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hotchpotch of Latin variants and old Greek translations. This was the Vulgate and it stayed unchanged and unchallenged for a millennium. St Jerome’s version became known as the Vulgate because of its common use in Roman Catholic churches.
Latin was the language of the Roman Empire which under the Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity as its official religion. Latin became the language of the Pope whose empire was also centred in Rome. When military Rome was conquered and its empire overrun, its language lived on in the Roman Church. Length of time and usage and Catholic politics made this Latin seem sacred, invincible and untouchable. Wycliffe and his Oxford scholars challenged that and their English manuscripts were distributed all over the kingdom by the scholars themselves. Oxford bred a revolutionary cell right inside an ostensibly safe breeding ground of the Catholic Church.
We are talking about a degree of centralised regulation in medieval Christian Europe which had a great deal in common with Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China and with much of Hitler’s Germany.
The Roman Church, rich, its tentacles in every niche of society, could be a vital ally in war, a diplomatic master force whose nuncios infiltrated all the courts of Europe. It was often crucial in the web of strategic alliances. Above all, it had a monopoly on eternal life. Eternal life was the deep and guiding passion of the time. The Vatican said you could only gain everlasting life – the majestic promise of the Christian Church – if you did what the Church told you to do. That obedience included forced attendance at church and the payment of taxes to support battalions of clergy. And accepting that the Bible had to be in Latin and not in your own tongue.
Daily life was subject to scrutiny in every town and village; your sex life was monitored. All rebellious thoughts were to be confessed and were punished, any opinions not in line with the Church’s teaching were censored. Torture and murder were the enforcers. Those suspected of even doubting the workings of this monumental monotheistic machine were forced into humiliating public trials and told to ‘abjure or burn’ – to offer a grovelling and public apology or be eaten by fire.
Wycliffe wanted to burst out of what he saw as these man-made bonds for which he saw no justification in the Bible. He saw the Catholic Church structure as an offence against true faith. Its teaching had become a corruption of the true message of Jesus Christ. It was no more than a degenerate institution. Behind the screen of its astounding cathedrals, its magnificent pageants, its music, its luring of artists and even the unique benefits of its hospitals and schools, Wycliffe, the severe Oxford scholar, saw the false gods of greed and oppression. He also realised that much of its power came from its control over religious language. He spoke out and demanded that everyone ought to have the right to read or hear the Bible in their own tongue.
His translators were writing in the age of the mystery plays – one of the few ways in which ordinary people could receive the Bible stories in English, though they had to be performed outside the churches and cathedrals. It was the time of Chaucer, who brought in the dawn of English literature, and of Piers Plowman, the epic English poem written by William Langland, a Wycliffe sympathiser.
From the start there was heavy criticism of the very idea of a translation into English. One chronicler complained that ‘the pearl of the Gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine’. But the swine wanted to be fed and immediately and for a century afterwards these Oxford manuscripts were in high demand.
This translation from the Latin could be literal and lumpen: ‘Lord go from me for I am a man sinner’ and ‘I forsooth am the Lord thy God full jealous’. And Latinate words weave through the text: ‘mandement’, ‘descrive’, ‘cratch’, but also ‘professions’, ‘multitude’ and ‘glory’. But this was the first proper English oasis in a thousand years. It began:
In the beginning God made of nougt heune and erthe. Forsooth the erthe was idel and voide, and derknessis weren on the face of the depth; and the spirit of the Lord was boren on the wateris And God seid, Light be maad, and Ligt was maad.
[In the beginning God made of naught heaven and earth. Forsooth, the earth was idle and void, and darkness was on the face of the depth, and the spirit of God was borne on the waters. And God said ‘Light be made!’ And light was made.]
Although the fortress of Latin had not been taken and would be secure for about 150 years, a breach had been made and the Bible in English had begun its long campaign.
The medieval Oxford scholars, long-woollen-gowned, staff in hand, took to the mud tracks of medieval England with their concealed manuscript Bibles in English. They travelled secretly through unculled forests and barely inhabited wildlands, hiding in safe houses, forever fugitive. They were a guerrilla movement and they were called Lollards. Their mission was to give people access to the Word of God in English.
The authorities would not endure it. They summoned Wycliffe to London to meet a synod of bishops and other churchmen in 1382, the year the translation was completed. It was a show trial. Wycliffe was condemned for heresy. His Bibles were outlawed. Anyone caught with a copy was to be tortured and killed. Yet the Lollards persisted; for more than a century they roved the land and passed on the Word.
Revenge could not be severe enough. More than forty years later, Wycliffe’s bones were dug up and burned. This, it was believed, would deprive him of eternal life for at the Last Judgement the body had to rise from the grave and reunite with the soul.
His remains were burned on a little bridge that spanned the River Swift, a tributary of the Avon. His ashes were thrown into the stream. Soon afterwards, a Lollard prophecy appeared:
The Avon to the Severn runs
The Severn to the sea.
And Wycliffe’s dust shall spread abroad
Wide as the waters be.
In English.
What was it that the Church was so afraid of?
The elders of the Church knew as well as Wycliffe and certainly Tyndale that the Bible had in its history moved through several languages and versions. Moses had brought down the tablets chiselled in Hebrew. Christ had preached to assemblies in their own languages – Aramaic and Syriac. The Greek version arrived to meet the needs of a Greek-speaking empire as did Roman versions. This culminated with Latin in the fourth-century Vulgate of St Jerome. But after that the Word of God was frozen. Despite the many languages the Church had dominion over, only the increasingly ancient Latin was permitted to speak for Christianity. To dispute that was a sin, seen as an attempt to undermine the foundations of the Church.
Language can be a means of control. It has always been used and abused by those claiming omnipotence. The medieval Roman Church’s mission was to impose recognition of its omnipotence the world over.
The Church attracted men of wisdom, scholarship and compassion. It also attracted ambition, corruption and brutal politicians. To save their souls, to celebrate their faith, to give thanks or express sorrow and repentance, the faithful were encouraged to offer gifts, often vast gifts, of land and money. This made the Church rich and ripe for plucking. The enterprise of some churchgoing men – in the profitable wool trade in England for example – turned them into princely landowners and successful merchants in England’s biggest manufacturing and trading business, and they paid into the treasure of the monasteries to express their thanks and seek favour with the Almighty. The treasure was there to be plundered.
The ancient credentials of Jerome’s Vulgate helped make the Bible an oracle. Its antiquity made it hard to challenge. To have lasted so long was surely in itself proof of truth. Its spiritual supremacy was absolute. This was good for commerce. Selling safe passages to heaven, dealing in relics and monetising miracles were profitable and the Church grew more and more fat on dealing with these practices. And Latin padlocked the faith which underpinned the whole edifice.
The longer it lasted the more inviolable the Latin became. Very few could read or speak it. Even the clergy were not necessarily familiar with it. In the sixteenth century the Bishop of Gloucester did a survey of 311 deacons, archdeacons and priests of his diocese. He found that 168 could not remember the Ten Commandments and 40 could not say the Lord’s Prayer.
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