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about 30 he had taken for the work ol his life the translation of the Bible into English. He was born in Gloucestershire, where his family seems to have used the name of Hutchins or Hychins, as well as that of Tindale, so that he is himself sometimes described by both names) ; and he became a member of Magdalen Hall (a dependency of Magdalen College) at Oxford, where he definitely associated himself with the Protestant party and became known as one of their leaders. He took his degree as B.A. in 1512, as M.A. in 1515, and at some uncertain date he is said (by Foxe) to have gone to Cambridge. If this was between 1511 and 1515, he would have found Erasmus there; but in that case it could have been only an interlude in the middle of his Oxford course, and perhaps it is more probable that his visit belongs to some part of the years 1515 to 1520, as to which there is no definite information. About 1520 he became resident tutor in the house of Sir John Walsh, at Little Sodbury in Gloucestershire, to which period belongs his famous saying, in controversy with an opponent: 'If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou doest.' With this object he came up to London in 1523, and sought a place in the service of Tunstall, bishop of London, a scholar and patron of scholars, of whom Erasmus had spoken favourably; but here he received no encouragement. He was, however, taken in by Alderman Humphrey Monmouth, in whose house he lived as chaplain and studied for six months; at the end of which time he was forced to the conclusion ' not only that there was no room in my lord of London's palace to translate the New Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England.'

13. About May 1524, therefore, Tindale left England and settled in the free city of Hamburg, and in the course of the next 12 months the first stage of his great work was completed. Whether during this time he visited Luther at Wittenberg is quite uncertain; what is certain, and more important. Is that he was acquainted with Luther's writings. In 1525, the translation of the NT being finished, he went to Cologne to have it printed at the press of Peter Quentel. Three thousand copies of the first ten sheets of it, in quarto, had been printed oB when rumours of the work came to the ears of John Cochlaeus, a bitter enemy of the Reformation. To obtain information he approached the printers (who were also engaged upon work for him), and having loosened their tongues with wine he learnt the full details of Tindale's enterprise, and sent warning forth-with to England. Meanwhile Tindale escaped with the printed sheets to Worms, in the Lutheran disposition of which place he was secure from interference, and pro-ceeded with his work at the press of Peter Schoefler. Since, however, a description of the Cologne edition had been sent to England, a change was made in the format. The text was set up again in octavo, and without the marginal notes of the quarto edition; and in this form the first printed English NT was given to the world early in 1526. About the same time an edition in small quarto, with marginal notes, was also issued, and it is probable (though full proof is wanting) that this was the completion of the interrupted Cologne edition. Three thousand copies of each edition were struck off; but so active were the enemies of the Reformation in their destruction, that they have nearly disappeared off the face of the earth. One copy of the octavo edition, complete but for the loss of its title-page, is at the Baptist College at Bristol, whither it found its way from the Harley Library, to which it once belonged; and an imperfect copy is in the library of St. Paul's Cathedral. Of the quarto, all that survives is a frag-ment consisting of eight sheets (Mt li-22'2) in the Grenville Library in the British Museum.

14. The hostility of the authorities in Church and State in England was indeed undisguised. Sir T. More

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attacked the translation as false and heretical, and as disregarding ecclesiastical terminology. Wolsey and the bishops, with Henry's assent, decreed that it should be burnt; and burnt it was at Paul's Cross, after a sermon from Bishop Tunstall. Nevertheless fresh supplies continued to pour into England, the money expended in buying up copies for destruction serving to pay for the production of fresh editions. Six editions are said to have been issued between 1526 and 1530; and the zeal of the authorities for its destruction was fairly matched by the zeal of the reforming party for its circulation. It was, in fact, evident that the appetite tor an English Bible, once fairly excited, could not be wholly balked. In 1530 an assembly convoked by Archbishop Warham, while maintaining the previous condemnation of Tindale, and asserting that it was not expedient at that time to divulge the Scripture in the English tongue, announced that the king would have the NT faithfully translated by learned men, and published 'as soon as he might see their manners and behaviour meet, apt, and convenient to receive the same.'

15. Tindale's first NT was epoch-making in many ways. It was the first English printed NT; it laid the foundations, and much more than the foundations, of the AV of 1611; it set on foot the movement which went forward without a break until it culminated in the production of that AV; and it was the first English Bible that was translated directly from the original language. All the English manuscript Bibles were translations from the Vulgate; but Tindale's NT was taken from the Greek, which he knew from the editions by Erasmus, published in 1516, 1519, and 1522. As subsidiary aids he employed the Latin version attached by Erasmus to his Greek text, Luther's German trans-lation of 1522, and the Vulgate; but it has been made abundantly clear that he exercised independent judg-ment in his use of these materials, and was by no means a slavish copier of Luther. In the marginal notes attached to the quarto edition his debt to Luther was greater; for (so far as can be gathered from the extant fragment) more than half the notes were taken direct from the German Bible, the rest being indepen-dent. It is in this connexion with Luther, rather than in anything to be found in the work itself, that the secret of the official hostility to Tindale's version is to be found. That the translation itself was not seriously to blame is shown by the extent to which it was incorporated in the AV, though no doubt to persons who knew the Scriptures only in the Latin Vulgate its divergence from accuracy may have appeared greater than was in fact the case. The octavo edition had no extraneous matter except a short preface, and therefore could not be obnoxious on controversial grounds; and the com-ments in the quarto edition are generally exegetical, and not polemical. Still, there could be no doubt that they were the work of an adherent of the Reformation, and as such the whole translation fell under the ban of the opponents of the Reformation.

16. Tindale's work did not cease with the production of his NT. Early in 1530 a translation of the Pentateuch was printed for him by Hans Luft, at Marburg in Hesse. The colophon to Genesis is dated Jan. 17, 1530. In England, where the year began on March 25, this would have meant 1531 according to our modern reckoning; but in Germany the year generally began on Jan. 1, or at Christmas. The only perfect copy of this edition is in the British Museum. The different books must have been set up separately, since Gn. and Nu. are printed in black letter, Ex., Lev., and Dt. in Roman; but there is no evidence that they were issued separately. The translation was made (for the first time) from the Hebrew, with which language there is express evidence that Tindale was acquainted. The book was provided with a prologue and with marginal notes, the latter being often controversial. In 1531 he pubUshed a translation

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