The Lollard Bible

The lollard Bible was the outcome of Wydif's conviction that the text of Holy Scripture should be accessible to all. and his learned colleagues knew very well, of course, that much of the Bible is difficult; but they believed that the New Testa­ment was 'opyn to the undirstanding of simple men, as to the poyntis that be most nedeful to saluacioun'. Only the better educated among the clergy and a few of the literate laity could read the Latin Vulgate; the Anglo-Norman Bible and the re­vised version of Jean de Sy (1355) were rare in England and would not have been intelligible to many outside the ranks of the aristocracy; and, by this date, the old West Saxon gos­pels had become obsolete. No doubt the average layman was sufficiently familiar with the main outlines of the Bible story, epi­sodes from which were represented on the walls, windows, and screens of many churches, retailed by preachers, and re-enacted in the popular miracle plays. Versified English paraphrases of Genesis and Exodus had been composed about 1250; and the Cursor Mundi offered an encyclopaedia of scriptural story in 24,000 lines, to him who ‘na French can’. But Bible-reading by the laity was not encouraged; and, in any event, none of these poetic or pictorial versions would have satisfied Wyclif's de­mand for the literal text as the key to right understanding of Holy Writ. Earlier fourteenth-century translations of the Psalter and parts of the New Testament suggest that there may have been an incipient movement in favour of vernacular scriptures before Wyclif's time; but the lollards were the first to plan and execute an English translation of the whole Bible. Wyclif him­self is now thought to have taken little if any part in the actual work of translation; but he may have supervised, and he cer­tainly inspired, the earlier of the two versions that has come down to us. This is a strictly literal rendering probably intended as a key to the Vulgate for those with little Latin, that is, for the inferior clergy and for laymen of some education. Since there is good manuscript authority for believing the Old Testament, down to Baruch III, 20, to have been the work of Nicholas Hereford, it is likely that this first version was an Oxford enterprise; but the translator, or translators, of the remainder of the Old Testament and of the New are unknown to us. Whoever they were, their work made it plain to the lollards that word-for-word rendering of the Vulgate into English was inadequate to convey the true sense of the original; a second version, freer, more idiomatic, and more readable was needed; this was begun in the eighties and completed probably about 1396. The trans­lator, generally believed to have been John Purvey (though the 'evidence for his authorship is not conclusive), describes himself in his prologue as a ‘simple creature’ and tells us that he sought many helpers in his attempt to solve the four main problems confronting any translator of the Bible in this period—to estab­lish a satisfactory text of the Vulgate; to unravel the sense of the text with the aid of the glossators; to find apt English equivalents for hard words and hard sentences; and to produce a lucid ren­dering. Allusions to Oxford in the prologue suggest that these helpers may have been Oxford scholars; and the result was a translation which was widely copied in the fifteenth century and, shorn of its outspokenly lollard prologue, remained the best English version until the time of Tyndale and Coverdale. If the association of the vernacular Bible with unorthodoxy was in some ways unfortunate, it is none the less evident that the lollards had met a demand which extended far beyond the circle of their adherents. The decline of French as the language of educated society and the great resurgence of English as a literary lan­guage in the second half of the fourteenth century, meant that, despite persistent discouragement of Bible-reading by authority, an English Bible had become a necessity, long before the Reformation.