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CHAPTER 1

A History of Judgments on the Middle English Bible

Nowadays the Middle English Bible (MEB) is almost always referred to as the Wycliffite Bible (WB), and it is usually assumed that it was always thought to be Wycliffite. The reality is quite different, as we will see in studying the reception of both forms of the translation (when they were differentiated) from age to age.

The Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century: From Anonymous to Trevisa, Wyclif, Wycliffites

To begin with, let us see how the new English renderings of the Bible were regarded in the fifteenth century. Scholars who believe that it was a Wycliffite production take it for granted that it was recognized as such from the very beginning until the present day, but, as will be apparent in later chapters, it is very difficult to prove that this was the case. Sometimes, as we will see, there appears to have been no other concern about it than that it was in English. The only early attribution of authorship in the more than 250 surviving manuscripts of the MEB occurs in what might be termed a secondgeneration copy (Bodleian Douce 369.1), which attributes the greater part of the Early Version (EV) of the Old Testament to Dr. Nicholas Hereford, one of Wyclif ’s early followers, who was condemned in 1382 for supporting some of his master’s doctrines. We will hear more about him later. The only name otherwise certainly attached to the MEB during the fifteenth century was that of John Trevisa, by William Caxton, in his edition of Trevisa’s Polychronicon, where he listed the Bible as among Trevisa’s other translations,¹ and this attribution was repeated subsequently, including even in the preface to the King James Bible of 1611: “Even in our King Richard the Second’s days, John Trevisa translated them [the Gospels, or the Scriptures] into English, and many English Bibles in written hand are yet to be seen with divers [i.e., in the possession of various persons], translated, as it is very probable, in that age.”²

When we come to the sixteenth century (Chapter 7 below) and can rely on the testimony of Thomas More, we see that the MEB was regarded not only as non-Wycliffite but as pre-Wycliffite; nevertheless, it was also considered by some to be forbidden. We will also see that the preface to the Rheims New Testament of 1582 considers the surviving renditions of the Bible to be non-Wycliffite and never prohibited.

However, the reformer John Bale, in his index of notes on the works of English authors, after saying that John Trevisa translated the whole Bible, says the same thing about John Wyclif.³ But earlier in his treatment of Wyclif, Bale has a more circumstantial entry concerning his translation of the whole Bible,⁴ based on his inspection of a Later Version (LV), prefaced by the treatise Five and Twenty Books (FTB), which Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden in their 1850 edition printed as the prologue to LV, and which they refer to as the “General Prologue” (GP).⁵ The late Mary Dove, in her magisterial study of the Middle English Bible, identifies the manuscript that Bale saw as the one now at Princeton University.⁶ She observes that the antiquarian John Leland, who provided Bale with many details about Wyclif ’s writings, did not come to a similar conclusion (that Wyclif translated the Bible).⁷ In Bale’s published Catalogus, he leaves out the detail of the incipit identifying Five and Twenty Books.⁸ The only other person of Bale’s era who made such a claim about Wyclif ’s translation of the Bible was the printer Robert Crowley, taking his cue from Bale’s earlier Summarium (1548), in Crowley’s edition of Piers Plowman in 1550. Crowley also printed Five and Twenty Books in 1550, under the title of The Pathway to Perfect Knowledge, calling it “a prologue” by Wyclif.⁹

Bale adds interesting details in the Catalogus to his claim that John Trevisa translated the whole Bible. He did so at the request of Lord Berkeley, he says, and he gives an incipit to it: “Ego Joannes Trevisa, sacerdos.”¹⁰

Attributions of authorship by later owners of MEB manuscripts are fairly rare. The person who inscribed an LV Bible to Edward VI in 1550 attributed the prologue (Five and Twenty Books), placed after the Old Testament, to Wyclif.¹¹ In 1615 an attribution to Wyclif was added to an LV copy of the New Testament Epistles and Apocalypse.¹² A later manuscript attribution was that of Baron Thomas Fairfax, who died in 1671; he noted that his LV New Testament was Wyclif ’s translation.¹³ An LV Bible at Emmanuel College in Cambridge was attributed to Wyclif and dated 1383 sometime after it was cataloged in 1600 by Thomas James and before it was seen by Henry Wharton in the 1680s.¹⁴ But in an updated entry Wharton says that all of the many English Bibles that he has seen (all LV) are attributed to Wyclif, but that these attributions are recent conjectures.¹⁵ An example is the seventeenth-century hand in the Fairfax complete Bible (LV), saying of its original date, 1408: “which is 25 years after Wickleff finished the translation”—that is, accepting 1383 as the date of Wyclif ’s version.¹⁶ But it is noteworthy that an annotator of the seventeenth century surmises that the New Testament (EV) in Dublin Trinity College 75 is by John Purvey, based on John Foxe’s description of him, and that he was also the author of the following prologue to the Old Testament (that is, Five and Twenty Books).¹⁷

It has been suggested by Dove that the earliest acknowledgment that there were two versions of the Middle English Bible was by Thomas James, the first librarian of the Bodleian, writing in 1612,¹⁸ but I disagree. Dove thinks that James assigned EV to the thirteenth century and LV to Wyclif, but in fact James is quoting from the prologue (Five and Twenty Books) attached to an LV Bible. He says of the author-translator, “Of one thing I am sure, that he that translated the whole Bible into English (which Bible came forth, as I guess, some hundred years before Wyclif ’s) held these books [other than the twenty-five inspired books of the Old Testament] for Apocrypha.” He adds a note: “The Bible hath been twice translated into English. The former edition is very ancient, whereof we have three copies (one in the Public Library, one in Christ Church Library, the other in Queen’s College), the later translated by Wyclif.”¹⁹ The manuscript that he saw in the Public Library must have been Bodleian 277, the revised LV (I call it LLV), which has the first chapter of Five and Twenty Books (GP).²⁰

However, we can hardly conclude that James knew the difference between EV and LV and accordingly attributed EV to Wyclif. The Bible that he saw at Christ Church was almost certainly EV (MS 145), and he considered it to be the same as the LV at Queen’s;²¹ and he seems to have known of no other English Bibles at Oxford. In his catalog of the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, published in 1600, he names only three complete English Bibles at Oxford (Christ Church, Queen’s, and one in New College, which perhaps was the same as the one he later cites as being at the Bodleian).²² He identifies no Bible that he has seen as Wyclif ’s translation.

Archbishop James Ussher, who died in 1656, repeated James’s statement in abbreviated form, which was exposed to public view when Henry Wharton brought out Ussher’s Historia dogmatica in 1689 and again in 1690. Here Ussher specifies 1290 as the time of the earlier translation:

1290, Anglicanus Interpres.

Longe ante Wiclevi translationem (100 annis, ut conjicit Thomas Jamesius) prodiit universorum Bibliorum Anglicana Translatio: cujus tria in Oxoniensis Academiae Bibliothecis MSS extant exemplaria: unum in Bodleiana (publica), alterum in Aedis Christi, tertium in Reginalis Collegii Bibliotheca.

(T. Jamesius, lib. vernaculo De Corruptione Patrum, part 2, loc. 24.)²³

Ussher’s entry on Wyclif is dated 1380. He cites Bale as saying that Wyclif translated the whole Bible. But he concludes from James’s remarks and the listings in his catalog that various copies of old English Bibles exist that differ in translation—which is something that James does not say. Ussher ends by saying he has seen Wyclif ’s translation of the New Testament in Sir Robert Cotton’s library.²⁴ The only Cotton MEB extant today is an LV complete Bible.²⁵

If Thomas James was not aware of two extant versions of MEB, it seems that Thomas Fuller was. In his History of the Worthies of England, published in 1662, Fuller says that John Trevisa, who died around 1400, had the temerity to translate the Bible about fifty years after Wyclif, and he says that “[his] translation is as much better than Wyclif ’s as worse than Tyndale’s.”²⁶ Henry Wharton, in the commentary that he appended to his edition of Ussher, likewise showed himself to be aware of the difference between EV and LV, and he agreed with Fuller that Wyclif was the EV translator. He says that James and Ussher erred in dating the LV translation so early, since the prologue cites Nicholas of Lyre and Archbishop Richard Fitzralph. The author’s impotent rage against Oxford academics proves that Wyclif was not the author, and the printers who published the prologue in 1550 were fantasizing (“hallucinatos esse”) when they ascribed it to him. He admits that it is certain that Wyclif translated the Bible, since Bale said so, as did Jan Hus before him.²⁷ But he was clearly not the translator of the common version (LV), in spite of the fact that it is ascribed to him in all of the copies that he has seen. These ascriptions are recent, made by uncautious readers. He concludes that the prologue and translation (LV) must be by Trevisa. He says that he has not been able to find a complete Bible in Wyclif ’s version (that is, EV), but only of some books (the Epistles and Sunday readings).²⁸

In Wharton’s outdated entry on Wyclif, where he attributes LV to Wyclif, he speaks of a Lambeth New Testament with the Epistle to the Laodiceans, citing the prologue that says it was only recently translated into English. From this Wharton concludes either that there was an earlier translation of the Bible or that there was a double edition of Wyclif ’s translation.²⁹ This is the first acknowledgment I have seen that a translator (here, Wyclif) may have revised his own translation.

In the first part of the eighteenth century, as Dove shows, there was a movement among Protestant scholars to retrieve Wyclif ’s authorship of LV. John Russell in 1719 proposed an edition of Wyclif ’s whole Bible, in the LV text, and John Lewis in his History of Wyclif in 1721, annotating Bale, cites only LV manuscripts as copies of his translation and his prologue.³⁰ In 1731 he published an LV New Testament as Wyclif ’s, with a history giving a full account of Bible translation in England. In it, he says he was mistaken in ascribing the prologue to Wyclif, since it was written after his time. He takes notice of the ascription of the New Testament (EV) in the Dublin manuscript to John Purvey, and says that the prologue goes with it.³¹

In other words, in this first mention of Purvey in discussions of the MEB, Wyclif himself translated what we call the Later Version, and Purvey, later on, produced what we know as the Early Version and the General Prologue.

In 1728, Daniel Waterland of Cambridge University informed Lewis of his view that EV and LV were by the same person, namely, Wyclif, but later Waterland perceived that events described in the prologue (Five and Twenty Books) happened after Wyclif ’s time, and therefore it and LV must have been by a disciple of Wyclif ’s. He suggested as the likely candidate John Purvey, described by Bale as Wyclif ’s librarius and glossator. When Forshall and Madden started work on the MEB in 1829, they accepted Waterland’s suggestion of Purvey as responsible for LV and the prologue, and by the time they published in 1850, they had embraced it as established fact.³²

During all this time of the progressive “Wyclifying” of the Middle English Bible, Dove has found only one doubter, namely, Humfrey Wanley, who started to catalog the library of Robert Harley in 1708. When describing a copy of the treatise Five and Twenty Books, he cites passages from it that “seem to agree well enough with the person and opinions of Wyclif, who is also commonly said to have translated the Bible out of Latin into English, though I could never yet see such a book with his name written therein by the first hand—not to mention what Sir Thomas More wrote, that there were then divers translations of Scripture into English, allowed by Authority, and that the Wycliffites were only charged with keeping certain prefaces to biblical books of Wyclif ’s composure.”³³ Even though More does not say this (rather he assumed that Wyclif did make translations, of which Richard Hunne possessed a copy, which, More hoped, had not been destroyed after his trial), it is significant that this is how Wanley reads him. He is saying, in effect, that there is nothing in the extant English Bibles that he has seen to connect them to Wyclif, unlike this clearly Wycliffite tract (which he assumes to be the same as the prologue printed in 1550 and ascribed to Wyclif and also found in certain English Bibles).

In the nineteenth century, the Latin works of John Wyclif were in high esteem, at least for their content if not for their style, and they were being systematically published.³⁴ But Wyclif had also achieved a high reputation as an English writer, so much so that Reginald Poole in 1895 called him “one of the founders of English prose-writing.”³⁵ Four volumes of treatises attributed to him had recently been printed.³⁶ These followed upon the publication at midcentury of the Middle English translation of the entire Bible by Forshall and Madden, which they partially attributed to him, as can be seen from their title: The Holy Bible … in the Earliest English Versions Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers.³⁷ The editors suggested that only the New Testament portion of EV was by Wyclif himself, while the Old Testament and all of LV was by his followers.

By the end of the century, the entire English Bible, without distinguishing between versions or parts, was commonly said to be the work of Wyclif, “the Wyclif Bible.” It was the example of the Egerton Bible, an EV copy, displayed in the British Museum as Wyclif ’s translation, that first inspired Cardinal Gasquet to embark on his revisionist history, as we shall see. But the first scholars who responded to Gasquet used a new term, “the Wycliffite Bible,” which has found favor to this day.

Dom Aidan Gasquet’s Objections to the Wycliffied Bible

The Wycliffite nature of the Middle English Bible as it solidified in the nineteenth century was challenged by only one person, the Benedictine historian Dom Aidan Gasquet, initially in an article published in the Dublin Review in 1894.³⁸ He held instead that the translations were not only orthodox productions, but also that they were approved of by the Church authorities. His theses were challenged on several fronts, but most trenchantly by Arthur Ogle, writing anonymously in 1900 and 1901,³⁹ and Ogle’s arguments were taken up and relentlessly repeated by G. G. Coulton in various publications.⁴⁰

Gasquet professes to identify a fallacious syllogism at work in the universal ascription of the early translations to Wyclif and his followers. It was presumed, begging the question, that the Catholic Church condemned translating the Scriptures into the vernacular. Therefore, only one possible conclusion could be drawn: the early translations must be by those who dissented from the Church. He asks: “May it not be possible that under the influence of a preconceived idea people have gone off on a wrong scent altogether?” And answers: “If we start with a foregone conclusion, we can have little hope that we shall read facts rightly, even though they be as plain as the proverbial pikestaff, and in this instance it appears to me that it has been assumed altogether too hastily that the English pre-Reformation Scriptures could not have been catholic, and must have been and were the outcome of the Wycliffite movement.”⁴¹

Gasquet begins his original essay by documenting the widespread scholarly belief at the time, the last decade of the nineteenth century, that John Wyclif himself had had an active role in the English Bible project, starting with the label on the Egerton manuscript that stood as the premier exhibit in the King’s Library in the British Museum: “The English Bible, Wycliffe’s Translation.”⁴² He can easily show that the idea of translating the Bible into English and examples of English translations existed long before Wyclif ’s time and were not the outcome of his movement.⁴³ On the conclusion of Forshall and Madden that Wyclif translated the EV New Testament, he finds no evidence at all, and adds, “It is difficult to account for the silence of Wyclif himself, who in none of his undoubted writings, so far as I am aware, lays any stress on, or, indeed, in any way advocates having the Scriptures in the vernacular, except so far as is implied in the claim that the Bible is the sole guide in faith and practice for all.”⁴⁴ It is admitted nowadays that Wyclif showed little interest in any kind of vernacular use until the end of his life.⁴⁵ Alastair Minnis puts it strongly: “The arch-heresiarch himself, John Wyclif, made no attempt to champion his ‘vulgar’ tongue (to the best of our knowledge). No justification of the translation of that most authoritative of all books, ‘The Book of Life,’ may be found anywhere in Wyclif ’s voluminous theological writings, though for centuries he has been lauded as the fons et origo of the First English Bible.”⁴⁶ “Wyclif ’s dismissive, perhaps even insulting, remarks in De veritate sacrae scripturae (1378) about the skills needed for the making of material Bibles are very much his own—and evidently consistent with what Anne Hudson has termed his ‘amazingly nonchalant’ attitude to language transference.”⁴⁷

None of Wyclif ’s adversaries attribute any such enterprise to him, Gasquet says, except that Henry Knighton said that he translated the Gospel; and John Hus reported that he translated the whole Bible, while Archbishop Arundel, writing to Pope John XXIII, at least implied the same.⁴⁸ Later scholars agree with Gasquet in dismissing the first two of these witnesses, and they should agree with him on his arguments against the third.⁴⁹ Finally, Gasquet observes, “From what we know of Wyclif ’s active, restless, and combative disposition, and of his particularly speculative turn of mind, we should hardly have been disposed to assign to him so tedious a task as that of mere translation.”⁵⁰

F. D. Matthew, in his 1895 response to Gasquet, cites a few pseudo-Wycliffian passages from his own English Works of Wyclif and from Thomas Arnold’s Select English Works of John Wyclif, which, he says, certainly imply “the authorship of Wyclif or some associate of his,”⁵¹ and Ogle rebukes Gasquet for not responding to this evidence.⁵² But Gasquet had already written off the wholesale ascription of English works to Wyclif,⁵³ and most modern authorities agree in denying his authorship of everything previously assigned to him in English.⁵⁴

What of the role of particular Wycliffites in the translation project? It was an easy deduction on Gasquet’s part that the universal acceptance of Wyclif ’s secretary John Purvey as the translator of LV rested on no proof whatsoever: “I believe that practically the only direct evidence to connect Purvey with this translation is the fact that his name appears in a single copy of the revision as a former owner.”⁵⁵ Ogle responds to this statement with indignant bluster, simply repeating what Forshall and Madden have to say—which indeed consists of no evidence at all.⁵⁶ The definitive dismissal of Purvey’s participation in the project came only in 1981 in Anne Hudson’s article in Viator.⁵⁷

Gasquet was willing to admit the participation of the Wycliffite Nicholas Hereford in the EV Old Testament, if the big “if ” of Forshall and Madden’s assertion turns out to be true. Gasquet says, “If the note ascribing the version to Nicholas Hereford is, as Forshall and Madden testify, practically contemporary, it certainly furnishes us with strong evidence that Hereford had a main hand in the translation of the Old Testament.”⁵⁸ Gasquet goes on to tell of Hereford’s renunciation of Wycliffite doctrines, and Ogle can see no reason for his doing so “unless it be to suggest that the orthodoxy which Hereford may have resumed in 1391 possessed some kind of retroactive virtue.”⁵⁹ Perhaps Gasquet was suggesting that he resumed work on the Bible, a possibility noted by Conrad Lindberg.⁶⁰

In recent times, the authenticity of the ascription to Hereford has come into question, as Hudson points out. It appears in manuscript Douce 369.1 at Baruch 3.20. This is the manuscript that Forshall and Madden used as their base text of EV from 1 Esdras up to this point.⁶¹ But this manuscript was written subsequently to another manuscript, Bodley 959, which preserves EEV, considered by Forshall and Madden to be “the original copy of the translator.”⁶² It breaks off at the same point, but has no attribution.⁶³ Hudson concludes: “The attempt to ascribe sections of the translation and its revisions to individual Wycliffites, or indeed to Wyclif himself, seems to me misguided, and furthermore, to show a singular failure to grasp the nature or magnitude of the undertaking.”⁶⁴ I will, however, suggest reasons later for doubting that the project was as massive as is sometimes supposed.

That leaves us without Wyclif and without specific Wycliffites and only with the Wycliffite doctrine in the anonymous so-called General Prologue (GP). This is where Gasquet made his big mistake. He did not read this treatise on the Old Testament, which Gasquet calls Five and Twenty Books (FTB),⁶⁵ closely enough to take notice of its occasional antiestablishment statements. While he exposed the groundlessness of Forshall and Madden’s assumptions about Purvey’s authorship of FTB and LV, he accepted their position that the treatise and LV were by the same person, the position taken by Henry Wharton: “In some few copies there exists a lengthy prologue, which gives an account of the method employed by the translator. Whatever the author says of these methods is borne out in the actual version; and there is thus no room for doubting, as Henry Wharton long ago observed, that the prologues [sic] and the translation are by the same hand.”⁶⁶ Gasquet goes on to cite the passage from chapter 15 of Five and Twenty Books that details the four steps outlined by the author in preparing his translation.⁶⁷ Gasquet concludes from this that he had no previous knowledge of EV.⁶⁸ (This would mean, of course, that LV was a fresh translation from the Bible, not a revision of EV.)⁶⁹ At least we can say that the author reveals no knowledge of EV and makes no reference to it.

Gasquet subsequently says, when speaking of the errors singled out for censure in the prologue of Richard Hunne’s Bible, in Hunne’s posthumous trial for heresy, that he can find no trace of such errors in the prologue to LV as edited by Forshall and Madden.⁷⁰ It is here that Ogle was able to convict him of a mistake that was thought by him and Coulton and many others to destroy his whole position.

From his statement in the preface to the reprinting of the Old English Bible, where he speaks of the challenges that he had received and his continued conviction as to the correctness of his views, it is evident that Gasquet thought that he had an adequate response to this objection. It should have been quite simple to guess what the general nature of such a response would be: if there had been no room for doubting that the author of the prologue was the same as the translator of the LV, now there is. In a lecture delivered in 1905 but printed only in 1912, Gasquet admits the Wycliffite nature of the prologue. In speaking of the Elizabethan period, he says: “Of Wiclif ’s works we have practically nothing. A print of the Wiclif at Nuremberg in 1546, another by Foxe at Strasburg in 1534; and, in England itself, the Prologue of the Bible in Henry’s reign (if indeed the Prologue be by Wiclif at all), and nothing else, is all that we find in the way of influences.”⁷¹

The only person who ever came close to suggesting such a probable response on Gasquet’s behalf was Herbert Thurston, who brings up the possibility that prologue and text are by different authors. Here is what he says: “No doubt the existence of these errors in the Prologue is a serious blow to one of his arguments, if we admit, as Dom Gasquet himself seems to do, that the reviser of the translation was identical with the author of the Prologue. But, after all, the earlier version was not the work of the author of the Prologue, and it would still be possible to maintain without inconsistency that the earlier version was in its origin not Wycliffite but Catholic.”⁷² Thurston could have added that, even though a Wycliffite may have revised a non-Wycliffite EV, he did not inject any Wycliffite doctrines or sentiments into the resulting LV.

But Thurston’s way out for Gasquet, that EV at least was Catholic in origin (a conclusion that Thurston himself thought was mistaken),⁷³ would not, I think, have satisfied Gasquet. I can see a different tack that may well have occurred to him, to judge from his original observation that the prologue appears in only “some few copies.” Hudson has made this point more recently: “The important point to note is that the Prologue is not the regular concomitant of the LV translation, but an exceptional addition to it.”⁷⁴ In explaining this state of affairs, Herbert Workman in 1926 in effect assumes that the prologue was originally present as an integral part of LV, but was eliminated in most copies because of its unorthodox contents.⁷⁵ But since the text of the Bible itself was so clearly orthodox, it does seem odd that the translator would prefix such a provocatively unorthodox prologue. In Chapter 2 we will consider the possibility that it was not an “official” prologue, but rather an attempt of an interloper with radical religious views to take the credit of the translation enterprise for himself and his cause. But even if it can be established that the author of the prologue was not a main force behind the Bible project, we will see that it remains undeniable that he was a participant in it. Gasquet, however, was willing to admit such Wycliffite participants, in the person of Hereford and even Purvey, and this, in effect, constituted another answer to Ogle’s challenge, which comes in summary form in Gasquet’s original article:

Whether Hereford, or Purvey possibly (for at best we are, so far as this is concerned, dealing with possibilities), may have had any part in the translation does not, after all, so much concern us. Our chief interest is not with the translator, but with the work itself, and with the question whether it may fairly be claimed as the semi-official and certainly perfectly orthodox translation of the English Church; or whether, on the other hand, it must be regarded as a version secretly executed, clandestinely circulated, and still more stealthily studied, by the Lollard followers of Wyclif. This is the main point of interest.⁷⁶

Ogle conceded Gasquet’s first point, the orthodoxy of the English Scriptures. Later, in Chapter 5, we will look into the second point mentioned here: was it a “stealth” project, or was it out in the open and accepted by the authorities?

As we will see in Chapter 7, Thomas More assumed that EV and LV, whether or not he recognized the differences between them, were pre-Wycliffite and that there was also a later Wycliffite Bible, represented by Hunne’s Bible with its clearly heterodox prologue. Gasquet’s judgment about EV and LV was the same, if we read “non-Wycliffite” for “pre-Wycliffite” (and, of course, discount More’s idea of a later translation that was indeed by Wyclif or Wycliffite).

Recent Developments

Later in the twentieth century, after Gasquet was forgotten, there were other efforts to modify or redefine the Wycliffite nature of the Middle English Bible. Anne Hudson has done much of this herself, in deflating exaggerated claims, some of which we have already seen, notably for the role of certain individuals like John Purvey and Nicholas Hereford.

First, there is David Fowler’s suggestion in 1960 that both Wyclif and Trevisa took part in producing EV while living at Queen’s College in the 1370s.⁷⁷ Sven Fristedt, however, believes that Trevisa and his colleagues had completed, or nearly completed, the first version of EV (what I call EEV) before Wyclif entered the picture. After Wyclif took up residence in Queen’s in 1374, he assessed the project, and, in order to improve it, he set about furnishing a Latin Bible with English glosses, which were used by Hereford and others to produce the “first revision” of EV (basically the text of EV as Forshall and Madden present it).⁷⁸ Conrad Lindberg, who has been studying and editing manuscripts of the MEB since the 1950s, thinks, on the contrary, that Wyclif started preparing a critical text of the Latin Vulgate as soon as he came to Oxford, around 1354,⁷⁹ and that he himself translated the EV New Testament,⁸⁰ and also worked on LV before his death at the end of 1384.⁸¹

Let us look next at the proposal made by Michael Wilks in 1975.⁸² Hudson purports to sum up his suggestion thus: “that there existed a pre- or non-Wycliffite vernacular bible which the lollards took over and modified.”⁸³ However, Wilks does not put it this way; he only says that the EV New Testament had been produced by 1382, with no provable or likely connection to Wyclif (Wyclif ’s own view being that the Word of God should be delivered to the faithful not through providing translations to be read but through good preaching). Then, shortly afterward, Wilks suggests, Nicholas Hereford and other Wycliffites began work on translating the rest of the Bible, producing the EV Old Testament, and next John Purvey produced the whole LV Bible. Thus, he conjectures, there was “a takeover of an originally independent English bible project by the Wycliffite movement in the decade or so after Wyclif ’s death.”⁸⁴

Since Hereford and Purvey have been sidelined by Hudson, Wilks’s hypothesis can be expanded to posit that the whole enterprise was originally nonpartisan. It may even have been anti-Wycliffite in sentiment. In a recent discussion of “ideological and political fissures” at Oxford, Patrick Hornbeck notes that “the reforming fellows of The Queen’s College … distanced themselves from some of Wyclif ’s ideas whilst nevertheless sponsoring, in part, the English translation of the Bible” (Hornbeck takes it for granted that the latter was an idea of Wyclif ’s).⁸⁵ Ian Johnson puts it another way: if we acknowledge that the translation endeavor was a team effort, “we need not assume that the project was entirely driven by a single ideology of church reform, or that all the collaborators could even have been characterized as Wycliffite”; and although the so-called General Prologue was written by a member of the team, “it should perhaps be taken as a polemical interpretation of the project, not a definitive statement of its aims.”⁸⁶

More recently, David Lawton says it is possible “that ‘Wycliffite Bible’ is a misnomer and that the translation becomes so only when his followers take it up and it is irretrievably associated with them.” He admits that we do not know whether it was Wycliffite in origin and says that “it may be time to abandon the ubiquitous modifier ‘Wycliffite’ for its earliest full versions.” He believes, however, that the versions became associated with the Wycliffites very early on and that they were undoubtedly illegal in the fifteenth century.⁸⁷

For my part, I think it likely that the enterprise was inspired by Wyclif, at least partially, because of his role in reviving Bible study at Oxford, and therefore could be called “Wycliffian” (see Chapter 3); but there is no indication that it was “Wycliffite,” that is, undertaken to promote heterodox doctrines. The EV Gospels were used by the authors of the Glossed Gospels, an Oxford project that began, according to Hudson, probably “before 1390 or even 1385,”⁸⁸ but even though she calls them “Wycliffite,” she can find little in them that is unorthodox.⁸⁹ And it is a project that was not successful, to judge by the small number of copies that have survived.⁹⁰ It may be that there was no effort to take over the Bible translation project until the LV process was nearly finished, and that the first attempt to appropriate it for Lollardy was by the “simple creature” who wrote the treatise Five and Twenty Books—a question to be discussed in Chapter 2.⁹¹ But even so, it may be doubted that this was a widespread movement, since, as Fiona Somerset points out, few of the English Wycliffite writers made use of EV and LV.⁹²