Book of Fire (4 page)

The family used two names, Tyndale and Hutchins, in a wide variety of spellings: Tindale, Tyndal, Hychyn, Hewchyns. A family tradition has it that they came originally from Tyndale in Northumberland, and adopted the name Hutchins to hide their northern origins during the Wars of the Roses. William was born only nine years after Richard III was killed at Bosworth Field and the violent flux of plots and rebellions had ended. One of the battles had been fought at Nibley Green in 1470; the dead were buried in the grounds of the parish church of St Martin, and the victors built a south aisle for the church in thanksgiving.

Henry VII, the new king, was a ‘a sad prince, full of thoughts’, his eyes ‘small and blue, his teeth few, poor and blackish, and his hair thin and white’. Two of his four immediate predecessors had been murdered, one had been killed in battle, and the fourth had been driven in humiliation from his realm in mid-reign; Richard III had murdered, or was suspected of involvement in the murder of his brother, his wife, the king, Henry VI, and two nephews, the little princes who disappeared in the Tower of London in 1483. The dead princes were brothers of Henry VII’s wife, Elizabeth of York, and Henry’s natural and overriding ambition was to make his new Tudor dynasty stable and long lasting.

Two pretenders challenged him. Lambert Simnel, the son of an Oxford tradesman but put forward as a surviving nephew from the Tower, was proclaimed king in Dublin in 1487, but his forces were defeated in battle at Stoke later in the year. Shortly after William Tyndale was born, another pretender, Perkin Warbeck, claimed to be the Tower’s second surviving prince; he was hailed by the Irish earls, and the king of Scotland gave him his cousin in marriage, before he landed in the West Country, failed to make progress, surrendered and was hanged in 1499.

Even after that, the dynasty hung by a single life. Henry VII’s sons Arthur and Edmund died young, though only after Arthur had married Catherine of Aragon. The future Henry VIII was left as the only male heir, a fact that, together with his later marriage to Catherine, his brother’s widow, was greatly to influence the adult life of William Tyndale and the future of English religion.

As a boy, Tyndale may have attended the grammar school at Wotton-under-Edge, the nearest large town. The school claims to be the eleventh oldest in England, and survives as Katharine Lady Berkeley’s School, though it moved from its old site in the town in the 1950s, and its buildings have been converted into apartments. The town’s motto is ‘Strong by Stream and Staple’, and its water-powered cloth mills flourished from the sixteenth century until they were put out of business in the nineteenth by the more efficient mills in the valleys around Stroud and by the giant works in Yorkshire. Its weekly cloth market flourished in Tyndale’s day, attracting many ‘tolseys’, or ‘foreigners’, from other parts, who paid a toll to attend it.

Tyndale was an eager and talented child, and he was sent to Magdalen School in Oxford at the age of about twelve, in 1506. A turreted fragment of the school’s Grammar Hall still remains; besides this school-room, the original building had little more than the chambers of the master and the usher, and a kitchen. Shortly after, he entered Magdalen Hall – then adjacent to Magdalen College but later moved and established as Hertford College – where he began the seven-year course that led to a BA degree.

Most undergraduates were from middling families – the great Thomas Wolsey was the son of an East Anglian butcher – and the nobility had yet to send their sons to Oxford in any numbers. The Tudor beau, with his florid languor, was still a generation distant. In Tyndale’s day, students were forbidden to keep sporting dogs, ferrets or hawks for hunting, though some went poaching in the
royal forests at Shotover and Woodstock; they were not allowed to gamble or to own dice or playing cards, or to carry arms unless travelling. Taverns and brothels were off limits. For legal amusement, students staged morality plays and pageants, and comedies by Plautus and Aristophanes, and sang and played the lyre and lute.

Tyndale went to Oxford in 1506, when he was about twelve. He graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in 1512, and Master of Arts three years later. He scorned the academic sophistry of the day, but he improved himself ‘in knowledge of tongues and other liberal arts’. His study of rhetoric helped to lay the rhythm and cadence that underpinned his translating genius. A later spell at Cambridge probably cemented his radical religious views.

(Bridgeman Art Library/National Portrait Gallery)

Board and lodging were cheap. Undergraduates were housed two or three to a chamber, with cubicles or ‘studyes’ partitioned off for reading, and an individual’s room rent was no more than sixpence a year. His share of commons, the basic food and drink bought each week for members of the hall or college, amounted to less than a penny a day. A contemporary wrote of Oxford dinners as a ‘penye pece of byefe amongst iiii, hauying a few porage made of the brothe of the same byefe with salte and otemell’. Each student provided his own bedding, knives, spoons, candlesticks, a lantern, a pair of bellows and a coffer for his books.

The chancellor of the university maintained his own court, with powers to deny a student a degree, or to expel, excommunicate or imprison in serious cases. Fines were the most common punishment. They were imposed for climbing in and out of college after the gates were shut, for bringing an unsheathed knife to table, for disorder, drunkenness, gaming and fighting. If blood was shed during a brawl, the fine was doubled. Scholars and fellows sometimes wore distinctive liveries and fur-trimmed cloaks, but undergraduates were required only to wear decent clerical garb, which varied in colour and style and differed little from ordinary dress. It was only later that they were obliged to wear black gowns, as they still do on formal occasions, thus making it possible for the university officers or proctors to distinguish ‘town’ from ‘gown’ in brawls.

Some one thousand young scholars attended the colleges, semi-monastic institutions of the regular and secular clergy, and the self-governing halls of the university. A small hall like Magdalen
might have no more than twenty students, living in shared chambers with a central hall for meals and disputations. They were up at 5.00 for divine service before the first, 6.00 a.m. lecture. They ate together in commons, with a bell or horn announcing dinner at 10.00 or 11.00 a.m., and supper at 5.00. Before retiring to bed, they chanted the
Salve Regina
or some such antiphon to the Virgin together. The atmosphere was one of family, as well as church; to this day, colleges refer to themselves as ‘domus’, or ‘house’, as in ‘house and home’.

Tyndale’s schooling gave him a thorough grounding in Latin. Boys learnt to speak and write elementary Latin in the early forms. Classes then progressed from Aesop and Terence in the third form to Horace’s epistles and Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
in the seventh, by way of Virgil, Cicero’s letters and Caesar’s history. In the eighth class, the science of grammar was studied in depth. Verse was rendered into prose, and vice versa, translations were made, and, though Ovid’s lascivious
De arte amandi
was strictly off the menu, Virgil was read out ‘
voce ben sonora
to bring out the majesty of his poetry’.

The Latin diet remained at the university. English had such lowly status that undergraduates were forbidden to speak it within the precincts of the hall, except at feasts and on holidays. It was compulsory for them to use Latin, although French was tolerated as an alternative in some colleges. Tyndale’s love of English – ‘our mother tongue’, he said, ‘which doth correspond with scripture better than ever Latin may’ – was eccentric. It was spoken by only three million people on their foggy island; and the English themselves largely governed, educated and prayed in Latin. A foreign scholar or cleric, such as Erasmus, lived for several years in England, and followed a lively social and academic life, without speaking any English.

The MA course began with the
trivium
, the ‘liberall artes’, a trio of grammar, rhetoric and logic. Tyndale will have read the
Rhetoric
of Aristotle, Boethius’s
Topics
, Cicero’s
Nova Rhetorica
and some works of Ovid and Priscian. His insight into rhetoric was greatly to influence his prose. The mark of all Tyndale’s writing is its brilliant resonance when read aloud. From the
trivium
, he moved on to the
quadrivium
, of arithmetic, music, astronomy and geometry. Whether Tyndale was musical or not, we do not know, though singing and playing music were a favourite student pastime; but the sense of rhythm and cadence that floods his work shows that he had a sensitive ear. He did not write poetry either and was somewhat sour to colleagues who did, and yet his images and his gift for the mood of words reveal a poetic temperament.

Public teaching was by lecture and disputation. The master took a set text and expounded on its meaning. His students had to provide interpretations and glosses on it, and to launch
quaestiones
, or investigations, into its aspects. Formal debates and oratory were held on
dies disputabilis
. In front of the young scholars, or sophisters, masters and bachelors argued on either side of an interpretation or proposition – usually one proponent and two opponents – until the presiding master gave his determination or final judgement.

Oxford was known as the Vineyard of the Lord for its learning and its beauty – ‘a place gladsome and fertile, suitable for a habitation of the gods’ Wycliffe had written of it – but Tyndale found its teaching sterile and antiquated. He improved himself ‘in knowledge of tongues and other liberal arts’, laying the basis of his translating genius. He devoted much attention to theology, and, so the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe recorded, ‘read privily to certain students and fellows of Magdalen College some parcel of divinity, instructing them in the knowledge and truth of the scriptures’. He found the Oxford theologians, however, to be ‘old barking curs … beating the pulpit with their fists for madness’.

The great enemies in his life – Sir Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey, and two bishops of London, Cuthbert Tunstall and John
Stokesley – were between fifteen and eighteen years older than him. Thomas More, for example, had gone up to Oxford in 1492. They were closer to the swirling anarchy, intrigues and assassinations of the dynastic wars; they were more conservative, more fearful of change than Tyndale. In 1515, while Tyndale was still at Oxford, More was on a diplomatic mission to Antwerp. Here he had begun to write
Utopia
, his evocation of a magical island of happiness and fair play, where reason and justice reign; but Utopia means a ‘non-place’, as the name of its great city, Amaurotum, comes from the Greek for ‘darkly seen’, and for More this ideal was an irony reflecting on the brutishness of reality.

Tyndale’s generation had less reason to fear change and disorder. He was restless at Oxford and scornful of the status quo. He found the student to be crushed by tradition and censorship: ‘he is sworn that he shall not defame the university, whatsoever he seeth’, he said, ‘and when he taketh his first degree, he is sworn that he shall hold none opinion condemned by the church; but what such opinions be, that he shall not know.’

The influence of Scholasticism, with its attempts to reconcile classical learning with Christian revelation, was all-pervading. It involved the minute examination of the Bible as the source of the absolute truth of God, against which human knowledge must be reckoned. Elaborate glosses were built on verses, sentences and individual words. Some of these glosses touched deep issues of faith, but many were ludicrous; the number of angels who could be gathered on the point of a needle was discussed in one example, while another, cited by Erasmus, posed the question of whether Christ could have taken on the likeness of a mule, and, if so, whether a mule could be crucified. Tyndale himself attended a degree ceremony for doctors of divinity at which a formal disputation was heard over whether the widow has more merit than the virgin.

This was mere ‘sophistry’, Tyndale said, and he was at war with the Schoolmen and the tiresome armoury of ‘their predicaments,
universals, second intentions, quiddities, haecceities and relatives’. He had a particular interest in the Bible, and may have already thought of translating it; in the only reference to his childhood that he made, he remarked that he had heard as a boy ‘how that king Athelstane caused the holy scripture to be translated into the tongue that then was in England, and how the prelates exhorted him thereto’. He said that the teaching of the scripture at Oxford ‘is so locked up with such false expositions and with false principles of natural philosophy’ that students could not enter into the true spirit of the Bible; instead, they were kept outside, and ‘dispute all their lives about words and vain opinions, pertaining as much unto the healing of a man’s heel as the health of his soul’.

He was, nonetheless, attentive to his studies. He graduated Bachelor of Arts, as William Hychyns, on 4 July 1512, and Master of Arts three years later. He had no reputation yet as a firebrand. Foxe says that his manners and conversation at this time were such that ‘all they that knew him reputed and esteemed him to be a man of most virtuous disposition and of life unspotted’. It was a condition of his MA degree that he stay for a year at Oxford to teach in the Schools. At a date not before 1516, therefore, ‘spying his time’, as Foxe put it, Tyndale ‘removed from thence to the university of Cambridge, where he … made his abode a certain space, being now farther ripened in the knowledge of God’s word …’.

Cambridge was then more radical and more Lollard-influenced than Oxford. Erasmus had taught there from 1510 to 1514, and humanism was becoming rooted, fresh and open after the musty staleness of the Schoolmen. Erasmus had gone on to edit and publish a Greek New Testament in 1516 as a purer alternative to the Latin Vulgate, for the original was, of course, written in Greek. In 1518, Richard Croke gave the first public lectures on the Greek language at Cambridge. Tyndale thus acquired the necessary fundamentals for his future work on the New Testament: the original text and the fine-tuned Greek needed to translate it.