Episode 3

1. But during the 14th and 15th centuries, there began a movement to return
English to its central place in society.
2. It was a religious society. The Catholic Church controlled and pervaded all
aspects of life, and it was in the Church that this struggle for access and
power would be fought.
3. In formal terms, God spoke to the people in Latin.
4. Six centuries ago, the Bible stories were commonly enjoyed, but not the
Bible itself.
5. The language of the time of Chaucer. Latin.
6. It was compulsory. At best, you'd only have understood the odd word of it.
7. Only the clergy were allowed to read the Word of God, and they did even
that silently. For the authority of the Catholic Church, it was vital that a
priest and a language stood between a believer and the Bible.
8. In the 14th century, there was the beginnings of a countermovement that was
going to turn the English-speaking world on its axis. It would eventually tear
the Church in two.
9. Wycliffe was a charismatic scholar, fluent in Latin, and therefore familiar
with the Bible. He was a major philosopher and theologian who believed
passionately that his knowledge should be shared by everyone. And he was
fiercely opposed to the power and wealth of the Church.
10.The Church in Wycliffe's time was often lazy and corrupt.
11.His overriding thought was summed up in his passionate belief in the right
of every man, whether cleric or layman, to examine the Bible for himself.
12.By the beginning of 1 380, Wycliffe had organised the translation from the
Latin of the first English Bible. The work took place here in Oxford,
probably with a number of translators. And it wasn't only the mammoth task
of translation that faced them. Their Bible had to be disseminated, too. Once
a translation was done, the new Bible was reproduced.
13.Hundreds were copied in scriptoria, production lines turning out handwritten
copies. 170 of these Bibles survived.
14.It wasn't an easy translation. Wycliffe and his team did a translation word
for word, even keeping the Latin word order.
15.The Church condemned him for it.
16.Wycliffe had begun to organise and train what amounted to a new religious
order of itinerant preachers, whom he dispatched around England. They
preached against Church corruption and proclaimed Wycliffe's anticlerical
ideas.
17.The preachers read from his English Bible, and they became known as
Lollards. They were a secret but influential movement and hated by the
Catholic establishment.
18.On May 17, 1382, a special synod made up of eight bishops, various masters
of theology, doctors of canon and civil law, and 45 friars met to examine
Wycliffe's works. They drafted a statement condemning Wycliffe's
pronouncements as outright heresies. It ordered the arrest and prosecution of
itinerant preachers throughout the land.
19.Wycliffe became ill. The stress defeated him, and he was paralysed by a
stroke. Two years later, he died.
20.Lollards were at constant risk of their lives. They met in hidden places,
especially in Hereford and Monmouthshire. They managed to elude the
agents of the Church and keep their faith alive. They went all over England,
luring great nobles and lords to their fold. It's most unlikely that they were
that numerous, but nevertheless this was a national political movement, and
its cause was the English language.
21.Yes, it was.
22.No, it wasn’t.
23.In 1414 the most imposing Council ever called by the Catholic Church
condemned Wycliffe as a heretic and in the spring of 1428 ordered his bones
to be exhumed.
24.Latin.
25.Henry V broke with 350 years of royal tradition and wrote his dispatches
home in English. Henry's English letters are deliberate pieces of propaganda,
to be spread throughout the land.
26.Once he returned from the campaigns, he continued to write in English.
27.The Houses of Parliament (the Palace of Westminster). That's a reminder
that on this site the kings of England once had their principal London
residence. This hall is all that survived the Great Fire, and somewhere 'round
here, when the king was in residence, would have been the first circle of his
government. This was called the Signet Office.
28.Across the country, people still spoke a mass of different dialects and would
have had trouble understanding one another. For instance the word "stiene"
or "stane" in the North was "stone" in the South.
29.From the language's point of view, there was a big engine of state that could
deal with this unruly tongue. It was the Chancellery, reduced to "Chancery,"
the civil service of the day, because it was crucial that a document produced
in London could be read in Carlisle.
30.A lot of it is just to do with the mongrel nature of English, and a lot of it is to
do with accidents of usage from centuries ago. Around the time English was
being standardised by Chancery, there was much debate about the best way
to spell things.
31.Reformers wanted to spell words according to the way they were
pronounced and traditionalists wanted to spell them in one of the ways
they'd always been.
32.Words that were thought to be of Greek origin sometimes had their spelling
adjusted, so that "throne" and "theatre" acquired their "h."
33.And like anybody who tries to rationalise English, they really messed it up.
34.Around this time, and nobody really knows why, a sea change took place in
the way English sounds. And it happened comparatively quickly, over a
generation or two. No, it didn’t change the spelling.
35.Printing was invented in Mainz, Germany, around 1435.
36.And although it was writers like Chaucer and Wycliffe who had established
a dominant dialect, it was Caxton's publications that consolidated the gains.
37.Early in the reign of Henry Vlll, the new king was still promising the pope to
burn any "untrue translations." He meant Wycliffe's Bible, relentlessly
circulating in hand-copied editions, and he set his Lord Chancellor, Cardinal
Wolsey, to hunt down and burn all heretical books.
38.On the 12th of May 1521, a huge bonfire of confiscated heretical works was
made outside the original St. Paul's Cathedral.
39.A young man who was Oxford-educated and an ordained priest became tutor
to a large household in Little Sodbury, Gloucestershire, where he started to
preach "in the common place called St. Austin's Green" in front of the
church. His name was William Tyndale, and his Bible was to bring about a
radical change both in the English language and in English society.
40.In 1 524, aged 29, Tyndale left England never to return.
41.He settled in Cologne and began the work of translating the New Testament
into English, not from Latin, but from the original Hebrew and Greek.
42.By 1 526, 6,000 copies had been printed abroad and were about to be
smuggled into England. Henry Vlll and Cardinal Wolsey whose spies had
alerted them were terrified of this perceived threat, and the whole country
was put on alert.
43.The Bishop bought and burnt his books, and Tyndale used the money to
prepare and print a better version at Church expense.
44.Its rhythmical beauty, its simplicity of phrase, has penetrated deep into the
bedrock of English as we still know it today. Tyndale's work formed 85% of
 the later King James Bible. Before long, there were thousands of copies of
Tyndale's Bible in England.
45.The authorities especially Thomas More still railed against him for "putting
the fire of scripture into the language of ploughboys," but the damage was
done.
46.In his last letter, Tyndale asked that he might have a warmer cap, a warmer
coat also, a piece of cloth with which to patch his leggings. And he asked to
be allowed to have a lamp in the evening to sit alone in the dark. But most of
all he begged to permit him to have his Hebrew Bible, grammar, and
dictionary, that he may continue with his work.
47.In August 1 536, Tyndale was found guilty of heresy by a court in the
Netherlands. And on October the 6th, he was strangled, then burned at the
stake. His last words were, "Lord, open the King of England's eyes!"
48.Henry Vlll had tried to divorce Catherine of Aragon, and that had brought
him into confrontation with the pope.
49.Henry's mood had changed, and Scripture was suddenly more important than
Church authority. Thomas More had been executed for refusing to see things
the king's way, and his new advisors, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas
Cranmer, keen to keep their heads, moved on ecclesiastical reform. And that
reform came with the split from Rome and the English Reformation.
50.Henry had already authorised this - Coverdale's Bible. In 1537, Matthew's
Bible, an amalgam of Coverdale's and Tyndale's, was allowed to be printed
in England. In 1539, we have the Great Bible. And it goes on... the Geneva
Bible, the Bishops' Bible, the Rheims Bible.
51.The English language has suddenly flowered. It's already returned to the
palaces of court and state, like this one, Lambeth Palace in London. It's
again become the language of a vivid and vigourous national literature, and
now, with the split from Rome, it's conquered the last and highest bastion...
the Church. It was the spirit of Protestantism that the Bible be available to
everyone.
52.The mediaeval Catholic Church kept the Bible from the people, Henry's new
Church set out to get the Bible to as many as possible.
53.By the end of the 16th century, there were so many competing versions that
King James I ordered a standardised version, which we now know as the
King James Bible of 1611.
54.The writers drew on all the previous versions, but mostly on Tyndale's.
Interestingly, they made no attempt to update the language, that was now 80
years old. So even though by 1611 English had undergone further
 revolution, the King James translators would still use "ye" sometimes for
"you".
1) "barbarian," "birthday," "canopy," "childbearing," "cockcrow,"
"communication," "crime," "dishonour," "envy," "frying pan," "godly,"
"graven," "humanity," "injury," "jubilee," "lecher," "madness,"
"menstruate," "middleman," "mountainous," "novelty," "oppressor,"
"philistine," "pollute," "puberty," "rampart," "schism," "tramp," "unfaithful,"
"visitor," and "zeal." "emperor," "justice," "profession," "city," "cradle,"
"suddenly," "angel," "multitude," and "glorie".
2) "beautiful," "fisherman," "landlady," "seashore," "stumbling block,"
"taskmaster," "two-edged," "viper," "zealous," "Jehovah" "Passover".