In 1521, a young scholar named William Tyndale arrived at Little Sodbury Manor to serve as chaplain and tutor to the children of Sir John Walsh. Born in Gloucestershire around 1494, Tyndale had studied at Oxford and Cambridge, and he carried with him a dangerous conviction: that ordinary English men and women should be able to read the Bible in their own language.
The Walshes kept a busy household, and visiting clergymen frequently dined at the manor. One evening, a Catholic scholar declared that people were better off with the Pope's laws than with Scripture. Tyndale's reply, recorded by the martyrologist John Foxe, became one of the Reformation's defining statements: 'I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than thou dost.'
“' By tradition, Tyndale began his translation work in his bedroom at the manor and would walk up to the hillfort above the village to think and rest among its ancient ramparts.”
By tradition, Tyndale began his translation work in his bedroom at the manor and would walk up to the hillfort above the village to think and rest among its ancient ramparts. A 19th-century account describes him rambling 'to the top of Sodbury hill, and there reposing amidst the ruins of an ancient Roman camp.' Unable to find support for his translation in England, he left for Germany in 1524 and completed his New Testament in Worms, smuggling copies back to England hidden in bales of cloth. He was betrayed, arrested in Antwerp, and executed for heresy in October 1536 — strangled and then burned. Yet roughly nine-tenths of his New Testament wording survives in the King James Bible of 1611. Little Sodbury is also one of Gloucestershire's rare Thankful Villages — communities that lost no residents in the First World War.
