John Trevisa and the Early English Bibles 2
By John Hooper
We are accustomed to thinking in terms of theWycliffeBible in the singular, so it is natural to assume that there was just one Wycliffe translation and it was solely the work of John Wycliffe (1324-1384), but that is not the case. The surviving manuscripts, of which there are about 250 in total, representing the largest portion by far of all surviving Middle English texts, fall into two distinct groups. It has long been recognised that these represent two distinct versions, an earlier and a later separated by about 8 to 10 years. There are far more manuscripts of the later Wycliffe Bible than the earlier, and in 1850 both were published side by side for the first time.
We are told that the English of the earlier Wycliffe Bibles follows closely the word order and construction of the Latin. This is in line with Wycliffe’s view that the text should not be altered, but there is still sufficient variation to suggest that different parts were apportioned to different translators. The language of the later translation is much more “English” and acknowledged to be a significant improvement. It has even been suggested that the later Wycliffe Bibles are as much an advance on the earlier versions as the Tyndale Bible would be on them.
The manuscripts are now scattered over the world but the largest number is in Oxford. Two-thirds of them contain only New Testament books but there are 20 complete Wycliffe Bibles dating from the late 14th and early 15th centuries. This gives us some idea of the demand for copies of that precious Book. We need to bear in mind too, that for over 100 years, until 1528, Wycliffe Bibles were banned books, so both copyists and owners took considerable risks.
The translators
Across all the manuscripts there is reference to just two translators and even they have only the briefest of mentions. The first is Nicholas Hereford, referred to twice, and the second is identified simply as “J,” mentioned only once. Hereford alone can be named with confidence as a translator, but he and “J” certainly had co-workers. One manuscript has the following note: “Here endith the translacioun of N [presumed to be Nicholas Hereford], and now begynneth the translacioun of J and of othere men”1 (emphasis added).
A modern historian has concluded, “Whoever the individual translators were, the production of the first English Bible was conceived as a group endeavour. The translators did far more than turn the Latin Bible into English. Their hugely ambitious project involved editorial, hermeneutic and linguistic Biblical scholarship…. With a task of such magnitude, several scholars must have been involved at any one time.”2
Regarding the anonymity of the scholars involved, David Daniell writes, “The silence, indeed secrecy, may show us an essential fact, that these Bibles were made in an atmosphere of danger, even fear. In that light, we can only admire the determination to take on such large work, and to make the Scriptures available to everyone who could read or hear.”3 In any case, their aim was not to make a name for themselves but to make the Word of God available in a language the people could understand at a time when literacy was increasing across the social spectrum. But the care they took not to identify themselves does make it difficult to write about these events with much certainty after 600 years.
Following Nicholas Hereford’s excommunication in 1382, he launched an appeal directly to the Pope in Rome but this only led to his imprisonment. Hereford escaped and in 1385 he worked his way back to England where the Bishop of Worcester forbad him to preach in the diocese and his writings were destroyed. We can safely say that from 1382 Hereford was no longer available to help in translation work. At some point his life takes a most regrettable turn, as in 1391 we find him reconciled to the church and appointed Chancellor of Hereford Cathedral, followed in 1395 by a similar appointment in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Two years later he returned to Hereford and died there in 1420 as a Carthusian monk. Doubtless Wycliffe, who had died in 1384, would have grieved much to see his friend and most loyal co-worker revert to Rome.
But we are left with the mysterious “J.” Who was this? Was it John Wycliffe? Scholars such as David Daniell think it unlikely that he did much of the translation work himself. By this time he was in Lutterworth, though as we have noted, he still rented a room at Queen’s. Why would he have done that if not because he expected to travel there regularly to at least oversee the translation work of others?
Another possibility for “J” might be John Purvey (1354-1421), Wycliffe’s secretary. The name of Purvey has often been associated with the later group of translations, especially in the 19th century, but evidence for his involvement in that work is now generally recognised to be minimal at most.
But there is one other name, another John who comes into view, and that is John Trevisa.
Trevisa’s involvement
In 1482, exactly 80 years after Trevisa’s death, William Caxton wrote that Trevisa, “atte request of thomas lord barcley translated … the bible … out of latyn into English.”4 Mention of Lord Berkeley reminds us of Trevisa’s education in Cornwall, likely to have been sponsored by this gentleman’s grandfather. In 1370 Trevisa was ordained and a few years later, possibly in 1374, he was installed as vicar of Berkeley in Gloucestershire. He was also appointed private chaplain to Lord Berkeley.
Such was the size and influence of the Berkeley estate and parish that Trevisa would have lived “at the centre of a floating clerical community; he was indeed central, since his colleagues lacked his Oxford education.”5
It has been said that Lord Berkeley “invested in literary activities to a degree unmatched in 14th century England.”6 His main interest lay in the translation of prose works from Latin into English and it would certainly have been in character for him to commission John Trevisa to translate the Bible, as Caxton states. From this point onwards a strong tradition arose that Trevisa translated the entire Vulgate Old and New Testament Scriptures from Latin into English. We can trace this tradition through various writers from John Bale, a Protestant churchman in Reformation times, to Archbishop Ussher in the 17th century, even to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1768 and down to the present day. How much of this is one writer merely repeating what another has said is difficult to say, but in Trevisa’s own writing there is more than a hint to support it, as we shall see.
In the 17th century Thomas Fuller (1662) and Henry Wharton (1690), both prominent churchmen and historians, recognised the two distinct versions of the Wycliffe Bible and wrote as though the earlier was by Wycliffe himself and the later one by Trevisa. It was Fuller who judged the later version to be “as much better than Wycliffe’s, as worse than Tyndal’s.”7 Again, in the 19th century the two groups of manuscripts were identified as representing early and later versions, referred to as Wycliffe A and Wycliffe B. Those familiar with Trevisa’s work tell us that even the early version carries some traces of Trevisa’s involvement, but the second apparently uses a more uniform English vocabulary typical of the man.
The early Wycliffe Bible
Wycliffe had been in Oxford since around 1350 and it is possible that a prayerful consideration of translating the Bible was already on his mind at that time, but historians differ as to when the work of translation began. Certainly, a key period is that covering the years from 1374, when Wycliffe first rents a room in Queens College, to his leaving Oxford and retirement to Lutterworth in 1381 or 1382. Throughout this time not only Wycliffe but also Hereford, Trevisa and William Middleworth were resident in the college. Furthermore, an incident occurred that helps to confirm the significance of those years.
In 1376 there was trouble at Queen’s College. Queen’s had been founded in 1341 as a college especially for students from Cumberland and Westmorland, but the recent influx of several fellows from Exeter College, including Hereford, Middleworth and Trevisa, had upset the balance in favour of the south. This led to a serious and long-running dispute. Matters came to a head when the election of a northerner as provost was challenged by the southerners and the king himself was asked to intervene. This he did in January 1378, ruling in favour of the original founding of the college. This led to a number of southerners, including John Trevisa, being expelled. Whether Trevisa and his colleagues had some foreboding that this might happen is impossible to tell, but in 1377 they had made off with a number of books from the college library, an incident that has given Trevisa something of a firebrand reputation.
Remarkably, a complete list of those volumes has been preserved and they include the very books that one would expect translators of the Scriptures to need! The inference is that Trevisa and his colleagues were not going to let possible expulsion from the college interrupt their work of translating the Scriptures. Among the books taken were commentaries, including two by Nicholas of Lyra, “one of the most influential exegetes of the later Middle Ages”8 and a favourite of Wycliffe and his followers, the Lollards.9 There was also a Latin Bible, a Latin dictionary, and a concordance. I cannot imagine that the Queen’s College library was in any sense a lending library, nor yet that Wycliffe condoned the younger men’s methods, but by the summer of 1380 all the books and other items taken had been returned and the controversy resolved.
Was there more to this incident than meets the eye? More than once over the intervening centuries the possibility has been raised that behind it all was a deeper, spiritual conflict and a more sinister motive forcing the expulsion. But the work continued regardless and translation was completed around 1380.
This brings us to the later Wycliffe Bible. As we have noted already, Wycliffe left Queens for Lutterworth in 1381-82, where he died on 31st December, 1384. The later Wycliffe Bible was completed around 1388 to 1390, 4 to 6 years after John Wycliffe’s death. It is possible that Wycliffe and his team of translators had always considered “A” to be part of an ongoing process of translation, a staging post, and after revision and correction it would reach its final form in “B.” There is little evidence to support this view, except that “B” is said to resemble a revision rather than a new translation.
The later Wycliffe Bible
By the time of Wycliffe’s death, John Trevisa had made his mark as a proven and accomplished translator of Latin texts into English. Experts agree that when compared with those other works, the later Wycliffe Bible is much more in Trevisa’s style than the earlier version. A characteristic of that style often pointed out is Trevisa’s frequent use of two English words to translate one Latin, in the expectation that the reader will understand at least one of them.10
College records confirm that Trevisa was resident at Queen’s until 1387, and being the lone translator would help to explain the many years that he spent at Oxford “studying for his doctorate.” It would also explain the prominence Trevisa is given by Caxton, by historians down to the present day and, of course, in the preface to the Authorised Version. Was this nothing more than a dubious tradition? David Daniell calls Trevisa an enigma and concludes that the hard evidence for his involvement in Wycliffe B “is still lacking,” but there is circumstantial evidence pointing in his direction. What is more, if the Bible translation carried out by Trevisa at the request of Lord Berkeley, mentioned in his own writing and referred to by William Caxton, is not Wycliffe B, there remains the unanswered question: Where is it?
If Wycliffe B is indeed the work of John Trevisa, he was a busy man because in the mid-1380s he was also beginning work on translating one of two very large encyclopaedic works, the Polychronicon. This is nothing less than a history of the known world at that time, written by Ranulf Higden (1280-1364), a Benedictine monk who is said to have been Wycliffe’s favourite historian.11
We might be wondering how Trevisa would have been able to spend so much time translating and decamping to Oxford while still having a parish to look after in Gloucestershire. He was most likely helped in this by a papal dispensation of 1298 that enabled clergy to be released to study at university, so long as their parish was not left without oversight. This would not have been much of a problem at Berkeley because in 1379 the parish employed no fewer than 15 clerics. It was evidently a wealthy benefice and Trevisa would have had no difficulty in ensuring that the parish work continued in his absence while he focussed on the work of translation. This raises the intriguing possibility that a Pope contributed unwittingly to putting an English Bible into the hands of the people. How wonderful is providence!
(To be Concluded)
Footnotes
1 Mary Dove, The First English Bible; (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 78.
2 Ibid., p. 79.
3 David Daniell, The Bible in English; (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 83.
4 David C. Fowler, The Life and Times of John Trevisa, p. 213.
5 Ralph Hanna III, Sir Thomas Berkeley and his Patronage; (Speculum, Vol. 64, No. 4, 1989), p. 893.
6 Ibid., p. 878.
7 Fowler, p. 216.
8 Fowler, p. 180.
9 Ibid., p. 229.
10 This use of ‘doublets,’ as they are called, is much more complex than I have described here. A dissertation on their use in the Wycliffe Bible and other texts of the time, available on-line, runs to over 300 pages!
11 Fowler, p. 229.