Before pausing to consider these translations in
* Equal to about £120 now.
‘Hag er aia petition is in the Harleian MSS. See Demaus, z { John Dobenek, who latinized himself as Cochleews, was born about 1503 in a village near Nurnberg. He was a violent opponent of Luther. As he was himself passing a book through Quentel’s press at the time, he had peculiar opportunities for learning the business of the two Englishmen. See the letters
from him in Arber’s First Printed English New nt 1871, pp, 18-24 J Testament,
§ William Roye, who had been an Observant Friar at Green- wich, was acting as Tindale’s amanuensis. As would be guessed from his poem, he was an uncongenial spirit, and Tindale was glad to get rid of him as soon as he could,
|| The fragment in 4to is now in the Grenville Library of the British Museum, No. 12,179. It consists of 31 leaves, and goes to the end of sheet H, ending abruptly with the words ‘ Friend, how camest thou in hither, and’ (Mt 2212), It has been photo- lithographed, with an Introduction, by Mr. Arber. Of the 8vo edition there is an imperfect copy in the Library of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and a perfect one (all but the title-page) in the Library of the Baptist College, Bristol. The singular vicis- situdes through which this last book has passed are told by Demaus, p. 126.
ee = ees
detail, we must briefly conclude the story of the author’s life.
The summer of 1526 was probably spent by Tindale at Worms, in making arrangements for the transmission of his books to England.* Ob- stacles in the way of their reception soon began to appear. Besides the warning given by Cochleus, Edward Lee, the king’s almoner, afterwards Arch- bishop of York, wrote from Bordeaux on Dee. 2nd, 1525, to report what he had heard of the suspected work in his journey through France. One active agent in the distribution of the books was Simon Fish, author of Zhe Supplicacyon for the Beggars, then living near the White Friars. Standish, bishop of St. Asaph,+ was the first to bring the matter under the cognizance of Wolsey. The great cardinal was disposed to make light of it, but Tunstall was urgent for the condemnation of the anonymous version, and it was ordered that the books should be burnt, wherever found. To make the condemnation more impressive, a public burn- ing was appointed, to follow a sermon by the Bishop of London at Paul’s Cross.t A mandate to the like effect was issued by Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, on Nov. 3rd; and by the end of the year the part taken by Tindale and Roye came to be publicly known, and an active search was made for them. West, a priest of the eae to which Roye belonged, was sent abroad to track them, and letters from him and Hermann Rinck, during 1528, give an account of their efforts. Tindale and Roye, however, had separated, and their machinations were thus baffled. In 1527, or thereabouts, Tindale went to Marburg in Hesse, the seat of a university, and there, towards the end of 1528, was joined by Frith. At Marburg (anglicized in his colophons as ‘ Marlborow’) he printed several of his controversial works, and, what more concerns us, the first instalment of his long-meditated version of the OT. The Penta- teuch was here printed by Hans Luft, and pub- lished Jan. 17th, 1530.§ Several copies of this exist, but only one (now in the Grenville Library) in a perfect condition. It is remarkable for the ‘ piebald’ appearance of the printing ; Genesis and Numbers being in Gothic letter; Exodus, Levi- ticus, and Deuteronomy, in Roman. The explana- tion probably is that the books were prepared for separate issue, the five having no collective title- page. The following year Tindale printed, at
* It is a mystery whence the money was obtained for defray- ing the first cost of these editions. 3000 copies of the 8vo edition are said to have been struck off at Worms. Whether the 4to edition was completed there, is disputed. No trace of such a complete edition is left, beyond the fragment printed at Cologne. Still, even the existence of this was not known till 1834,
+ For this person, see Erasmus’ Letter to Justus Jonas (Eng. tr. 1883, p. 42).
f As need hardly be said, this buying up and burning the copies of Tindale’s first edition proved the readiest means of providing money forasecond, But it is not fair to call Tindale, as Dore does, a ‘ participator in the crime’ because he let the books be sold, knowing to what purpose they would be put. The motives of the two parties were different. The bishops wished to destroy this translation ; Tindale wished to replace it by a better. See Dore, Old Bibles, 1888, p. 26.
§ Genesis alone has the colophon : ‘ Emprented at Marlborow in the lande of Hesse, by me Hans Luft, the yere of oure Lorde M.CCCCC.xxx. the xvij dayes of Januarij.’. From the peculiarity of ‘Marlborow’ as an equivalent for Marburg, and from an im- pression that Hans Luft never had a printing-press there, Mombert endeavoured to prove that the Pentateuch was really printed at Wittenberg, and that ‘ Marlborow’ was a pseudonym. ‘It is painful,’ says one writer, accepting this as proved, ‘to think that an intentional misstatement should be on the im- print of the first part of the English bible ever issued’ (Dore, Old Bibles, 1888, p. 67). The pain may fortunately be relieved, and the fair fame of Tindale cleared, by observing the evidence furnished by an able reviewer of Mombert in the Atheneum, Apr. 18th, 1885, to show that Hans Luft really had an itinerant press at Marburg at this time, and that in fact one publication of this very year, the Compendious olde Treatise used by Foxe, bears the colophon : ‘Emprented at Marlborow in the lade of Hessen by me Hans Luft.’