The Adventure of English

by Melvyn Bragg

  His main argument was to distinguish the eternal, ideal Church of God from the material one of Rome. In short, he maintained that if something is not in the Bible there is no truth in it, whatever the Pope says — and, incidentally, the Bible says nothing at all about having a Pope. When men speak of the Church, he said, they usually mean priests, monks, canons and friars. But it should not be so. “Were there a hundred popes,” he wrote, “and all the friars turned to cardinals, their opinions on faith should not be accepted except in so far as they are founded on scripture itself.”

  This was inflammatory and cut away the roots of all established authority, especially as he and his followers like John Ball coupled this with a demand that the Church give away all its worldly wealth to the poor. The Church saw no option but to crush him. For Wycliffe went even further. He and his followers attacked transubstantiation, the belief that, administered by the clergy, the wine and bread turn miraculously into the blood and body of Christ; he attacked clerical celibacy, which he thought of as an institutional control system over the army of the clergy; he attacked enforced confession, the method, Wycliffe argued, by which the clergy could trap dissidents and check errors in thought; and indulgences, the purchase of which were said to bring relief from purgatory but also brought wealth to the Church; pilgrimages, as a form of idolatry; and Mystery Plays, because they were not the word of God. Wycliffe took no prisoners.

  His prime and revolutionary argument, one which, if accepted in any shape or form, would have toppled the Church entirely, was that the Bible was the sole authority for religious faith and practice and that everyone had the right to read and interpret scripture for himself. This would have changed the world, and those who ruled the world knew it. He was to become their prime enemy. It is ironic that his main arguments had to be written in Latin — the international language of scholarship and theology — though there are English sermons by him and his followers.

  It is remarkable enough that a young man in a quiet clerical college in a country long thought by Rome as on the “outermost edges of the known world” should raise up his fist against the greatest authority on the earth. He must have been fully aware of the risk he was taking. It is even more remarkable that he went on and did something, did so much, to put his ideas into practice and to enlist so much help from other scholars who also must have seen their whole life and life’s work imperilled by this breathtaking venture.

  What sustained them, I think, was the state of the Church as they saw it every day. It was intolerable to these Christian scholars. It was often lazy and corrupt. Bible reading even among the clergy appears to have been surprisingly rare, for often they did not have the Latin. When, for example, the Bishop of Gloucester surveyed three hundred eleven deacons, archdeacons and priests in his diocese, he discovered that a hundred sixty-eight were unable to repeat the Ten Commandments, thirty-one did not know where to find those Commandments in the Bible and forty could not repeat the Lord’s Prayer. To men of true conscience, integrity and faith, men like Wycliffe and his followers, this state of decay and lack of care in what mattered most, this debilitated belief and betrayal of vocation, had to be got rid of and defeated. The chief weapon, the natural weapon for a scholar, was a book: the Bible, in English.

  A full Bible in English was unauthorised by the Church and potentially heretical, even seditious, with all the savage penalties including death which such crimes against the one true Church exacted. Any translation was very high risk and had to be done in secrecy.

  Wycliffe inspired two biblical translations and rightly they bear his name. Both versions are made from the Latin Vulgate version and follow it so closely that it can be incomprehensible. Wycliffe prepared the first translation but the burden of it was undertaken by Nicholas Hereford of Queen’s College, Oxford. He would have needed the help of many friends as well as recourse to a great number of books. It was not only the translation itself, a mammoth task, which faced them: the Bible had to be disseminated too. Rooms in quiet Oxford colleges were turned into revolutionary cells, scriptoria, production lines were established turning out these holy manuscripts, and from the number that remain we can tell that a great many were made. One hundred seventy survive, a huge number for a six-hundred-year-old manuscript, which tells us that there must have been effective groups of people secretly translating it, copying it, passing it on. Later, hundreds would be martyred, dying the most horrible deaths, for their part in creating and distributing to the people the first English Bible.

  It is difficult to appreciate the extent and the audacity of this enterprise. Wycliffe was leading them into the cannon’s mouth. All of them knew it and yet behind the obedient honey-coloured Latinate walls of Oxford colleges, the medieval equivalent of the subversive samizdat press which bypassed Stalin’s controls in Russia was organised, and effectively. The operation is a long way from the image of medieval Oxford as a cloistered community of rather quaint time-serving scholarly clerks. Oxford was then the most dangerous place in England, leading the fight in an underground movement which challenged the biggest single force in the land and called into the public court the authority of the revealed language of God. Yet Wycliffe and his men believed they were to change the world and for a brief moment, it seemed, they had. The Wycliffe English Bible was completed. It was scaled out. It was read.

  Here are the opening lines, first in Wycliffe’s English and then in modern speech:

  In the bigynnyng God made of nouyt heuene and erthe. Forsothe the erthe was idel and voide, and derknessis weren on the face of depthe; and the Spiryt of the Lord was borun on the watris. And God seide, Liyt be maad, and liyt was maad. And God seiy the liyt, that it was good, and he departide the liyt fro derknessis; and he clepide the liyt, dai, and the derknessis, nyyt. And the euentid and morwetid was maad, o daie.

  In the beginning, God made of naught heaven and earth. Forsooth, the earth was idle and void, and darkness were on the face of depth, and the spirit of God was borne on the waters. And God said “Light be made!” — and light was made. And God saw the light that it was good and He departed the light from the darkness. And he klept the light day and the darkness night. And the eventide and morrowtide was made, one day.

  That passage is straightforward. But in many places it is not an easy translation. Yet many familiar phrases do have their English origin in this translation: “woe is me,” “an eye for an eye” are both in Wycliffe, as are words such as “birthday,” “canopy,” “child-bearing,” “cock-crowing,” “communication,” “crime,” “to dishonour,” “envy,” “frying-pan,” “godly,” “graven,” “humanity,” “injury,” “jubilee,” “lecher,” “madness,” “menstruate,” “middleman,” “mountainous,” “novelty,” “Philistine,” “pollute” — “puberty,” “schism,” “to tramp,” “unfaithful” and “zeal” — all these and many more were read first in Wycliffe’s Bible. Once again we see not only additions to the English word-hoard but new ideas being introduced or current ideas being given a name — “humanity,” “pollute” — which then, as words often do, took on a larger and more complex life. New words are new worlds. You call them up and if they are strong enough, they keep in step with change and along the way describe more and more, provide new insights, evolve on the tongue and on the page. How many nuances and therefore meanings attach to the multiple uses of the world “humanity”? In the cause of bringing his greatly revered faith to the English, Wycliffe not only widened the ecclesiastical vocabulary — “graven,” “Philistine,” “schism” — he also let loose words which over the next four centuries would net meanings far removed from the perilously translated texts of medieval Oxford.

  The criticism of Wycliffe’s Bible is that it is too Latinate. So in awe were they of the authority of the Latin version that they translated word for word, even keeping the Latin word order, as in “Lord, go from me for I am a man sinner” and “I forsoothe am the Lord thy God full jealous.” Another result was that the text itself is shot through with La
tinate words, some directly imported, some of which came through the French, such as “mandement,” “descrive,” “cratch.” There are over one thousand Latin words that turn up for the first time in English whose use in England is first recorded in Wycliffe’s Bible, words such as “profession,” “multitude” and “glory” — a good word for this Bible.

  1. Bede, English monk and scholar, wrote the first ever history of the English-speaking people in Latin, completed in 731. He proposed that the English language should also be used in books.

  2. St. Jerome’s Preface from the Lindisfarne Gospels, late seventh century. Aldred’s tenth-century “gloss” is a word-for-word English translation of the Latin.

  3. The only surviving manuscript of Beowulf, dating from the tenth century, the first great poem in the English language, begins, “So: the Spear Danes in days gone by / And the Kings who ruled their clan were a legend . . .”

  4. By the mid-ninth century the marauding Danes threatened to take over the English language.

  5. The Alfred jewel bears the inscription — in English — “Alfred had me made.” By defeating the Danes, Alfred had saved the English language.

  6. After William’s victory at Hastings in 1066, depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, the French language of power and authority ruled the land.

  7. Twenty years later, William sent out his officers to take stock of his kingdom. The result, the Domesday Book, was written in Latin. Detail from the shorter illustrated version.

  8 and 9. Henry II with his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine — their reign saw a growing poetic tradition, embodied in Arthurian romance. This French manuscript (below) shows King Arthur and Guinevere with Lancelot kneeling before them.

  10. Scenes from the early fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter: while the French-speaking court feasted, the English-speaking labourers tended the land.

  11. Bestiaries were usually written in Latin but by the late thirteenth century a few were being elaborated and translated into English.

  By the standards of the day it was a bestseller and at first the Church merely condemned Wycliffe. They complained that he had made the scriptures “more open to the teachings of laymen and women. Thus the jewel of the clerics is turned to the sport of the laity and the pearl of the gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine.”

  The swine were to be fed by Wycliffe and, zealous, alight with his mission, he began to organise and train what amounted to a new religious order of itinerant preachers whom he despatched around England. Their typical garb was a russet-coloured woollen robe. They carried a long staff. Initially most were those fearless Oxford scholars, though they were quickly joined by “the low born” in extraordinary numbers. Their avowed inspiration, through Wycliffe, were the seventy evangelists whom Jesus had sent out to convert the world. Their purpose was to spread the Word, literally, in English.

  It had the characteristics of a guerrilla campaign. They were out to bring God back to the people through the language of the land. We read that they were in the highways, byways, taverns and inns, on village greens and in open fields preaching against the Church’s wealth and corruption and proclaiming Wycliffe’s anti-clerical ideas. They were spied on, they were observed. They were taking their lives in their hands, but Wycliffe drove them on. They became known as the Lollards, the name deriving from “lollaerd,” mumbler, from “lollen,” to mutter or mumble. They called themselves Christian Brethren.

  Most alarmingly of all, they cut out the priests.

  Here is part of Wycliffe’s version of the Beatitudes:

  Blessid ben pore men in spirit, for the kingdom of heuenes is herne.

  Blessid ben mylde men, for thei schulen welde the erthe.

  Blessid ben thei that mornen, for thei schulen be coumfortid.

  Blessid ben thei that hungren and thristen riytwisnesse,

  for thei schulen be fulfilled.

  Blessid ben merciful men, for thei schulen gete merci.

  . . .

  Ye ben salt of the erthe.

  Blessed be poor men in spirit, for the Kingdom of heaven is theirs.

  Blessed be mild men for they shall wield the earth.

  Blessed be they that mourn for they shall be comforted.

  Blessed be they that hunger and thirst rightwise, for

  they shall be fulfilled.

  Blessed be the merciful men, for they shall get mercy.

  . . .

  You are the salt of the earth.

  The Bible, through English, now called out directly to the people. This could not be tolerated. On May 17, 1382, in Blackfriars in London, on a site now boasting a Victorian public house whose tiled decor remembers Wycliffe’s time, a synod of the Church met to examine Wycliffe’s works. There were eight bishops, various masters of theology, doctors of common and civil law and fifteen friars.

  It was a show trial.

  Their conclusions were preordained and on the second day of their meeting they drafted a statement condemning Wycliffe’s pronouncements as outright heresies. Wycliffe’s followers were also condemned. The synod ordered the arrest and prosecution of itinerant preachers throughout the land. Many of those caught were tortured and killed.

  Perhaps most significantly of all as far as the English language is concerned, the synod led, later, to a parliamentary ban on all English-language Bibles and they had the powers to make this effective.

  Wycliffe’s great effort was routed. He had taken on the power of the Church and he had been defeated. His Bibles were outlawed. The doors of the Church, from the greatest cathedrals to the lowliest parish churches, were still the monopoly of Latin.

  On 30 May, every diocese in the land was instructed to publish the verdict. Wycliffe became ill. He was paralysed by a stroke. Two years later he died on the last day of 1384.

  In 1399, Henry IV was to accept the crown in English. Chaucer delighted readers and appreciators of English everywhere with The Canterbury Tales. But the Church slammed the door.

  Yet the Lollards risked their lives and carried on, meeting in hidden places, we are told, especially in Herefordshire and Monmouthshire. One contemporary chronicler wrote that “every second man” he met was a Lollard and they “went all over England luring great nobles and lords to their fold.” It is very unlikely they were so numerous or so influential among the nobility although, in a different context, in the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, English was proving its worth as a language of protest against central authority and certain restless nobles and lords might well have welcomed that.

  William Langland was a Lollard and his religious poem, Piers Plowman, was published in 1390. It was the most popular poem of its day, and it shows how deeply Wycliffe’s ideas had bitten in. Langland wrote in the West Midlands dialect and while Chaucer’s base was London and the cognoscenti, Piers Plowman gathered in the provincial and the strongly religious-minded rural population with whose often desperate plight he sympathised wholly.

  His poem is written in alliterative verse; Chaucer had used a regular natural structure and rhyme schemes breaking away from the older tradition. Langland reaches back across the centuries to Beowulf as he explains how the poem came to him on the Malvern Hills:

  In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,

  I shoop [wrapped] me into shroudes [garments]

  asI a sheep were . . .

  Ac [but] on a May morwenynge on Malverne hilles

  Me bifel a ferly, of Fairye me thoghte.

  [I had a marvellous dream as if by supernatural intervention]

  He refreshes alliterative verse and uses it as a root, making his dreams — of Christian life, of the plight of the poor and of the corruption of the clergy — more believable for being so plainly painted. In Langland’s verse:

  Ac I beheelde into the eest an heigh to the sonne,

  I seigh a tour on a toft, trieliche ymaked . . .

  In Modern English:

  I looked to the East towards the rising sun

  And saw a tower on a hill, wonder
fully built.

  A deep dell beneath, a dragon inside

  With a deep ditch dark and dreadful to look at.

  In between I found a fair field full of folk

  Working and going about their business.

  . . .

  Some laboured at the plough with no time

  for pleasure.

  Planting and sowing and sweating with effort.

  . . .

  I found there friars of all four orders

  Preaching to the people to profit themselves

  Glossing the gospel just as they liked.

  . . .

  For the parish priest and the pardoner

  Share in the silver

  That the parish poor would have

  If they were not there.

  This is meant to sound like the language of the people and in that language Langland continues the work of Wycliffe. This language and the poetry of it prefigures Pilgrim’s Progress and other works central to the Protestant English language of the Reformation. Yet there was only so much, in truth comparatively little, that a poet could do.

  After Wycliffe’s death and despite the condemnation and harshness of the Church, copies of Wycliffe’s Bible continued to be produced and circulated — even when it became a mortal crime to own any of Wycliffe’s works. With astonishing courage, Catholics who spread the English language were prepared to defy the Pope and take a chance with their lives and their eternal souls in order to read the word of God to the English in their own language.