The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

It was unconditional surrender. It was defecting en masse to the side of the enemy. It was purging the past out of memory. It was now the King’s Bible’s English. Where the medieval Catholic Church and Henry VIII most violently up into the 1530s had kept the Bible from the people, Henry’s new Church set out to get the Bible to as many as possible. It has had an incalculable influence on the spread of our language. For centuries it was heard week in week out, sometimes day in day out, by almost all English-speaking Christians wherever they were, and its precepts, its images, its proverbs, its names, its parables, its heroes, its promises, its words and rhythms, sank deep shafts into the minds of the men and women who heard it. It went to the heart of the way we spoke, the way we described the world and ourselves. Its English bound the English together. By the beginning of the seventeenth century there were so many competing versions that seven hundred fifty reformers from within the Church of England requested James VI of Scotland, who had become James I of England, to authorise a new translation. Fifty-four translators were chosen from the Church and the universities to produce an edition which would be submitted to the bishops. The work took about five years and it cannot go unremarked that this tremendous endeavour makes the achievement of Tyndale appear all but superhuman.