William Tyndale

by James J. Ellis

“I have long adopted an expedient which I have found of singular service to me,” said Richard Cecil. “I have a shelf in my study for tried authors, and one in my mind for tried principles and characters.

“When an author has stood a thorough examination and will bear to be taken as a guide, I put him on the shelf!

“When I have most fully made up my mind on a principle, I put it on the shelf!

“When I have turned a character over and over on all sides, and seen it through and through in all situations, I put it on the shelf!”

William Tyndale is a man whose character may be placed upon the shelf, for he and his life have successfully endured the test of the ages that have in turn examined him, and sometimes not with the kindest of feelings. It is difficult for us to estimate adequately the magnitude of his success, because the whole current of religious life has changed since his time, and mainly because of what he accomplished. A great writer has imagined what would occur if some morning every sentence of the Scriptures were obliterated both from the printed page and from the minds of men; he believes that a blank Bible would mean a blank world, and that was largely the moral condition of things into which Tyndale was born. There was no Bible, at least in circulation, and therefore there were ignorance, tyranny, hopelessness, and discord. The Reformation was not only a bringing-in of a new life beyond the grave, it also gave fresh hope and meaning to the existence on this side of death; so that commercial enterprise and national liberty are products of that period.

Frith, in his amusing autobiography, tells us of a picture-dealer who said of Dickens and his writings, “He couldn’t help writing ’em. He deserves no credit for that. He a clever man! Let him go and sell a lot of pictures to a man that don’t want ’em, as I have done lots of times; that’s what I call being a clever man!”

The same has practically been long felt if not expressed about William Tyndale, for it is only of late years that his supreme ability has been admitted. Yet he was undoubtedly a great man; Foxe calls him “the true servant and martyr of God, who, for his notable pains and travail, may well be called the Apostle of England.” Tyndale is rightly so called, for he, in spite of the Bishops, gave to the world a book which they did not desire, and in so doing he did more for the English Reformation than the King and Parliament combined.

Of the early days of this great man but very little is known. Foxe, in his Life of William Tyndale, says that he “was born about the borders of Wales, and brought up from a child in the University of Oxford, where he, by long continuance, grew up and increased as well in the knowledge of tongues and other liberal arts, as especially in the knowledge of the Scriptures, whereunto his mind was singularly addicted, insomuch that he, lying then in Magdalen Hall, read privily to certain students and fellows of Magdalen College some parcel of divinity; instructing them in the knowledge and truth of the Scriptures. His manners also and conversation, being correspondent to the same, were such that all they that knew him reputed and esteemed him to be a man of most virtuous disposition and of life unspotted. Thus he, in the University of Oxford, increasing more and more in learning and proceeding in degrees of the schools, spying his time, removed from thence to the University of Cambridge, where, after he had likewise made his abode a certain space, being now further ripened in the knowledge of God’s Word, leaving that University also, he resorted to one Master Welch, a knight of Gloucestershire.” In these few lines Foxe concentrates the history of several years, and these were years of supreme interest and importance both to the man and to us. Nor has subsequent research done very much to fill in this gap, although one or two things are now clear to us.

It was for a long time believed that William Tyndale was a son of Thomas Tyndale of Hunts Court, the manor-house of North Nibley, a village in Gloucestershire. Accordingly a monument has been erected upon Nibley Knoll (one of the Cotswold Hills) in his honour—a noble column which is still conspicuous from far in that pleasant country. But it has been shown that this could not have been, and that not to the manor-house, but to a farmhouse, must we look for the birthplace of our hero. At Melksham Court, in the parish of Stinchcombe, there had long lived a family of Tyndales, who, it is said, had originally come from the North of England. This was during the Wars of the Roses, and in order to elude the proscription which in turn visited the adherents of each house, these Tyndales assumed the name of Hutchins.

It is probable that these farmers, whose lands were principally swamps that had been reclaimed from the Severn, were the ancestors of William Tyndale. The Tyndales of North Nibley were, however, probably relatives of these farmers. The precise date of William Tyndale’s birth cannot be stated, but from the fact that, in his reply to Sir Thomas More, Tyndale said, “These things to be even so M. More knoweth well enough, for he understandeth the Greek, and he knew them long ere I did,” it is inferred that More was at least some years the elder. More was born in the year 1478 A.D., and therefore it is conjectured that about 1480 was the date of Tyndale’s birth. Of Slymbridge, his probable birthplace, Demaus says that it “was then, as now, wholly engrossed in the production of cheese and butter; a quiet agricultural parish, where life would flow on calmly as the great river that formed its boundary. The dairymaid was the true annalist of Slymbridge; and the only occurrence beyond drought which would distress the peaceful population would be occasional predatory incursions of their lawless neighbours from the Forest of Dean, which waved in hills of verdure towards the west, as a picturesque counterbalance to the Cotswolds in the east. Such a place one naturally associates with stagnant thought and immemorial tradition.”[1]