This Little Britain: How One Small Country Changed the Modern World. Harry Bingham
sat not, But in the lawe of the Lord his wil; and in the lawe of hym he shal sweteli thenke dai and nygt.
Even putting aside the archaic spellings, this text reads more like half-chewed Latin than proper English. But it was a start. Its authors must have recognized the weakness of that early version, because no sooner had the first translation been finished than a new and better one was begun. Those translations were transcribed by hand, then disseminated by wandering Lollard preachers. (Lollard, from the Middle Dutch word meaning ‘a babbler of nonsense’, came to be applied pejoratively to all Wyclif’s followers, who then came to embrace the term enthusiastically.)
In a land where books were rare and precious, where the language of salvation had always been incomprehensible to the vast bulk of the population, those Bibles must have been the most extraordinary experience: liberating, poetic, exciting, inspiring. Many parish priests, indeed, would have understood next to nothing of the Latin that they had so solemnly intoned in church. With Wyclif’s new Bibles, weavers and housewives were suddenly being let into knowledge of God’s word itself, secrets that had previously been the property of only a tiny handful.
Inevitably, of course, the movement was suppressed. Wyclif’s manuscripts were burned and the Lollards themselves arrested, often killed. But just as today the tide of technology tends to favour the Internet over those seeking to erect barriers against it, so too did the invention of the printing press shift things decisively in favour of revolution. Wyclif’s translations had had to be copied, slowly and painfully, by hand. Those that came after him in England and (particularly) Germany could churn out copies by the thousand. Costs fell, print runs increased. By 1526, William Tyndale, heavily influenced by Martin Luther, printed three thousand copies of his English language New Testament, then sold each copy for as little as four shillings. The authorities could no more track down and burn each copy than they could order trees to hold their leaves in autumn. An English-speaking God had finally, decisively arrived.
As far as British exceptionalism is concerned the story ends there. An Englishman, John Wyclif, inaugurated a movement that would lead to the most important development in the Christian Church since the split between Catholic and Orthodox. That movement then shifted its centre of gravity eastwards to Germany, and England played no more than a secondary role in what followed. Yet to end the story at that point leaves off, at least from a literary point of view, its conclusion.
As we know, Henry VIII broke with Rome and, on his death, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, converted the English Church into a genuinely Protestant one, something it had not been during Henry’s reign. During the six-year reign of Edward VI, around sixty new versions of the Bible were released. More followed under Elizabeth, then James.
Compared with the old days, this was liberation indeed, but a troubling one all the same. It was all very well to write the gospels in the language of ploughboys, but the translations couldn’t all be equally good. Which ones were right, which wrong? It was time to set up a committee.
The committee in question was a bureaucrats’ daydream. Fifty-four translators were appointed, split across six working groups, who toiled away for six years. The results were fed into yet another committee, a review committee, comprising scholars from Oxford, Cambridge and London. The review panel spent nine months in honing their texts. The result of their labours, the Authorised Version of the Bible (or the King James Bible), could have been a bureaucratic disaster, a hotchpotch of muddle and compromise. It was nothing of the sort. It has become, deservedly, one of the great monuments of English.
The secret of its success was a simple one. All the committees, but most especially the final review committee, paid close attention to what would sound good when read aloud. Furthermore, keeping to their mandate of making scriptures accessible, the translators stuck to a honed-down lexicon of just eight thousand words. (Shakespeare, by contrast, uses some twenty thousand.) The result was grand, spare, sonorous and easy to understand. Here, for example, are the famous words from John’s Gospel, given in some of the major versions of the Bible up to this point:
AN ANGLO-SAXON VERSION (995): ‘God lufode middan-eard swa, dat he seade his an-cennedan sunu, dat nan ne forweorde de on hine gely ac habbe dat ece lif’.
WYCLIF (1380): ‘For god loued so the world; that he gaf his oon bigetun sone, that eche man that bileueth in him perisch not: but haue euerlastynge liif’
TYNDALE (1534): ‘For God so loveth the worlde, that he hath geven his only sonne, that none that beleve in him, shuld perisshe: but shuld have everlastinge lyfe.’
KING JAMES (1611): ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Sonne: that whosoever beleeveth in him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.’
Among these different versions, Wyclif’s words, with their strange spellings and disconcerting rhythms, seem to us like ancient history. The Anglo-Saxon is ancient history. Tyndale’s version rings out almost as clear and modern as the King James version. But it is only in its final appearance that these lines find their feet; meaning, rhythm and weight coming together in perfect balance.
That Bible in that version is one of the great monuments of our, or any, literature.* It, every bit as much as Shakespeare, has shaped the language we use today. Whether we are fruitful and multiply or are at our last gasp, whether we serve two masters or cast our pearls before swine, whether we live by bread alone or off the fat of the land that flows with milk and honey, then in this den of thieves (for by their fruit shall we know them) we are quoting the Bible. If we have ears to hear, if nation should rise against nation, if we pass by on the other side, if we kick against the pricks, if we are full of good works or a law unto ourselves, if we say, ‘Doctor, heal thyself’, and if we take up our beds and walk (doubtless escorting the poor whom we have always with us), if we are present in spirit, if we suffer fools gladly, if we cry ‘Oh death, where is thy sting?’ then (be of good cheer) we are quoting the Bible. In short, where two or three are gathered together, we can but find that we live, move and have our being in the world that Wyclif, Tyndale and the King James translators created.
The influence of that Bible lies in far more than just a couple of hundred famous phrases. As I was writing this chapter, I happened to pick up a copy of my third novel, The Sons of Adam, where I came across the following sentence: ‘Tom would be happy if all the kings of the earth had been turned overnight into ordinary people: shoe-shine boys, oil-riggers, commercial travellers, bums.’ That phrase ‘the kings of the earth’ is straight from the Authorised Version (Revelation 6:15 if you care to check) and it isn’t standard English today. ‘All the kings in the world’ would be more normal, or perhaps even ‘Every king on the planet’. But I had wanted a grander phrase than that, something to point up a contrast with the ‘ordinary people’ that followed. I’ve probably never read the relevant bit of Revelation and I certainly didn’t consciously reach for the language of King James, yet because I was after something sonorous, grand and spare, my subconscious took me there anyway—just as thousands of other writers have been led, wittingly or unwittingly, to the exact same source. That’s influence. That’s greatness.
* The same could be said of Luther’s 1534 German-language Bible, as much a literary landmark as a religious one.
Shakespeare. What is there to say about him that hasn’t already been endlessly said? How to find a new angle on this most talked-about figure? In the end, mightn’t it be best just to sidestep the Bard and talk about other things instead?
Except that