Bible and Sword (13 page)

The work that reached fruition in the Bible of 1611 really began with Tyndale in 1525; but his was by no means the first translation into the English vernacular. All the earlier ones, however, had predated the invention of printing and were self-limited by the difficulty of reproducing copies in longhand. Once printing was available, the flood waters were loosed, and the vernacular Bible could no longer be kept from the people, for as fast as the Church authorities could buy them up or burn them more copies could be printed.

The fact that Henry VIII defied the Pope for a divorce and so sanctioned the Protestant revolt was not a cause of the Reformation, but an accident that placed the Crown on the side of the reformers earlier than might otherwise have happened. The Reformation would have taken place if Henry had never lived or never lusted after Anne Boleyn. The spirit of Protestantism was abroad and in England had been strong ever since John Wyclif and his Lollards fought the abuses of the Roman Church in the fourteenth century. Wyclif himself and his disciples had translated the entire Bible from the Vulgate in the 1380’s. How immense was their devotion to their cause is plain when one thinks
of the work involved. One hundred and seventy manuscript copies of the Wyclif Bible have survived. Many more must once have existed, for many were probably destroyed when the Lollards were being persecuted as heretics and many more lost in later years. Perhaps two, three, or four hundred copies were made, each copied out laboriously by hand (there are approximately 774,000 words in the Bible) and each done in danger of the copyist’s life or liberty. Even possession of the vernacular Bible at that time could be used as evidence of the crime of heresy. “Our bishops damn and burn God’s law because it is drawn in the mother tongue,” accused a Lollard writer of the fifteenth century.

But what concerned the bishops was not so much the reading of the Bible as
who
read it. It was not the translation as such that infuriated the bishops, but the unauthorized translation and the use of it among classes prone to heresy and revolt, who had already shown their temper in the Peasants’ Uprising of 1381. The rich and orthodox, whose interest lay in upholding Church authority, were frequently granted special licenses to possess and read the Bible in English. But the upper clerics were concerned to keep it out of the hands of the common man lest he find a direct path to God that by-passed the sacraments of the Church. In 1408 Archbishop Arundel decreed that anyone making or using an unlicensed translation of the Bible was liable to the ultimate penalty of death at the stake; the decree was founded on the notorious
de Heretico Comburendo
passed by the King and Parliament in 1400, the first statute in English law to allow the death penalty for religious beliefs. “Divers false and perverse people of a certain new sect,” it said, who “preach and teach these days openly and privily divers new doctrines and wicked heretical and erroneous opinions … and hold and exercise schools and make and write books and wickedly do instruct and inform people” shall be handed over to the secular courts and, if they do not abjure, shall be burned “that such punishment
may strike in fear to the minds of others.” No wonder that Thomas Fuller in his
Church History
says of one of the Wyclifites, John de Trevisa, who made a translation in 1397, that he does not know which to admire the most, “his ability that he could, his courage that he durst or his industry that he did perform so difficult and dangerous a task.”

Generally the Wyclif Bibles were of pocket size, intended for the use of the itinerant Lollard priests who went about among the people preaching and reading to them from the Scriptures in the language of daily speech. Records show that the cost of one of the little Wyclif Bibles was about forty shillings, or the equivalent of a hundred and fifty dollars today. The fact that as many as a hundred and seventy were preserved despite the efforts at suppression is further evidence of the value put upon them. Over a century later bits and pieces of the manuscript Bibles were still being used. Foxe in his
Book of Martyrs
, speaking of the year 1520, reports that a load of hay was sometimes paid for a few chapters of the New Testament in English.

Essentially the Lollard movement was an attempt to democratize religion, to bring it to the people direct from Scripture, free of all the tithes, indulgences, pardoners, fat abbots and mitred bishops, and the whole venal empire of the intrenched clerical hierarchy. Wyclif wanted to put the Scriptures into English because he believed that the Bible and not some red-hatted prelate on a Roman throne was the true source of all law, human and divine. Unless it existed in the common tongue it could not serve as a daily guide for all men, as he hoped to make it. But despite the Wyclif translation it would go too far to say that he familiarized England with the Bible, especially with the Old Testament. Copies were too few, their cost too great, and the general level of literacy too low to accomplish any widespread change. Wyclif’s great contribution was the
idea
of the Bible as the pre-eminent spiritual authority that every man could consult for himself. His efforts established
the deep root growth of English Protestantism that was necessary before the top growth could sprout in the Reformation. But real life for the Bible in English had to wait for the printing press.

In the ages before Wyclif, however, the content of the Bible, especially Genesis, Exodus, and the Psalms from the Old Testament and the Gospels of the New, had been familiar. We have seen how the Celtic Gildas, the earliest British historian, composed every line of his
Epistle
with examples from the Old Testament in mind. Beginning with Bede many translations into Anglo-Saxon of parts of the Old and New Testaments were made in the pre-Conquest period. Bede himself translated the Gospel according to John; King Alfred translated the Psalms and the Ten Commandments as part of his general work of putting Church history and the Fathers into English for the greater education of his people. Various other versions of the psalms and gospels and “Bible stories” were done into Old English; but the motive for these was pious rather than protestant as with the Wyclifites. The education available to the Anglo-Saxon clergy was limited and what Latin they acquired lamentably meager. Preaching in Saxon times was in the vernacular. To aid the semiliterate priests in conducting services and reading sermons, translations of the Scriptures were written in parallel columns beside the Latin or in interlinear glosses. Stories from the Old Testament of Adam and Eve, of the Patriarchs, of Joseph and his brethren, of Moses and the Exodus were also the subject of sermons and homilies and more often of poems sung by the Saxon bards at banquets and of pantomines and miracle plays.

Caedmon, the first English poet, composed many of his sagas on Old Testament themes. In Bede’s unforgettable story Caedmon appears as a herdsman called on for a song by a group feasting around the night fire, but he had no skill to entertain them. That night as he slept among the oxen he dreamed that a stranger came and commanded
him to sing; and when he protested that he could not, the Lord gave him voice and words, and he arose and took a harp and poured forth a song. Afterwards he remembered the words and repeated them, and they were taken down. “His song,” says Bede, “was of the creation of the world, the birth of man, of the history of Genesis. He sang too of the Exodus of Israel from Egypt and their entrance into the Promised Land.”

Many of the Caedmonian poems belong to later centuries than the seventh, when Caedmon flourished, but until lately were attributed to him because of the celebrity given to his name by Bede. Written probably by a succession of Saxon bards, these poems take up the incidents of the Old Testament that were the most likely to be appreciated by a Saxon audience: tales of kings and tyrants, hosts and battles and mighty deeds interpreted in terms nearest the experience of the poet and his listeners. During the four centuries before the Norman Conquest the raids of the Norsemen and their local conquests kept some part of England constantly at war. There was hardly a year when a boatload of Danes did not plunge in somewhere along the coast to raid, plunder, kill, and burn; hardly an inhabited spot that at some time had not been left a smoking ruin. That is what the poet has in mind when he tells how Abraham led his “aethelings” and his “fyrd” to battle over the kings in the vale of Siddim. Abraham’s victory was a vicarious satisfaction to the too-often-defeated Saxons, and they reveled in the picture the poet drew of “the fowls of prey tearing the flesh of the murderers of freemen” and in Abraham’s words to Melchizedek, whose enemies he has slaughtered (as rendered into modern English by Stopford Brooke):

The awful fate of “Pharaoh’s fyrd” under the engulfing waves of the Red Sea was another death of tyrants that delighted the Saxon audience. “Famous was that day over the middle earth when the multitude went forth,” writes the unknown poet of the Old English
Exodus
. The Israelites tremble as they hear the thunder of the oncoming Egyptian army, but Moses marshals them to the defense, urging them to “don their linked war-coats — dream of noble deeds.” Then he parts the waves and the tribes cross over. “Shields these sea-vikings bore over the salt marsh,” and behind them the Red Sea closes over the death struggle of the Egyptians — “Highest that of haughty waves! All the host sank deep!”

As the annual terror of the Norsemen lengthened into territorial conquests and the hope of ridding the country of its enemies all but flickered out, last-ditch fighters like King Alfred and religious leaders like the Abbot Aelfric tried to inspire a sense of national resistance among the people. Aelfric, surnamed “Grammaticus” in testimony of his great learning, died in 1020. He has been called “the most distinguished English-writing theologian in his time and for five centuries afterwards.” To spread religious education, but also to foster a fighting patriotism among his people, Aelfric turned to the example of the ancient Hebrews. In addition to translating the Pentateuch he epitomized most of the Old Testament in a running narrative and composed homilies based on the books of Judges, Esther, “who delivered her nation,” Judith, and Maccabaeus. He explains his choice of the last by “the great valor of that family who prevailed so much in fighting against the heathen forces encroaching upon them and seeking to destroy and root them from the land which God had given them … and they got the victory through the true God in whom they trusted according to Moses’ law … I have turned them also into English so read them you may for your own instruction.” Judas Maccabaeus, whose history Aelfric included in his
Lives of the Saints
, was, he says,
“as holy in the Old Testament as God’s elect ones in the Gospel-preaching because that he ever contended for the will of the Almighty.… He was God’s thane that most often fought against their conquerors in defense of their people.”

Aelfric interpolates in the story explanations to his audience of how these things came to be; and if any should wonder how God’s angels could appear to the Jews, they must know that

Aelfric may have seen some disturbing signs that the Saxons, through contact with the heathen Danes, were hankering after the pagan gods of their fathers, for he is careful to point out that when Israel of old “forsook the living God they were harried and abased by the heathen nations who dwelt about them,” but “when again they called earnestly on God with true repentance then he sent them help through some judge who overcame their enemies and freed them from their misery.” He appends a list of English kings, Alfred, Athelstan, and Edgar, as examples of English leaders who, like the judges of Israel, defeated their enemies through God’s help.

Likewise the story of Judith, Aelfric explains, “is also arranged in English in our manner as an example to you men that you should defend your land against the hostile
host.” Aelfric’s homily on Judith’s heroic tyrannicide was inspired by the most stirring of all the Anglo-Saxon Bible poems, the
Judith
, which is supposed to have been composed in honor of Alfred’s stepmother, the young queen Judith whom Alfred’s father married in 856. Other scholars have suggested, to the contrary, that the poem postdates Aelfric and was itself inspired by his homily, and that it may have been a eulogy of the queen of Mercia who led her people to battle against the Danes early in the tenth century. In any event the poem, which has been placed with Beowulf in the front rank of old English literature, made Judith a favorite heroine. In the fragment that survives we read how Holofernes, drunk as a typical Saxon thane,

Judith enters the tent where the Assyrian king is sleeping off his drunken stupor; down flashes her glittering sword, beheading the tyrant. Triumphantly she holds aloft the black-bearded, blood-dripping head to the people assembled at the city’s walls, exhorting them to revolt.