What “Father of the English Bible” Means
Calling John Wycliffe the “father of the English Bible” is a later and somewhat loose label. Parts of the Bible had been rendered into Old English centuries earlier, and verse paraphrases and psalm translations circulated in English before Wycliffe’s time. What the label points to is the first complete Bible in Middle English, now usually called the Wycliffite Bible or the Lollard Bible, produced in the last decades of the fourteenth century by people connected with Wycliffe’s circle at Oxford.
The title is also a little misleading about authorship. Most scholars doubt that Wycliffe translated much of the text himself. His part was to argue that scripture should be available to ordinary readers, and he inspired the effort. The actual work was done by followers, and the details of who did what are partly guesswork. For his wider career, see the account of his teachings and the Lollard movement elsewhere on this site.
Two Versions
The Wycliffite Bible survives in two main forms, both translated from the Latin Vulgate, not from Hebrew or Greek. That fact matters: it was a translation of the church’s own standard Latin text, not a fresh return to the original languages, as later Renaissance translators would attempt.
- The Early Version was produced around the 1380s. It follows the Latin very closely, often word for word, and its sentence order can feel awkward in English. Translators seem to have aimed at accuracy to the Vulgate more than at smooth reading.
- The Later Version was prepared in the 1390s, and it recasts the text into more natural English. It rewrites clumsy constructions and uses idiom more freely, which made it far easier to read aloud and to understand. This is the version that circulated most widely.
The Later Version also came with a general prologue explaining why scripture in English was useful, and many copies include study aids, such as tables of readings for the church year.
Who Did the Work?
Evidence is thin, and scholars have long debated attribution. Two names come up most often.
- Nicholas Hereford, an Oxford scholar and supporter of Wycliffe. One surviving manuscript of the Early Version appears to stop abruptly in the middle of the Book of Baruch, which has traditionally been explained as a sign that Hereford’s work was interrupted, perhaps when he was summoned to answer for his views in 1382. This is an inference, not a documented fact.
- John Purvey, a close associate of Wycliffe, who has been credited with the Later Version. Some scholars question the attribution, and it may be that a team revised the text rather than a single person.
Wycliffe’s own role was probably that of organizer and instigator, though even this is partly based on later claims, including those of his critics. Medieval translation work was often collaborative, and several hands seem to have been involved in both versions.
Copying and Circulation
This was the age of hand-copying, long before the printing press reached England. A complete Bible was an enormous and costly project, requiring a great deal of parchment and weeks or months of labor from a professional scribe. Still, surviving manuscripts suggest unusually wide demand: well over a hundred and fifty copies survive in some form, many of them of the Later Version, and the number of lost copies must have been far higher.
The surviving books are often modest in size and decoration. Many were meant to be carried and read, not displayed. That fits what we know of ownership, which included clergy, gentry, merchants and wealthy laypeople, and also some owners of high rank. Owning a copy of the English Bible was not always a sign of Lollard belief. In the fifteenth century, some orthodox readers kept copies, and some copies were even bequeathed in wills of people who were never accused of heresy. The question of who read these books, and why, has no simple answer. Scribal workshops of the type described in the article on scriptoria and scribes were not necessarily connected to the movement at all, and lay professional copyists likely produced many copies.
The Church’s Response
Church leaders did not condemn the idea of translating scripture in itself. Parts of the Bible had been translated before without trouble. The concern was control: a translation supported by a movement critical of clergy, and made available outside clerical supervision, threatened the authority of church teachers to interpret scripture.
Archbishop Thomas Arundel took the leading role. In 1409 his Constitutions, issued at Oxford, forbade making new translations of scripture into English without a bishop’s approval and prohibited reading such translations in public or private without permission. The rule did not specifically declare the Wycliffite Bible heretical in every copy, but in practice it made possession risky. Later in the fifteenth century, heresy trials of suspected Lollards sometimes treated owning or reading English books as evidence. Some accused people were questioned about specific books, and a few were punished severely.
Enforcement was uneven. Many copies survived, and Bibles that carried no obvious Lollard signs may have been tolerated. The gap between the law and everyday practice was considerable.
Why It Mattered
The Wycliffite translation is a major landmark in the history of Middle English, written around the same time as the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, though it was a very different sort of text. Its language is a valuable source for scholars who study the development of English prose.
Its later influence is debated. When William Tyndale produced his English New Testament in the 1520s, he worked from Greek and Hebrew rather than from the Vulgate, and he wrote in a style quite different from the Wycliffite text, so the direct link is limited. Still, the earlier translation showed that a full English Bible was possible, and it left a tradition of demand for scripture in the language of ordinary people that later translators could build on.