William Tyndale was born around 1494, most likely in the countryside near Dursley. A prodigiously gifted linguist — fluent in German, Italian, French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew — he studied at Oxford before becoming a tutor to the family of Sir John Walsh at Little Sodbury Manor, just a few miles south along the Cotswold escarpment.
It was at Little Sodbury that Tyndale's dangerous conviction hardened: the Bible must be published in English, so that even 'a boy that driveth the plough' could read it. Persecution drove him from Gloucestershire, then from England entirely. Between 1525 and 1535, working in Germany and the Low Countries, he translated and printed the New Testament and half the Old Testament from the original Greek and Hebrew — not from the Latin Vulgate, as others had done.
Copies began circulating in England in 1526, smuggled in bales of cloth. The authorities were furious. In 1535, Tyndale was betrayed in Antwerp by Henry Phillips, a bankrupt young Englishman who lured him from the safety of the English merchants' house under the pretence of friendship. After sixteen months' imprisonment at Vilvoorde Castle near Brussels, Tyndale was strangled at the stake and his body burned on 6th October 1536.
“The authorities were furious.”
His reported last words were prophetic: 'Lord, open the King of England's eyes.' Within three years, Henry VIII authorised an English Bible based largely on Tyndale's work. Bible scholars have since concluded that eighty-three per cent of the King James New Testament and seventy-six per cent of its Old Testament are Tyndale's words.
