Wycliffe Bible and the Lollards: The First Full English Bible

The Wycliffe Bible was the first complete translation of the Bible into English, made from about 1382 by scholars inspired by the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe. It formed part of a wider challenge to the authority and wealth of the medieval Church, carried on by Wycliffe’s followers, the Lollards. Church and crown condemned the movement as heresy, but the English Bible survived in hundreds of handwritten copies and anticipated the Reformation by more than a century.

John Wycliffe and his ideas

John Wycliffe (c. 1328–1384) was one of the leading scholars at the University of Oxford, where he taught philosophy and theology and was for a time Master of Balliol College. In the 1370s he became rector of Lutterworth in Leicestershire and served the crown in disputes with the papacy, gaining the protection of the powerful John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.

Wycliffe argued that true authority, or dominion, belonged only to those in a state of grace, and that the state could take away the property of a corrupt clergy. He came to see scripture as the sole and sufficient guide for Christians, more authoritative than popes or Church tradition. Around 1379–1380 he went further and attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation, the teaching that the bread and wine of the Mass become the body and blood of Christ.

These ideas were sharpened by events. The Western Schism from 1378, with rival popes in Rome and Avignon condemning each other, convinced Wycliffe that the papacy itself was corrupt. Pope Gregory XI had already condemned a series of his propositions in 1377.

The translation

Wycliffe believed that ordinary Christians should be able to read God’s law in their own language. Around him gathered a group of Oxford scholars who began translating the whole Latin Vulgate Bible into English.

The result survives in two main versions. The Early Version, begun around 1382, is a very literal rendering that follows Latin word order closely and can be hard to read. One manuscript notes that Nicholas Hereford’s work broke off in the middle of the Book of Baruch, perhaps when he was summoned to answer charges of heresy. The Later Version, completed in the 1390s, is far more natural English. It has traditionally been linked to Wycliffe’s secretary John Purvey, though this attribution is debated.

Wycliffe’s own share in the translation is uncertain, and he may have supervised rather than translated. Both versions worked from Latin rather than from the original Hebrew and Greek, which few Western scholars then knew.

How the Bible was copied and read

Printing did not reach England until the 1470s, so every copy of the Wycliffite Bible had to be written by hand. A complete Bible was a large and costly book, and many surviving manuscripts contain only the New Testament or selected books, which were cheaper to produce and easier to hide.

Some copies were made with great care by professional scribes, with decorated initials and tables showing which passages were read at Mass on each day of the year. Others are small, plain volumes that look designed for private use. The Later Version was also accompanied by a General Prologue that explains the translators’ methods and argues for the value of scripture in the common language.

Most people in the late fourteenth century could not read, so the English Bible reached many of them through others. Lollard groups met in houses to hear passages read aloud and to memorise them, and suspects in later heresy trials were sometimes accused simply of owning or hearing English books of scripture.

Condemnation and the Lollards

In May 1382 Archbishop William Courtenay held a council at the Blackfriars in London that condemned twenty-four propositions drawn from Wycliffe’s works as heretical or erroneous. An earthquake struck during the meeting, and both sides claimed it as a sign. Wycliffe’s supporters at Oxford were forced to recant or leave, and Wycliffe retired to Lutterworth, where he continued writing until his death on 31 December 1384.

His followers became known as Lollards, a term probably from a Middle Dutch word for a mumbler, used as an insult. They included Oxford scholars, some knights and gentry, and many artisans and ordinary people. Lollards preached in English, read scripture in small groups and rejected practices they saw as unscriptural, such as pilgrimages, prayers to saints and images, and clerical celibacy. In 1395 a manifesto known as the Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards was posted during a session of Parliament.

Opponents also blamed Lollard preaching for social unrest, including the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, though there is little evidence that Wycliffe’s ideas inspired it.

Persecution

Under the Lancastrian kings the Church gained new weapons. The statute De heretico comburendo of 1401 allowed convicted heretics who relapsed to be burned. That year the priest William Sawtrey became the first Lollard to be burned for heresy in England.

Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s Constitutions, drafted in 1407 and issued in 1409, banned the making or reading of new English translations of scripture without a bishop’s licence and restricted preaching and teaching at Oxford. In January 1414 the Lollard knight Sir John Oldcastle led a failed rising near London; he was captured and executed in 1417.

At the Council of Constance in 1415 the Church formally condemned Wycliffe as a heretic, and the same council burned the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus, who had been deeply influenced by Wycliffe’s writings. In 1428, on the orders of Pope Martin V, Wycliffe’s remains were exhumed at Lutterworth, burned and thrown into the River Swift.

Survival and legacy

After Oldcastle’s rising Lollardy lost most of its support among the gentry and became an underground movement of craftsmen and small communities, especially in the Chilterns, Kent, London and the Midlands. Periodic trials continued into the early sixteenth century.

The Wycliffite Bible proved remarkably durable. About 250 manuscripts survive, some owned by wealthy and entirely orthodox readers, showing that the ban was enforced selectively. When William Tyndale produced his printed New Testament from the Greek in 1526, he worked in a new tradition, but Lollard communities were among his early readers. The line of English Bibles led eventually to the King James Bible of 1611.

Later Protestant writers called Wycliffe the “Morning Star of the Reformation”. Modern historians are more cautious about direct continuity, but they agree that his ideas and the English Bible made him one of the most important religious thinkers of medieval England.

Timeline

• c. 1328: John Wycliffe is born in Yorkshire.
• 1377: Pope Gregory XI condemns propositions from Wycliffe’s writings.
• c. 1382: Work on the Early Version of the English Bible is under way.
• May 1382: The Blackfriars Council condemns twenty-four of Wycliffe’s propositions.
• 31 December 1384: Wycliffe dies at Lutterworth.
• 1390s: The more readable Later Version of the Wycliffite Bible is completed.
• 1395: The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards are posted during Parliament.
• 1401: De heretico comburendo is passed; William Sawtrey is burned.
• 1409: Arundel’s Constitutions ban unlicensed English translations of scripture.
• 1428: Wycliffe’s remains are exhumed and burned.

Why it matters

The Wycliffe Bible put the whole of scripture into English for the first time and raised the question of who had the right to read and interpret it. Wycliffe’s challenge to papal and clerical authority, carried on by the Lollards and by Hus in Bohemia, foreshadowed many arguments of the Protestant Reformation.