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psalms were translated into Anglo-Saxon in the ninth century, perhaps by the pious King Alfred. A section of Genesis was worked on by the grammarian abbot Aelfric in the late tenth century. An anonymous scholar translated the four gospels into West Saxon. Metrical versions of Genesis and Exodus existed in Middle English from the mid-thirteenth century; before his death in 1349, the Yorkshire mystic-poet Richard Rolle had translated and glossed, or made comments and explanations, on the Psalter in English.
    Nothing resembling a complete version of the Bible had been attempted before Wycliffe. The earliest work was done under his follower Nicholas Hereford, a fellow of Queen’s College at Oxford. He had translated the Old Testament from Genesis to Baruch when he was condemned with Wycliffe by the 1382 Blackfriars council, and fled abroad for fear that Archbishop Courtenay would have him burnt. The task was continued by John Purvey, who worked at Lutterworth until Wycliffe’s death at the end of 1384. The new English Bibles were eagerly sought after – it was said that a man would give a cartload of hay for a few sheets of St Paul – but bulky and time-consuming to produce. Each was an individual labour of magnitude, painstakingly hand-copied on to parchment and bound between boards. The English language was in headlong development – Latin was resented as alien and ecclesiastical; French, falling from fashion during the long French wars, was banned from use in the law courts in 1362, the year before parliament was opened with speeches in English for the first time – and the language in the Wycliffe Bibles would soon seem almost as outdated as Anglo-Saxon.
    ‘Nellen ge deman,’ a verse in the Anglo-Saxon gospel runs,‘daet ge ne syn fordemede.’ In Wycliffe, that is rendered: ‘Nyle ze deme, that se be nat demyd.’ But the sentence in Tyndale – ‘iudge not, lest ye be iudged’ – needs only the substitution of ‘ you ’ for ‘ ye ’, to pass muster in our own English.
    Nicholas and Purvey worked from the Vulgate, rather than the Greek and Hebrew originals. If much of their translation was a plodding word-for-word affair, they sometimes captured a graceful lilt – ‘If I speke with tungis of men and aungels, sothli I haue not charite’ – and above all they gave the English their first direct contact with the word of God in their own language.
    The Church was angered and frightened. The Bible, the ecclesiastical chronicler Knighton observed, was now ‘more open to the laity, and even to women who were able to read, than formerly it had been even to the scholarly and most learned of the clergy’. Knighton did not find this admirable. To him, it meant that ‘the gospel pearl is thrown before swine and trodden underfoot … and become a joke, and this precious gem of the clergy has been turned into the sport of the laity …’.
    Hostility to Wycliffe’s followers escalated. The term ‘Lollard’ was applied to them, a derivation from the Dutch lollen , to mumble, and used in English to describe religious eccentrics and vagabonds. A violent opponent, Thomas Netter, railed at ‘so many of this sect of Wycliffe, standing in the line of battle, provoking the Church to war; fearlessly they preach, they publish their doctrines, they boast of their strength …’ Unlicensed preachers roamed the dioceses, ignoring summons to be silent. Lollards kept schools and held disputations and Bible readings; they made some progress among gentry and merchants, though most were artisans, weavers, millers, thatchers, butchers, and many were women.
    The ‘Bible-men’ denied all rituals that were non-biblical. They ate meat on fast days. They did not keep Sunday as a special day. They did not confess. They failed to gaze up when the Host was elevated at mass. Some held that the sacramental bread had noteven a symbolic significance. Eleanor Higges of Burford was arraigned for putting the sacrament in her oven and eating