The Middle English Bible. Henry Ansgar Kelly
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and sent to Alexandria to render the Bible into Greek; none of them were said to be pontiffs.56
Ullerston in English: Reporting Archbishop Arundel’s Approval of Queen Anne’s English Gospels
The English treatise noted above, Against Them That Say, which draws on Ullerston’s Latin treatise, has uniformly been judged to be Lollard in sentiment. Margaret Deanesly ascribes it to John Purvey;57 Curt Bühler, who does not know Deanesly’s work, terms it “a Lollard tract” in the title of his edition of 1938; while Hudson says, “In form it is a typical Lollard production: lists of authorities, biblical, patristic, canonistic and historical, cited in favor of a Lollard viewpoint and given a rough frame.” She favors a date before 1407, because of “the absence of allusion to the prohibition of biblical translation.”58 If, however, we judge that biblical translation was not prohibited, we should revisit the subject, and the whole question of the treatise’s Lollardy. As it stands, I can find only one passage in it that seems obviously Wycliffite: after citing Fitzralph’s statement that the Sacrament might well be made (that is, the Mass celebrated) in the vernacular of each country, the author says: “But we coveiten not that, but prey anticrist that we moten have oure bileve in Englishe.”59 The sentiment is very much out of tune with the rest of the treatise. Perhaps the text originally read “unto crist,” which was distorted by an early copyist. Mary Dove says that the writer was probably a Wycliffite,60 and that “by ‘anticrist’ the writer surely means the church authorities who are denying the people the Bible in English.”61 Like Hudson, she is writing under the assumption that the constitutions passed in 1407 and promulgated in 1409 banned biblical translations, but unlike Hudson she assumes that the author of this treatise knows of the ruling and is protesting against it.
Dove notes that the treatise appears “in most copies … in the context of identifiably Lollard material,” but that, surprisingly, in the manuscript of the Pierpont Morgan Library (no. 648, ca. 1445–55), it comes between Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Life of Jesus Christ and Bridget of Sweden’s Revelationes.62 However, the only other medieval copy, besides Morgan, is the Trinity College Cambridge manuscript (B.14.50), which indeed includes this piece among Wycliffite treatises and excerpts.63 The other four copies are in “collections of texts supposedly heralding the Reformation” produced in early modern times, as Dove tells us.64 The Trinity manuscript, which Dove takes as her base text, has the reading as above, “prey anticrist”; but Morgan erases “prey,” and three of the later copies omit “prey” entirely. Dove comments, “The notion of praying to Antichrist evidently daunted scribes.”65
Immediately after making the above statement, the author identifies himself as someone who has had much personal experience in dealing with Jews: “We that have much communed with the Jews know well that all mighty men of them, in what[ever] land they be born, yet they have in Hebrew the Bible, and they be more active in the Old Law than any Latin man commonly, yea, as well the lewd men of the Jews as priests.”66 The most likely Englishmen of the time about whom this could be said were the keepers of the rolls, who also functioned as wardens of the Domus Conversorum. The warden from 1405 to 1415 was John Wakering, who shortly afterward became bishop of Norwich.67 One of the residents of the Domus at this time was the daughter of Rabbi Moses, referred to as “bishop” of the Jews.68 Of course, English clerics who traveled or resided abroad could also have had the opportunity to commune with Jews.
Dove demonstrates that Against Them draws almost entirely from various portions of Ullerston’s treatise, far more extensively than cited by Hudson.69
Alastair Minnis says that the “anonymous Lollard” who compiled the work ignored “Ullerston’s balancing arguments against translation,”70 but, as we have seen, Ullerston included these arguments only in summary form and only for the purpose of refuting them.
Against Them’s original material, apart from a few odds and ends, is mainly limited to three anecdotes at the end. The first is a very brief recollection of a sermon preached before the bishop of London by the Dominican friar John Tille in the hearing of a hundred people, saying that St. Jerome professed to have erred when he translated the Bible.71
This report of Tille’s sermon is accepted as authentic by historians, like A. B. Emden. Tille achieved his doctorate in theology at Oxford by 1403; he was the prior of the London convent of Dominicans, that is, Blackfriars, from 1402 and again in 1408, after Thomas Palmer stepped down in 1407.72 He may still have been at Blackfriars for the meeting of convocation in January 1409 at St. Paul’s, when the Oxford constitutions were confirmed, and in April, when Archbishop Arundel sent the standard notice to the bishop of London to promulgate them throughout the province.73 Dove in fact suggests that Tille was actually addressing the constitution dealing with the Bible, Periculosa, which starts out with the same quotation of Jerome about the dangers of translating the Bible.
The author of Against Them reacts to Tille by comparing him to the magician Elymas (Bar-Jesus), who tried to keep Sergius Paulus, proconsul of Paphos, from the faith by preventing him from hearing St. Paul preach the Word of God; whereupon Paul rebuked him and said he would go blind: “But Friar Tille, that said before the bishop of London, hearing a hundred men, that Jerome said he erred in translating of the Bible, is like to Elymas, the which would have letted a bishop or a judge to hear the belief, to whom Paul said, ‘O thou, full of all treachery and of all fallacy, seeking to turn the bishop from the belief, thou shalt be blind to a time.’ This is written in the Deeds of the Apostles, thirteenth chapter.”74 It is interesting that he interprets the proconsul of Acts 13 as a “judge or bishop,” and then settles on “bishop.” He goes on to cite Jerome much more fully than Ullerston does in his extant third article, but we must remember that Ullerston dealt entirely with Jerome’s translation in his first two articles, and it may be that the English author had access to the whole treatise. Or, dare we suggest it, perhaps the author of the English treatise is Ullerston himself, or at least a rather disorganized intimate of his?
The second fresh anecdote that Against Them contributes goes back in time to a supposed bill in Parliament against current Bible translations:
Also it is known to many men that in the time of King Richard, whose soul God assoil, into a Parliament was put a bill by assent of two archbishops and of the clergy, to annul the Bible that time translated into English, and also other books of the Gospel translated into English, which, when it was seen of Lords and Commons, the good duke of Lancaster, John, whose soul God assoil for His mercy, answered thereto sharply, saying this sentence: “We will not be the refuse of all men, for sithen other nations have God’s Law, which is law of our belief, in their own mother language, we will have our in English, who that ever it begrudge.” And this he affirmed with a great oath.75
It is usually thought that there is no historical basis to this story, but Ralph Hanna takes it at its face as a reference to a real clerical effort in Parliament to suppress “Lollard biblical translations” (he assumes that EV and LV were perceived as Lollard), perhaps in 1388 or in 1394.76
Against Dove’s assertion that “it was not for parliament to legislate on such matters,”77 we can point out that there was a statute against heretical preaching passed in the wake of the Blackfriars meeting of 1382, which invoked the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops and other clergy of the realm.78 And Parliament legislated against heretical books in the 1401 statute Contra Lollardos,79 which followed the formulation sent forward by convocation.80
We must remember that the Church convocations were considered part of Parliament when they met together. In the Merciless Parliament of 1388 singled out by Hanna, the Monk of Westminster reports that there was a magnus rumor, or great discussion, in full Parliament on March 12 concerning the Lollards and their preachings and books in English (“de Lollardis et eorum predicacionibus et libris in Anglicis”) whereby they were leading astray simple folk and even some substantial persons. Four of the implicated preachers were summoned for trial before a panel of bishops and scholars, and on reconvening on April