3. History of english language The Battle for the Language of the Bible PDF

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THE BATTLE FOR THE LANGUAGE OF THE BIBLE In the last program we looked at the way in which English had begun to oust French as the language of law and government and how there was a new confidence in English literature but during the 14th and 15th centuries there began a movement to return English to its central place in society. This fight was often a violent one. It was as much a political story as a linguistic one and it starts right at the top. For late medieval Britain was above all a religious Society. The Catholic Church controlled and pervaded all aspects of life and it was in the church that this struggle for access and power would be fought. English set out to become the language of God. In the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. God created the heavens and the earth, now the earth was formless and empty, and God said let there be light and there was light. Through him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life and that life was the light of men. In the beginning was the word but not if you lived in 14th century England and couldn't speak a Latin. Power in words lay in the Bible, there was no Bible in English. In formal terms God spoke to the people in Latin. Six centuries ago the Bible stories were commonly enjoyed but not the Bible itself, to the majority it was a closed book. The Mystery Plays first performed in York around thirteen seventy-six are still being performed today. They tell the Christian story from the mystery of God's creation to the birth death and resurrection of Christ. They are religious plays but they're not the Scriptures, there are sort of biblical soap opera at the same kind of remove from the original source as our nativity players are today. The language of the streets was immediate and direct but in God's house Latin ruled. Anybody who has brought up in the ways of the Church of England would find a medieval church service linguistically a strange and remote affair. When you went to church and everybody had to, it was compulsory, there was no familiar English, everything was in Latin. The clergy could read the Word of God, a bell was wrong to let the congregation know when the priest had reached the important bits. For the authority of the Catholic Church it was vital that a priest and a language stood between a believer and the Bible but all that was about to change dramatically. In the 14th century those the beginnings of a counter movement that was going to turn English-speaking world on its axis. It would eventually tear the church in two it would mark the end of the Middle Ages and would cost many lives, it was the battle for the language of the Bible. Some of the English wanted access to the kingdom of heaven in the language of the streets, they wanted a Bible had belonged to them and they were prepared to fight for it. It was the boldest way for English to become the language of real power. The prime mover was John Wickliffe who at the age of 17 was admitted to Merton College Oxford. John Wickliffe Wickliffe was a charismatic scholar fluent in Latin and therefore familiar with the Bible. He was a major philosopher and theologian who believed passionately that his knowledge should be shared by everyone and he was fiercely opposed to the power and wealth of the church. “When men speak of the church they usually mean priests, monks, cannons and Friars but it should not be so. Whether a hundred Pope's and all the Friars turned to Cardinals, their opinions in matters of faith should not be accepted, except insofar as they're founded on the scripture itself.” The church in Wickliffe style was often lazy and corrupt. Bible reading even among the clergy were surprisingly rare but often they didn't have the Latin. When the bishop a blaster surveyed 311 deacons, archdeacon's and priests of the diocese, he discovered that a 168 were unable to repeat the Ten Commandments, 31 didn't know where those commandments came from and 40 couldn't repeat the Lord's Prayer. Wickliffe railed at the corruption and complacency of the church, his overriding thought was

summed up in his passionate belief in the right of every man whether cleric or laymen to examine the Bible for himself. This meant a full English Bible, but it wasn't an easy task, it was unauthorized by the church and so potentially heretical. It had to be done in secrecy. For its aim was to overthrow the powerful with words. By the beginning of 1380 Wickliffe had organized the translation from the Latin of the first English bible. The work took place in Oxford probably with several translators and it wasn't only the mammoth task of translation that faced them, their Bible had to be disseminated too. Once a translation was done the new Bible was reproduced, hundreds were copied in script area production lines turning out handwritten copies. 170 of these Bibles survived, a huge number for a 600-year-old manuscript which tells us there must have been armies of people secretly transcribing it, copping it and passing it on. The first English Bible changed the world and later for the sake of this book hundreds will be martyred dying the most horrible deaths. There was a problem with Wickliffe Bible, it wasn't an easy translation. Many familiar phrases do have their origin here but on the whole Wickliffe and his team was so in awe of the sacred nature of the Latin scriptures that they did a translation word-for-word even keeping the Latin word order. They were people still nervous with their own language, anxious that it could carry the weight of God's Word. Wickliffe had begun to organize and train what amounted to a new religious order retainer and preachers whom he dispatched around England. That purpose was to spread the word in English. They were determined to win the battle for God. In the highways, byways, taverns, inns and village greens they preached against Church corruption and proclaimed Wickliffe anti-clerical ideas. They read from his English Bible and they became known the Lollards, a secret influential movement hated by the Catholic establishment. They went straight to the source of God's teaching and cut out the priests. The church wasn't going to stand for this. On May the 17th 1382 a special synod made up of 8 bishops various Master of Theology, doctors of Canon and civil law and 45 friars met to examine Wickliffe works. Two days into their meeting they drafted a statement condemning Wickliffe’s pronouncements as outright heresies. The Synod also condemned Wickliffe associates. It ordered the arrest and prosecution of itinerant preachers throughout the land, eventually it secured a parliamentary ban on all English-language Bibles. On the 30th of May that year the Synod instructed every diocese to publish the verdict. Wickliffe became ill, the stress defeated him, and he was paralyzed by a stroke. Two years later he died. Wickliffe death didn't signal the end of the movement, now afterwards Lollards were at constant risk of their lives. They met in hidden places especially in Hereford and Monmouthshire, they managed to elude the agents of the church and keep their faith alive. One contemporary chronicler said that every second man he met was a lard and they went all over England luring great Nobles and Lords to their fold. It's most unlikely that there were that numerous but nevertheless this was a national political movement and its cause was the English language. William Langland Piers Plowman of William Lyons it's the most popular religious poem of its day. The English language was used to express a personal Christian spiritual vision and his evidence of a native tradition that's a real and growing alternative to the established religious culture. It came to Langland in a series of dreams, the first it's written in a literate averse itself a form which harks back to the old English of Beowulf. It's an allegory of the Christian life and of the contemporary corruption of the Christian Church. English here is being used to form not just a literal language but one which is an alternative to the received authority passed down either through French or Latin. This is the language of an individual relationship with God, it's prefigures books like pilgrim’s progress and Paradise Lost. It became the Protestant language of the English Reformation. Meanwhile the church was not satisfied with Wickliffe's death it continued to burn Bibles, it burned people and in ordered Wickliffe to be posthumously burned. In 1414 the most imposing council ever called by the Catholic Church condemned Wickliffe as a heretic and in the spring of 1428 ordered his bones to be

exhumed and removed from consecrated ground. With the primate of England looking on with lifts remains were disinterred and burned by a little bridge that spanned the river Swift, a tributary of the Avery. His ashes were scattered into the stream. Officially the Bible remained in Latin. Henry V In the early 15th century Henry was campaigning around northern France winning French territory and famous battles. After his victory Henry broke with 350 years of royal tradition and wrote his dispatches home in English. English Kings had begun to speak English unto his father Henry the fourth, but all court documents had hitherto been written in French, as they had been since the Norman conquest. Henry's English letters are deliberate pieces of propaganda to be spread throughout the land. Henry's motives may have been the exploitation of anti-French fervour but once he returned from the campaigns he continued to write in English and doing so he made the first major step towards the creation of an official standardized English that everybody could read. The houses of parliament are also called the Palace of Westminster that's a reminder that on this site the kings of England wanted their principal London residence. The Hall is all that survived the Great Fire and somewhere around here when the king was in residence would have been the first circle of his government. The signet office wrote personal letters on behalf of the monarch which carried the Royal Seal. Once Henry decreed that the signet office should use English it was inevitable that the rest of the country would come to do the same. The problem was which English. Across the country people still spoke a mass of different dialects and would have had trouble understanding one another. English standardization Fortunately, from the languages point of view there was a big engine of state that could deal with this unruly tongue. It was the chancellery reduced to “Chancery”, the civil service of the day. It was crucial that a document produced in London could be read. As Chancery began to use the English language it had to make hundreds of decisions about which form of a word and which spelling to adopt. We don't know how these choices were made but we do know that they stuck thousands of documents were painstakingly written out and sent all over the country. Many had legal status, so they had to be exact and consistent and under the influence of Chancery the language starts to look more modern and more even. Around the time English was being standardized by Chancery there was much debate about the best way to spell things. There were reformers who wanted to spell words according to the way they were pronounced and traditionalists who wanted to spell them in one of the ways that always been.They couldn't help tampering though and a desire to make the roots of the language more evident words that had ended English from French for instance were given a Latin look. To prove the folly of trying to bring reason into the language the English promptly decided to pronounce everything differently anyway. Around this time and nobody really knows why a sea change took place in the way English sounds this is called the great vowel shif and in heaven comparatively quickly. Over a generation or two before it English was pronounced in a way that sounds foreign to us now. Printing What really gives all languages uniformity is writing and what gives writing is huge modern power is invention and spread of printing. Printing was invented by Gutenberg in Germany around 1435. Printing marks the beginning of the Information Age. Movable type made it easy to manufacture books in large numbers. It became very hard indeed to control the spread of ideas and print favoured the language of the people. English was pressed into service. Latin was still the language of religion and scholarship. When Caxton introduced printing to England he got

straight on with making books in English. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Mallory's tales of King Arthur ways bestsellers. English was still a fluid and regionally difficult monster and Caxton worried about how to achieve a common standard that will be understood and read by all. It was writers like Chaucer and Wickliffe who'd established a dominant dialect, it was Caxton's publications that consolidated the games. It would eventually be made permanent by the English Bible which in Tudor times, thanks to printing, reached everyone who could read. The scene was set for the creation of probably the most influential book that's ever been in the history of language. Henry VIII and William Tyndale Early in the reign of Henry the eighth, the new king was still promising the Pope to burn any untrue translations. He meant Wickliffe's Bible relentlessly circulating in hand copied editions and he set his Lord Chancellor Cardinal Wolsey to hunt down and burn all heretical books. On the 12th of May 1521 a huge bonfire of confiscated heretical works is made outside the original sand Paul's Cathedral. It was said that the flames burned for two days. That same year a young man who was Oxford educated and an ordained priest became tutor to a large household in little Sodbury Gloucestershire, where he started to preach in the common place called sent Austen's green in front of the church. His name was William Tyndale and his Bible was to bring about a radical change both in the English language and in English society. He's had more influence on the way we speak that anyone except Shakespeare and he had to leave the country to do it. Tyndale was in the mole of Wickliffe 100 years on. He believed passionately in an English bible. In 1524 age 29, Tyndale left England and settled in Cologne, where began the work of translating the New Testament into English from the original Hebrew and Greek. By 3.000 copies had been printed abroad and were about to be smuggled into England. Henry aids and Cardinal Wolsey whose spies had alerted them were terrified of this perceived threat and the whole country was put on alert. Naval ships patrolled the coastal waters boats were stopped and searched and a great many of the Bibles were intercepted. For the state this was a serious struggle Latin was the language not only of God, but the state's authority arrested on it too. The enemy had to be beaten off an enemy that would eventually give the English language so magnificently to the English people but first tens and then hundreds of these Bibles began to get through. The Bishop bought and burned his books and Tyndale used the money to prepare and print a better version at Church expense and this is what the conflict was about, a Bible for the people in their spoken language. It's impossible to overpraise the quality of Tyndale's writing, its rhythmical beauty. Its simplicity of phrase has penetrated deep into the bedrock of English as we still know today. Tyndale's work formed 85% of the later King James Bible the one we all know and we all use his phrase is still. By this stage in the adventure of English we're coming across words that carry our ideas and emotions and feelings even today. Words that not only tell us about the external world we live in but about the inner nature of our condition. There were thousands of copies of Tyndale's bible in England. In his happy phrase the noise of the new bible echoed throughout the country. Produced in a small pocket-sized edition that was easily concealed, it passed through the cities and universities into the hands of even the humblest men and women. The authorities, especially Thomas More, still railed against it for putting the fire of Scripture into the language of Plowboys but the damage was done. The English at the English Bible legal or not. In 1535 Tyndale was arrested and jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde. He was convicted of heresy and executed by strangulation, after which his body was burnt at the stake. His last words were: “Lord open the king of England's eyes”. In fact, events had already opened the Kings’ eyes. Henry VIII had tried to divorce Catherine of Aragon and that had brought him into confrontation with the Pope. Now he too was opposed to papal supremacy. Henry's mood had changed, and scripture was suddenly more important than church’s authority. Thomas Moore had been executed for refusing to see things the Kings way and his new advisors, Thomas Cromwell

and Thomas Cranmer keen to keep their heads moved on ecclesiastical reform. That reform came with the split from Rome and the English Reformation. Now England needed the scriptures to be available in its own tongue English was to become at last the language of power. Henry's change of mind came too late to save Tyndall even supposing he gave his fate any thought at all but by the time Tyndall's martyrdom Henry had already authorized this Coverdale Bible which was translated from the German and was the first legal Bible in England, that was in 1535. In 1539 we have the great Bible designed to be the official version for newly Protestant England and to be placed in every parish church in the land. After centuries of suppression three Bibles are approved and published inside six years and he goes on: the Geneva Bible, the bishops Bible, the Rheims Bible. The English language has suddenly flowered, it's already returned to the palaces of Port and state like Lambeth Palace in London. It's again become the language of a vivid and vigorous national literature and now with the split from Rome its Concord the last and highest Bastion, the church. It was the spirit of Protestantism that the Bible be available to everyone. The medieval Catholic Church kept the Bible from the people, Henry's new church set out to get the Bible to as many people as possible. It's had an extraordinary influence on the spread of our language. By the end of the sixteenth century there were so many competing versions that King James the first ordered a standardized version which we now know as a King James Bible of 1611. The writers drew on all the previous versions but mostly on Tyndale's. They made no attempt to update the language that was now 80 years old, so even though by 1611 English had undergone further revolution. The King James’ Version was deliberately archaic, even then and that's part of its extraordinary power. It was designed to feel as if it had the authority and resonance of speech from the past. It was meant to sound ancient antique like the very words of God. Above all the men who made this version listened, to their final drafts being read aloud repeatedly and altered them accordingly so that they had the right rhythm and balance. This makes the authorized English Bible a preachers Bible. It was written to be spoken to be heard, to be understood. It was written to spread the word....