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that it was no more than a symbol – ‘neither Christ nor any part of him, but the efficacious sign of him’ – and this denial struck at the heart of Catholic grandeur.
    A peasants’ revolt broke out in May 1381, sparked off by the imposition of a poll tax, but blamed in part on Wycliffe’s radical preaching and his championship of the poor. The mob, led by Wat Tyler and Jack Straw, was inflamed by a sermon preached on Blackheath – ‘[T]here shall be neither vassal nor lord … Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve?’ – and broke into London, sacking palaces and dragging Archbishop Sudbury from the Tower, where he had fled for shelter, and killing him.
    William Courtenay, a tougher man, a hounder of heretics, replaced him as archbishop. He convoked a council that met at Blackfriars in London on 17 May 1382. It condemned twenty-four of Wycliffe’s propositions as ‘heretical and erroneous’. A powerful earthquake shook the city as it sat. Courtenay described the tremors as a portent of the purging of noxious heresies from the bowels of the earth. To Wycliffe, they were proof of God’s anger at the Church.
    He was forbidden to teach at Oxford and forced to retire to his rectory at Lutterworth. From here he continued to rail against the clergy, who paraded with ‘costly saddles, bridles with dangling bells, rich garments and soft furs’, happy to ‘see the wives and children of their neighbours dying with hunger’. He whittled his sharp and early sense of English nationalism. ‘Already a third and more of England is in the hands of the Pope,’ he thundered.‘There cannot be two temporal sovereigns in one country; either Edward is King or Urban is king. We make our choice. We accept Edward of England and refute Urban of Rome.’
    Spurning Latin as the language of Church oppression, he wrote almost entirely in English now. Since ‘the truth of God standeth not in one language more than in another’, he said, the Bible should be translated into English so that ‘it may edify the lewd people as it doth clerks in Latin … No man is so rude a scholar but he may learn the gospel according to its simplicity.’ He posed an apparently unanswerable question: ‘Why may we not write in English the gospel and other things dedicating the gospel to the edification of men’s souls?’
    Why not, indeed? The Vulgate then in use across Catholic Christendom was itself a translation, of course. It had been painstakingly rendered from the original Greek and Hebrew at the end of the fourth century by St Jerome, in order to resolve the many differences in earlier Latin manuscripts, and became the standard editio vulgata . The Bible had also existed in Syriac, Coptic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian and Aramaic for a millennium or more before Wycliffe. By the ninth century, it had been translated into Persian and Arabic, and the brothers Cyril and Methodius had created the outline of the Cyrillic alphabet to render it into Slavonic.
    The earliest Old English translations to survive were made by Caedmon, a seventh-century monk at Whitby and a former cowherd who had felt a divine urge to learn to read and write. ‘He sang of the world’s creation, the origins of the human race, and all the story of Genesis,’ the scholar and theologian the Venerable Bede wrote of Caedmon; ‘he sang of Israel’s exodus from Egypt and entry into the Promised Land …’ An Anglo-Saxon translation of the gospels made from the Vetus Italica, the pre-Vulgate Latin Bible, was said to be the work of Bede himself. His student Cuthbert described how the great scholar completed his work onSt John’s gospel on his deathbed in the monastery at Jarrow in May 735. ‘In the evening, his pupil said, Dear Master, one sentence is still wanting,’ Cuthbert recalled. ‘Write it quickly, exclaimed Bede. When it was finished … he repeated the Gloria Patria, and expired in the effort.’ Passages from Exodus and the first fifty