** That 1466 and not, as commonly said, 1467 was the date of Erasmus’ birth, has been shown by Kan, the learned head- master of the Erasmiaansch Gymnasium at Rotterdam.
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Between the years 1480 and 1490, possibly in the same year that, Luther was born at Eisleben, William Tindale first saw the light, it is believed, in the little village of Slymbridge, Gloucester- shire.* Foxe says that ‘from a child’ he was brought up in the University of Oxford. If so, as he did not take his Bachelor’s degree till 1512, nor his Master’s till 1515,+ it would seem that his first years there were spent, not in college but in school. And with this agrees the statement that he entered Magdalen Hall, then known as Grammar Hall, the school preparatory to the great founda- tion of William of Waynflete. As a boy there, he may have seen Colet, who was probably of Mag- dalen ; but Colet left Oxford on being appointed Dean of St. Paul’s in 1505, and it is not likely that Tindale could have come, in any direct manner, under his influence. ‘ Spying his time,’ says Foxe, Tindale presently left Oxford for Cambridge. The exact year of this migration we do not know, nor the immediate cause of it. It is natural to connect it with the presence of Erasmus in the sister university, where he was Lady Margaret professor from 1511 to 1515. But here, again, the date of Tindale’s M.A. degree is a difficulty.
Aftez leaving the university, about 1521, as we may suppose, he became tutor in the family of Sir Thomas Walsh, a knight of good position and well connected, at the manor house of Little Sodbury, not far from the place of his birth. Here he remained till the latter part of 1523. The need of reform in matters ecclesiastical in Gloucestershire may be inferred from the fact that from 1512, when Sylvester de Giglis returned to Rome, to 1535, when Hugh Latimer was conse- crated, there was no resident bishop of Worcester. The see was held by Italians; one of them being afterwards Clement vil. As men’s thoughts were turned to such abuses, we can hardly wonder that a blunt, free-spoken man like Tindale occasionally got into heated arguments with the local clergy and others who frequented the manor house. ‘These he silenced by a translation of the Enchiridion of Erasmus ; but, beginning to preach in an irregu- lar manner to the neighbouring villagers, he was summoned to appear before a clerical tribunal, presided over by Parker, chancellor of the diocese.
Though no proof of heretical teaching was estab- lished against him, Tindale began to turn his thoughts to anotherscene. The idea of an English Bible had been long present to his mind. In London the idea might become a fact. He would address himself to the Bishop of London, Tunstall, the friend of More, a man of repute as a states- man and a scholar. Armed with a translation of Isocrates to be his introduction to the bishop, and a letter from his patron to Sir Harry Guildford, he came to London. The reception he met with from Tunstall, though not surprising to us, and the dis- appointments he experienced in other quarters, convinced Tindale, as he sorrowfully owns, ‘not only that there was no rowme in my lorde of londons palace to translate the new testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all englonde.’ +
During his short stay in London he met with one faithful friend. This was Humphrey Mon- mouth, afterwards an alderman and sheriff, and knighted, who chanced to hear him preach in the
*We follow in this account the Life of Tyndale by R. Demaus, revised edition 1886. The Reformer, it may be noted, spelt his own name Tindale (ib. p. 9), the spelling adopted throughout this Dictionary. ‘
+See Boase, Register of the University of Oxford, 1885, i. pp. ix, 80. He supplicated for his degree in the name of Huchens, or Hychyns, a name by which some previous genera- tions of his family appear to have been known. The dates furnished by the Register make the earlier year suggested for
Tindale’s birth improbable. t Preface to the Pentateuch.
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church of St. Dunstan in the West. Monmouth took him into his house as chaplain, at a stipend of £10 a year.* For this he afterwards got into trouble; and his petition to Cardinal Wolsey, between four and five years later, is valuable for the picture it gives us of Tindale’s manner of life while in his house. After relating his first ac- quaintance with him, Monmouth continues: ‘So I took him into my house half-a-year; and there he lived as a good priest as methought. He studied most part of the day and of the night at his book; and he would eat but sodden meat by his good will, and drink but small single beer.’ +
At the table of Monmouth, a merchant who had travelled, and visited Rome and Jerusalem, Tindale would be sure to meet with men who could tell him of the doings abroad, and especially of Wittenberg and Luther. Determined at length, as the safest course, to entrust his contemplated work to a foreign printer, he made choice of Ham- burg, and in or about the month of May 1524 set sail for that busy city. As Hamburg is said to have possessed no printing-press at this time, it is a matter of dispute whether or not Tindale stayed there till his translation was ready for printing. He may have gone to visit Luther at Wittenberg, as is implied in statements of More and others. If so, he returned to Hamburg, to receive his re- mittance from Monmouth, and then went on to Cologne, to arrange for the printing of his English Testament at the press of Peter Quentel. Three thousand copies of the work, in small quarto size, were to be struck off. The printing had advanced as far as signature K, when the authorities of the city unexpectedly gave orders for the work to be stopped, and the printed sheets confiscated. An enemy, Cochleeus,t had been dogging the footsteps of the English scholar, and from him came the information given to the senate. Tindale and his companion Roye§ hastily caught up what they could of their materials, and took passage up the Rhine to Worms, where they would be in less fear of interruption. From the difficulty of matching Peter Quentel’s type at the press of Peter Schoeffer (son of the partner of Faust), Tindale seems to have given up the thought of completing the 4to edition ; and instead to have had his work printed in small 8vo, without notes or glosses. But, not to waste the copies of the sheets printed in 4to at Cologne, he sent them on to England. In this way, about March 1525-26, there appeared the first English New Testament ever printed, the one in 8vo, complete, and the portion of the one in 4to. Of this latter, the first printed in point of time, only one solitary fragment is known to remain ; and of the former, only two copies, neither of them complete.||