Tyndale, WILLIAM, memorable in the history of the English Bible, was born about 1484, and was a native of Gloucestershire, born most probably at Melksham Court in the parish of Stinchcombe, rather than at Hunt's Court, North Nibley. He had his education first at Oxford—at Magdalen Hall, says unvarying tradition—and graduated B.A. in 1512. His name occurs in Boase and Clark's Register of the University of Oxford (1884-88) as William Hychyns—a name said to have been assumed by his great-grandfather, and by which at any rate, together with Tyndale's, he is described in official documents. It is probable enough that at Oxford he may have been influenced by the disciples of Colet, who himself lectured here till 1505, and it is still more probable that he was attracted to Cambridge by the fame of Erasmus, who lived there from about 1510 to 1514. He left Cambridge most probably about the close of 1521 to become chaplain and tutor in the household of Sir John Walsh of Little Sodbury in Gloucestershire. His sympathy with the new learning soon aroused suspicion, and in 1523 he went up to London, where he was hospitably entertained in the house of Humphry Monmouth. He was already a competent Greek scholar, and in his unsuccessful application to Tunstall, Bishop of London, he carried with him a translation of part of Isocrates as a recommendation. In the spring of 1524 he went to Hamburg, probably made his way thence to Wittenberg, next in the autumn of 1525 to Cologne, and there, with the help of a Franciscan friar named William Roye, and another, began with Quentel in 1525 the printing of his English New Testament in an impression of 3000 copies in quarto size. This had not proceeded beyond the gospels of Matthew and Mark when the officious intrigues of Cochlæus forced Tyndale to flee to Worms, where, instead of completing Quentel's unfinished work, Peter Schoeffer printed for him another impression of 3000 copies in a small octavo size, without prefaces to the books or annotations in the margin. The quarto was completed soon after, most probably also by Schoeffler, with general introduction, prologues, inner marginal references, and outer marginal glosses, these last largely taken from Luther's version of 1522, the references especially being faithfully copied in many cases even to the errors. The translation itself owed much to Luther, much also to the 3d ed. (1522) of the Greek Testament of Erasmus with its Latin translation. Tunstall and Warham denounced the book, hundreds of copies were bought up and burned by their authority, but in both forms it made its way by the summer of 1526 to the hearts of Englishmen, and the strong simplicity and homely vigour of its style established a standard of biblical translation into English, and bequeathed its phrases imperishable to all posterity. By 1530 as many as six editions, of which three were surreptitiously printed at Antwerp, had swiftly and silently been dispersed, yet, says Westcott, so fierce and systematic was the persecution that of these six editions, numbering perhaps 15,000 copies, there remains of the first quarto fragment but one copy, and that imperfect (Grenville Library, Brit. Mus.; photo-lithographed by Mr Arber, 1871), of the first octavo but two, one incomplete (in St Paul's Cathedral Library), the other wanting only the title-page (in Baptist College, Bristol; fac-simile by Mr Francis Fry, 1862), and of the others but two or three copies, and these not satisfactorily identified.
Meantime Tyndale continued to toil indefatigably at the labour of his life. In 1530 he published at Malborow (Marburg) by Hans Luft his version of the Pentateuch (reprinted by Rev. Dr J. I. Mombert, 1885), where the marginal glosses, almost all original, contain many violent attacks on the pope and the bishops, full of rich satire, irony, and even humour. It is scarcely possible, pæe Dr Mombert, that Tyndale could have found time to master Hebrew very thoroughly, and we find that here, still more than in his New Testament, he leans heavily on Luther. Later, in 1531, appeared his version of Jonah, with a prologue (fac-simile by Mr Fry, 1863). An unauthorised revision of Tyndale's New Testament was made at Antwerp by George Joye in August 1534, and in November of the same year Tyndale himself issued there at the press of Marten Euperowr a revised version with short marginal notes and prologues, together with a translation of the 'Epistles taken out of the Old Testament which are read in the church after the Use of Salisbury upon certain days of the year.' These include a large number of portions from the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. One copy of this work, probably that preserved in the British Museum, was struck off on vellum and beautifully illuminated for presentation to Queen Anne Boleyn, under whose favour apparently was printed in 1536 by T. Godfray a reprint of Tyndale's revised New Testament—the first volume of Holy Scripture printed in England. Once again before the end Tyndale revised his Testament (1535), this time without the marginal notes, but with the innovation of headings to the Gospels and Acts, but not the Epistles. Another point of difference was a peculiarity of orthography (maester, faether, moether, stoene, moost, &c., 200 in all), long suspected erroneously to have been an attempt to supply provincial forms for English rustics, but more probably, as Mr Demaus, Bishop Westcott, and Mr Ellis believe, due to the copy being read to a Flemish compositor, who gave the Flemish equivalents of the English vowel-sounds.
But now it wanted only the crown of martyrdom to consecrate the lifelong devotion of Tyndale to his task. Already the emissaries of Henry VIII. had often tried to get hold of him, or at least to discover his hiding-place. He had spent two quiet years of constant labour at Antwerp, part of the time in the house of Thomas Poyntz, when he was seized through the treachery of one Henry Philips, 24th May 1535, 'not without the help and procurement of some bishops of this realm' says Hall. For sixteen months he lay in the castle of Vilvorde, and it appears that Cromwell made some ineffectual efforts to save him. A single letter in Latin, discovered by M. Galesloot in the archives of the Council of Brabant, is reproduced in fac-simile by Mr Demaus, and gives a touching picture of the noble martyr sitting through the long winter nights in the cold and darkness of his dungeon, and asking above all things for a lamp and his Hebrew Bible, Grammar, and Dictionary. It is highly probable that his prayer was granted, and that before the end he had completed, according to unvarying tradition, the translation of the Old Testament to the end of the Books of Chronicles. This part of his work was printed by John Rogers, along with Tyndale's Pentateuch and New Testament, in what is usually known as Matthews' Bible. Tyndale's protracted trial was apparently not begun till 1536; on Friday the 6th October of that year he was first strangled, then burned. Foxe tells us that at the stake he cried 'Lord, open the king of England's eyes!' Eight years before he had written, 'If they shall burn me, they shall do none other thing than that I look for. . . . There is none other way into the kingdom of life than through persecution and suffering of pain, and of very death, after the ensample of Christ.'
Tyndale's chief original works were A Parable of the Wicked Mammon (1527); Obedience of a Christian Man, his most elaborate book (1528); and Practice of Prelates (1530), a pungent piece of controversial polemic, called forth by Sir Thomas More's Dialogue (1529), which he met formally with his plain and pointed Answer (1531). More followed next year with the first part of his long and intemperate Confutation, a work unworthy of its author's reputation. Tyndale's Works were published, together with those of his dear friend Frith, and Barnes, in folio by John Daye in 1573. His Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scripture were published by the Parker Society in 1848; his Expositions and Notes on the Holy Scriptures, together with the Practice of Prelates, in 1849, and the Answer to More's Dialogue in 1850. It was fortunate for our literature that the task of translating the Bible fell to a writer with such a splendid sense of English as William Tyndale. He gave to his work an independent and ineffaceable stamp of originality, and, if later revisers of greater learning have amended his renderings, the characteristic language of the English Bible remains his own. See the admirable biography by the Rev. R. Demaus, revised ed. by Richard Lovett (1886); also Westcott's General View of the History of the English Bible (2d ed. 1872), and Francis Fry's Bibliographical Description of forty editions of Tyndale's version in English (1878).