Summary. The cathedral library has a John Wycliffe New Testament (MS Lich 10) dated c.1410. It is a handwritten translation from the Latin New Testament to Old English by one of Wycliffe’s students.
John Wycliffe,[1] c. 1331[2]–84, was a priest and professor at the University of Oxford. Through sermons and writings, he advocated the translation of the Latin Bible, Vulgate version, into Middle English so that ordinary people could read the Bible for themselves. At one time it was thought he translated the whole Bible, but it is now thought he completed the Gospels and some of the New Testament and his followers worked on the Old Testament.[3] The ‘Wycliffite Bible’ was the first complete translation of the Bible, and was finished by 1382[4]. The first version was more literal, difficult to read and had some awkward translations; an early book is in the British Library.[5] Updated, easier to read versions followed in the next thirteen years translated by his friend John Purvey with the help of others.
Artistic
impression of John Wycliffe from a book by C. C. Savage 1856. Wikimedia, Public
Domain.
The bible was
never used in church services, but circulated widely amongst clergy until 1538
when Henry VIII enforced his Great Bible on every parish. The significance of
Wycliffe’s translation is that it laid the foundation for the reforms of the
16th-century and eventually the rise of Protestantism. Wycliffe saw God’s
wisdom lay in words set out in the gospels and not as taught doctrinally and
variably by priests in the Roman Catholic Church. In 1409, a provisional
council of the English Church banned further translations of the Bible into
English. In 1425, Wycliffe was posthumously condemned by the church and his
bones were dug up and burned.
Wycliffe New Testament in the cathedral
library
Part of a
decorated page
Around 250 manuscripts of the Bible in varying states of completeness exist. It is strange more Wycliffe Bibles of the early 15th-century exist than do the orthodox versions of this time. About 150 manuscripts, complete or partial survive, containing the updated translation in its revised form. The irony of Wycliffe’s provocative distribution of a readable Bible was that it was banned in all its forms by episcopal authority, yet vernacular translations of scripture were freely available in France, Germany, Italy and the Low Countries by the time of the Reformation.[6] Furthermore, there were texts based on the gospels written in the vernacular and acceptable to own.
[1]
His name has been spelt in at least twenty different ways. He came from a
wealthy family with known ancestry and has been linked with the parish of
Wycliffe, near Richmond, Yorkshire.
[2]
Dates of 1324, 1328 and 1331 have been given He was in Oxford by 1345.
[3]
Some historians believe Wycliffe played a minor role in the translations and a leading
role in making the vernacular Bible known to many. He is known to have
translated the Apocalypse in 1356, entitled ‘The last age of the church’, which
could have reflected his view of the church. It was also eight years after the
Black Death and with much loss of clergy, those taking their place were seen to
be inferior. His next work included extracts taken from other authors.
[4]
Bede was translating the Gospel of John into Old
English in the 8th-century at the time of his death. Various Mercian texts were
translations of parts of the Psalter and other commentaries, see M. P. Brown, ‘Mercian manuscripts:
The implications of the Staffordshire Hoard, other recent discoveries, and the
New Materiality'. E. Kwakkel (ed.) Writing in Context: Insular manuscript
culture 500--1200. (Leiden: 2013), 23--66. The first six books of the Bible were translated for
the Old English Hexateuch in the 11th-century. Short translated commentaries
were published by others previous to Wycliffe. Therefore, the idea of having a
translated bible for all to read was not new, but it was Wycliffe that enabled
it to happen.
[5]
Egerton MS 617.
[6] P. Marshall, Heretics and Believers. A history of the English Reformation. (New Haven and London: 2017), 117.
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