expedient of a new translation of the Scriptures into the mother tongue’.³ About the same time John Hus in Prague wrote, ‘By the English it is said that Wycliffe translated the whole Bible from Latin into English’.

Numerous copies have survived, including over forty in the British Library, nearly as many in the Bodleian, fourteen in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, and single copies in the libraries of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges, in the cathedral libraries at Lincoln, Worcester, and Hereford, and a few in Europe and the U.S.A.

In 1397 the church authorities pressed for the death penalty for heresy, and the statute of 1401 de heretico comburendo armed the opponents of the vernacular Bible with this dreadful weapon. Archbishop Arundel secured the condemnation of a number of points of Wycliffe’s teaching in 1407, and one of his ‘Constitutions’ against the Lollards reads: ‘We resolve therefore and ordain that no one henceforth on his own authority translate any text of Scripture into English or any other language ... and that no book, pamphlet or tract ... composed in the time of the said John Wycliffe or since, or to be composed in future, be read in part or in whole, publicly or privately, under the pain of the greater excommunication, until the translation shall have been approved by the diocesan of the place, or if the need be, by a provincial council’.

The prohibition was sternly enforced and the number of prosecutions recorded for owning and reading English Bibles is considerable. Thus the very possession of an English Bible was a potential danger, and if the Bible contained any evidence of Wycliffite authorship the danger would be increased. It is not surprising that surviving manuscripts contain little information about the translators and scribes responsible for their production.

The Publication of the Wycliffe Bible

The Bibles were laboriously written by hand long before the invention of printing, and in those days there was no standard literary dialect, and no standard spelling.

For example:

• their may be her, here, ther, their or thair;
• them may be hem, horn, ham, them, than, theim, thaim;
• flesh may be fleisch, fleish, flesch, flesh, flehs, flessh, etc.

The copies were carefully and neatly written, and in spite of the inconsistent spelling, they were intelligible to those who could read, and they were the means of blessing to many readers.

The Basis of the Translation

The basis of the translation was not the ‘Received Text’, but the Latin Vulgate, and the Latin manuscript copies available to the translators varied much in quality. The prologue to the Wycliffite Bible describes their first great task of producing a more reliable Latin text—‘A simple creature hath translated the Bible out of Latin into English. First this simple creature had much travail with diverse fellows and helpers to gather many old Bibles, and other doctors and common glosses, and to make one Latin Bible ‘sumdel trewe’; and then to study it of new, the text with the gloss, and other doctors as he might get, and especially Lire on the old testament that helped full much in this work’. The whole prologue may be read at length in the old spelling in Anne Hudson’s ‘Selections from English Wycliffite Writings’.⁴ The translation inevitably reproduced the imperfections of its Latin source, but it was the best that could be accomplished at the time.

The influence of the Vulgate and its underlying Greek text is evidenced by such passages as Luke 2.14 ‘in erthe pees be to men of good wille’, and the omission of the ‘doxology’ at the end of the ‘Lord’s prayer’ in Matthew 6.13. The influence of the Vulgate is also shown by distinctive renderings of certain passages, e.g. John 3.8 ‘The spirit brethith where he wole, and thou herist his vois’.

Wycliffe’s Scholarship

Wycliffe was one of the leading scholars of his day and held important offices at Oxford. He was Seneschal or steward of Merton College in 1356, Master of Balliol in 1361, Warden of Canterbury Hall (which was afterwards merged with Christ Church) in 1365. In 1374 he became rector of Lutterworth, where his ministry and writings continued to arouse much hostility, but amid many trials ‘he pursued to the last his course of unremitting devotion to the work of teaching and preaching’.⁵

The Bible attributed to Wycliffe survives in at least 170 copies which were individually examined in great detail by Forshall and Madden for their great four volume work published in 1850. A careful comparison showed that the copies can be separated into two distinct sets, one that is very literal and in some respects unpolished, and the other more smooth and flowing and expressed in more idiomatic and less laboured English. Although the scholarly debate on the extent of Wycliffe’s involvement in the translation has continued for more than a hundred years, it is generally agreed that the earlier version should be attributed to Wycliffe and the later version to his friend John Purvey.⁶ With this conclusion Prof. Sven L. Fristedt generally agrees, although differing from Forshall and Madden in some matters of detail.⁷

First published in Quarterly Record 481. Last updated 3 October 2023. 

References: 

^1. W. J. Heaton Books referred to Our Own English Bible, Its Translators and their Work London 1905.

^2. I. M. Price The Ancestry of Our English Bible (2nd Edition revised by W. A. lrwin and A. P. Wikgren: New York 1907/1949).

^3. The Cambridge History of the Bible Vol. 2. The West from the Fathers to the Reformation: Cambridge 1969.

^4. Anne Hudson Selections from English Wycliffite writings: Cambridge 1978.

^5. W. F. Moulton The History of the English Bible 5th Edition: London 1911.

^6. J. Forshall and Sir F. Madden: The New Testament in English according to the version by John Wycliffe about 1380 and revised by John Purvey about 1388: Oxford 1879 (a small reprint of the N.T. text).

^7. S. L. Fristedt The Wycliffe Bible in English IV ‘The Principal Problems connected with Forshall and Madden’s Edition’: Stockholm 1953.