When you describe someone as 'the salt of the earth' or dismiss a rule-breaker as 'a law unto themselves', you are quoting William Tyndale. The scholar commemorated by the tower on Nibley Knoll did not merely translate the Bible into English — he forged the very language in which it would be read for five centuries.
Tyndale faced a peculiar challenge. He was translating from Greek and Hebrew into a language that had no established tradition of biblical prose. Latin phrases could not simply be carried over — they would be meaningless to the ploughboy Tyndale wanted to reach. Instead, he invented vivid, muscular English phrases that lodged permanently in the language. 'The powers that be', 'my brother's keeper', 'the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak', 'eat, drink and be merry', 'fight the good fight' — all are Tyndale's.
His influence on English is difficult to overstate. While Erasmus had produced his Greek New Testament in 1516 and Luther had also translated from Greek and Hebrew, Tyndale brought a freshness and directness to his prose that later translators could not improve upon. When the scholars assembled by King James I produced their Authorised Version in 1611, they kept Tyndale's phrasing intact across the vast majority of both Testaments.
“'The powers that be', 'my brother's keeper', 'the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak', 'eat, drink and be merry', 'fight the good fight' — all are Tyndale's.”
Standing at the foot of his monument, walkers are in the landscape where this extraordinary man grew up — the steep escarpment, the vale stretching west to the Severn, the small stone villages. It was from here that a boy from rural Gloucestershire set out to change the English language forever.
