Five hundred years ago, in February 1526, some six thousand copies of William Tyndale’s complete New Testament of the Bible were printed at a press in the imperial city of Worms in Germany. Today, as we celebrate the quincentennial, there are only two copies known to have survived the banning and burning of his work in England. The British Library has one, which I actually held in my hands when I was making a recording of Tyndale’s Matthew Gospel in original pronunciation for the library a few years ago. It’s a beautiful piece of work, by any standards, and you can read it in a facsimile edition published by the library.

Why burn them? Because they were in English. Tyndale’s was a daring initiative, partly based on the Greek sources and thus at odds with the Catholic establishment, where the sole acceptable version was the Latin Vulgate. Only a tiny proportion of the population could understand Latin, and Tyndale wanted the Bible to be understood by everyone in their own tongue, and moreover so clearly that it would be accessible even to, as he put it, ‘the boy that driveth the plough’. The initiative was greatly influenced by Reformation Protestant thinking, and it was this, along with his ferociously anti-Catholic prose writing, that led to his execution for heresy in 1536.

His translation was a first, both in biblical history and in the history of the English language. There had been a few fragments translated into English before, going back to Anglo-Saxon times, and a group associated with John Wycliffe had produced a version of the whole Bible in the late