{ The list of such passages may be easily extended from Eadie or Mombert.
§ As none of the volumes in Forshall and Madden’s great edition has a table of contents, Skeat was at the trouble to Compile one for a paper read by him at a meeting of the Philo- logical Society, June 5th, 1896, He distinguishes the different MSS used by the editors in. each part of their work. See the Transactions of the Phitlological Society, 1896, p. 212 ff.
Ee
VERSIONS (ENGLISH)
gloss, explaining Bariona as ‘the sone of culuer’ (a dove).
_ This being the case, one is perplexed to know on what ground Sir Thomas More should inveigh so bitterly against Wyclif’s translation :—‘In which translacyoun he purposely corrupted the holy text, malycyously placyng therin suche wordys as myght in the reders erys serue to the profe of such heresyes as he went about to sow; which he not only set forth with his own translacyon of the byble, but also with certayne prologes and glosys which he made ther vpon.’* Such prologues and glosses as we have do not answer this description. ‘The ecclesiastical authorities in England’ at the time, writes an unexceptionable witness,} ‘most certainly approved of various copies of the actual versions now known as Wyclifite.’ Some of these extant copies are shown, by the autographs and inscrip- tions they bear, to have belonged to high personages in Ohurch and State. What is the explanation? A very daring one has been started by Father Gasquet.t He endeavours to prove that the versions of which we have been speaking, those we call the Wyclifite, are not Wyclifite at all; that we have been under a delusion all these years; that the heretical translation of the Bible due to Wyclif and his followers, if it ever existed, has completely disappeared ; and that what we possess under that name is neither more nor less than an authorized Catholic translation of the Bible. The existence of such orthodox versions is attested by the evidence of Sir Thomas More, who declares that ‘the whole byble was longe before his (Wyclif’s) dayes by vertuous & well-lerned men translated into the englysh tonge, & by good and godly people with deuocyon & sobernes well & reuerently red.’§ In another well-known passage he speaks of having seen ‘Bibles fair and old.’ It is to be observed that More speaks of such orthodox versions as were made long before Wyclif’s days. The Bibles he has seen are old. That no authorized version was made at, or after, Wyclif’s time, follows plainly, it would seem, from another passage a little later on in this same Dyaloge. ‘And surely howe it hathe happed that in all this whyle god hath eyther not suffered or not prouyded that any good vertuous man hath had the mynde in faythfull wyse to translate it, and ther vpon eyther the clergy or at the lest wyse some one bysshop to approue it, this can I nothynge tell.’ ||
If, then, the orthodox English versions seen by More were old ones ; if, as he implies, no fresh ones were made by authority from Wyclif’s day to his own, how is the fact to be explained that the Bible, now suddenly claimed as Catholic, while found, wholly or in part, in nearly 200 MSS, should be found nowhere but in MSS written in or soon after Wyclif’s time? Why should the style, in every instance, fix the composition to the last quarter of the 14th century? What can have caused this sudden and prolific growth of orthodox Bibles just then, when no link is visible to connect them with an earlier stage?
Father Gasquet’s paradox is a bold one, and, it need not be said, ingeniously and forcibly defended. But, if it is proved untenable, the resorting to it will be one more testimony to the candour and good faith of the Wyclifite translation. 4
iv. REFORMATION PERIOD.—The century that intervened between the death of Wyclif and the birth of Tindale has been rightly called a century of preparation. For a time the spread of Lollard opinions was checked. The passing of the Act de heretico comburendo in the reign of Henry Iv., and the condemnation of unauthorized versions of the Bible in the Synod at Oxford in 1408, threat- ened to be a deathblow to the hopes of Wyclif’s followers. But the wave which had retreated for a while was soon to return with redoubled force. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 threw ope to the Western world the treasures of Greek litera- ture. The invention of printing, about the same period, furnished the means of spreading abroad the results of the new learning. In 1466** was born one destined to be perhaps the greatest ex- ponent of that new learning, Desiderius Erasmus. Hitherto authority had triumphed against convic- tion: it was now to be seen whether it would triumph against conviction allied with knowledge.
* A Dyaloge of syr Thomas More Knyghte . . . 1530, f. cviii. + The Rev. F. A. Gasquet, O.S.B., in an article which origin- ally appeared in the Dublin Review, July 1895, reprinted and enlarged in The Old English Bible, and other Essays, 1897,
LIC.
t In the work just cited, pp. 102-178.
§ Dyaloge, as before, f. cviii.
|| Ib. f. exiv. vers., letter G. : é
] See, further, an article by F. D. Matthew in the English Historical Review for January 1895, and Kenyon’s Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, 1895, p. 204 ff.