John Trevisa and the Early English Bibles 3
By John Hooper
We know that John Trevisa completed his English translation of Higden’s great encyclopaedia, the Polychronicon, in April 1387. We can be certain because he dated it in his own hand. Moreover, throughout the work Trevisa inserted additions of his own, clearly marking them as such, and introducing the whole thing with a prologue.
Trevisa’s Dialogue
Within the prologue Trevisa incorporated a piece called A Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk upon Translation. The “dialogue” was a popular literary form in those times and this particular example follows a debate between a secular Lord, representing Lord Berkeley – who you will remember is Trevisa’s patron – and the lord’s clerical Clerk1, denoting Trevisa himself. The theme is the value of translation, notably that of the Bible, and it is the Lord who has the strong arguments, using lines of reasoning which it is thought Trevisa may have learned from Wycliffe’s supporters in Queen’s College. We made reference to one of those arguments in the first instalment:
… it may not be told in English what the Latin is to mean without translation out of Latin into English. Then it needeth to have an English translation; and for to keep it in mind that it be not forgotten, it is better that such a translation be made and written than said and not written.
An argument that was sometimes used against translation stemmed from the notion of the time that some languages are superior to others. The Clerk attempts to use this argument, suggesting that it is a “lewd,” i.e., fruitless, occupation to translate the Scriptures from such a noble language as Latin into English. The Lord responds that if that were the case, those who had translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, and Jerome who had translated from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, were also “lewdly [= fruitlessly] occupied.” The Clerk’s argument, therefore, does not stand.
The third argument used by the Lord views translation of the Scriptures in the context of making known the Gospel, and surely this is the strongest argument of all. We might struggle a little with the English of those times but I think we can follow the thread:
Also the gospel, and prophecy, and the right faith of holy church must be taught and preached to English men that can [= know] no Latin. Then the gospel, and prophecy, and the right faith of holy church must be told them in English, and that is not done but by English translation. For such English preaching is very English translation, and such English preaching is good and needful; then English translation is good and needful.2
One can hardly imagine Trevisa putting such reasoning as this upon the lips of Lord Berkeley if Berkeley himself was not in hearty approval of it. Throughout the dialogue Trevisa presents himself in the role of devil’s advocate, all the while goading the noble Lord into strengthening his case for English translation of the Scriptures. We can only marvel at the providence of God as we see Him preparing the way not only for the Lollards but also for more faithful translations of the Bible, and the English Reformation over a hundred years later. The principle is already established that if the English people are to know the Gospel with greater clarity and purity, it must be preached to them in English: and that will require an English Bible. Trevisa cannot understand why the people should be deprived.
Personal involvement
Having stated his case, Trevisa concludes his prologue with a prayer. It begins like this:
Then God grant us
grace grathly to gin [= sufficient to understand],
wit and wisdom wisely to work,
might and mind of right meaning
to make translation trusty and true, pleasing to the Trinity, three persons and one God, in majesty, that ever was and ever shall be….
John Trevisa, 18th April 1387
These words make it very likely that in 1387 John Trevisa was still personally involved in the translation of the Scriptures. They also enable us to catch a glimpse into the man’s soul as he acknowledges his total dependence on God to achieve his goal: an English translation of the Bible that is faithful and pleasing to Him.
Significantly, as the Dialogue goes on, Trevisa outlines his principles of translation. His aim is to produce a translation from Latin that is “clear and plain.” To achieve this, in some places he is able to “set word for word,” but in others he finds that he must “change the order of words” to make a sentence comprehensible in English, “but for all such changing, the meaning shall stand and not be changed.” In other words, a faithful translation must be able to be understood but with no compromise in accuracy: sound principles for a translator of Holy Scripture.
There is one final clue in Trevisa’s Dialogue that might easily be overlooked. The prayer whose beginning we have quoted, continues with a summary of the creation of the world. The late W. R. Cooper, who was a strong advocate of Trevisa as the translator of Wycliffe B, has pointed out that in his summary of Genesis 1 Trevisa uses words and phrases very similar to those used in the text of the later Wycliffe translation. This indicates that in 1387 Trevisa had intimate knowledge of a work that was not published until 1388. Cooper writes, “Such a familiarity at such a time is something that we could only reasonably expect from the translator of Wycliffe B himself, which stamps Trevisa’s authorship on that translation as forcefully as any fingerprint.”3
The Prologue to Wycliffe B
This brings us to another document of interest, the lengthy Prologue to the Wycliffe B Bible itself. Its 15th and final chapter is concerned with the process of translation, summarising it like this:
- Establish a corrected and authoritative Latin text.
- Study this authoritative text with the aid of commentaries and glosses,4 especially Lyra on the Old Testament.
- Consult linguistic authorities to elucidate hard words and sentences.
- Produce a clear and accurate English translation.5
The author of the Prologue sums up his accomplishment by saying, “a simple creature hath translated the Bible out of Latin into English.”6 He goes on to say, “At the beginning I purposed, with God’s help, to make the sense as true and open in English as it is in Latin, or more true and more open than it is in Latin.”7 Notice that he writes in the first-person singular. This is one man’s work and no longer a team effort. Also, since the translator of the Bible and the writer of the Prologue are evidently the same person, if the translation is Trevisa’s work, so is the Prologue. He has not given us his name, no doubt for his own safety, but as he brings his long preface to a close, he makes an intriguing reference to a number of books that “this simple creature” had been able to “gather”:
“… many old Bibles, and other doctors and common glosses … especially Lyra on the Old Testament, that helped him greatly in his work…. old grammarians and old divines concerning hard words and hard sentences, how they might best be understood and translated.”8
Is this a reference to those very books Trevisa had helped to “gather” from the Queen’s College library a decade or so earlier?
The Prologue tells us something too of the spiritual character to be expected of a translator of Scripture. He is to “live a clean life and be devout in prayer and have not his wit occupied about worldly things, that the Holy Spirit, author of wisdom and knowledge and truth, direct him in his work and suffer him not for to err…. God grant to us all grace to know well and keep well holy writ, and to suffer joyfully some pain for it at the last. Amen.”9
The Prologue includes a moving plea for the translation to be approved by the Church of England. Regrettably my ignorance of Middle English means I cannot safely make it easier reading, but we know from history that the Wycliffe – or perhaps more accurately the Wycliffite – Bible “was not approved by the English church,” and in 1409 “the advocates of biblical translation lost the legal battle to be allowed open access to the law of God in their mother-tongue….”10 That privilege would not be granted for another 120 years.
Trevisa and the Berkeleys
The remaining years of Trevisa’s life – he died in 1402 – were spent largely under the patronage of Lord Berkeley at Berkeley Castle, just north of Bristol. Today the Berkeley family still live in the castle and are one of only five English families able to trace their male line uninterrupted back to Anglo-Saxon times. The Lord Berkeley of Trevisa’s day was by far the richest landowner in Gloucestershire and had considerable local power. He is known to have been on good terms with one or two of the “Lollard knights,” members of the nobility who were sympathetic with at least some of the Lollards’ beliefs. One of these was Sir John Cheyne who earned the disfavour of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, for being “an enemy of the church.” The two main areas in which both Berkeley and Trevisa sympathised with the Lollards would appear to have been their anti-clericalism and support for the use of English. These alone would not have made them Lollards, but Trevisa’s objection to the Apocrypha and purgatory would have placed him closer to the Lollard end of the spectrum, as we have noted before.
Alongside Trevisa’s parish and chaplaincy duties at Berkeley, as well as being canon of nearby Westbury-on-Trym, he continued the task of translating Latin texts into English at the request of his patron. These included another huge encyclopaedia. The Queen’s College records show that he returned to Oxford for at least some of the period 1394 to 1396. All this was part of a wider picture. Trevisa and his much better-known contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer, were turning English into a literary language and at the vanguard of that process was the English Bible. As time went on we find others, who were not necessarily supporters of Wycliffe, taking up the cause for Scripture in English. For example, in the early 1400s twelve anonymous Cambridge Tracts11 were published, representing a wide range of views but all in favour of an English Bible.
Before we take our leave of Trevisa, there is one more intriguing connection to be made. It would appear that Trevisa’s influence on the translation of the English Bible did not come to an end with his death. A hundred or so years later, a young boy would make the five-mile journey from his home in the south Gloucestershire village of North Nibley to the library at Berkeley Castle. There he would find and read John Trevisa’s translation of Higden’s massive Polychronicon, with its persuasive prologue. That boy’s name was William Tyndale.
Trevisa and Tyndale
As he read Trevisa’s Preface to the Polychronicon, with its strong statement for an English translation of the Bible into English so that English people could read and understand the Scriptures, we can imagine Tyndale saying, “I’ll translate the Bible when I grow up!”12
This is not an impossible or far-fetched scenario. In his work The Obedience of a Christian Man Tyndale actually mentions his reading of Higden’s book, and throughout his writings there are many other links to John Trevisa. Another of Trevisa’s works that the young Tyndale would most likely have read was one I have not mentioned yet, A Dialogue between a Knight and a Clerk on the Temporal and Spiritual Regiments. This is concerned with the separate identity and authority of church and state. Tyndale’s views on the subject were quite different from those of Luther and other continental reformers, but very much those of John Trevisa.
So, did Tyndale’s desire to translate the Bible stem from his reading of Trevisa? The Cornishman had raised a challenge: “If any man can make of the books of these Chronicles a better English translation, and one that is more help to the reader, let God enable him.” Maybe this is Tyndale’s personal response to that challenge: “And as I offered that to all men, to correct it, [the New Testament] whosoever could, even so do I this.”13 Certainly Tyndale paved the way for “a better English translation” of the Scriptures because he translated from the original Greek, not the Latin Vulgate.
Curious minds have wondered whether Tyndale derived some of his other doctrinal convictions from what he had first read in Trevisa. We may never know for sure but, for example, Trevisa believed the Apocrypha to be “of no authority” and in Tyndale’s writings there is no reference to any of the apocryphal books. Trevisa viewed purgatory as a hoax because, he said, “no man that commits mortal sin shall be saved unless he is truly repentant while he is still alive,” likewise, Tyndale rejected the notion of purgatory. We may even have Trevisa to thank (if that is the right word) for Tyndale’s “Easter” in Acts 12:4.
A modern authority on Tyndale, who has read the three volumes of his works no fewer than seven times, has come to this conclusion: “There is one source and two roots which I have discovered behind Tyndale’s theology. The source of Tyndale’s theology is Scripture, the Word of God that we find in the Old and New Testament…. The first root of Tyndale’s writings are the works of Wyclif and his followers; the second, the works of John Trevisa.”14
Conclusion
Our review of John Trevisa’s life, work and legacy has been unavoidably sketchy and full of uncertainty, but hopefully we have been able to shed a little light on the man, and why he is mentioned by Miles Smith in his preface to the Authorised Version. He was certainly a man raised up by God with the right aims and motives, the right skills and contacts, and to be in the right place at the right time. Above all, I believe there is sufficient evidence to say that he had the right heart for the work, a heart humbled and filled with the Spirit of God. A secular historian has described Trevisa as “an extra-ordinarily prolific and important translator,”15 but the full extent of his personal involvement in translating the Bible will remain somewhat hazy until, as the Word of God assures us, “Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it” (1 Corinthians 3:13). Then we will know for sure.
We are still left with the question of why Wycliffe is not mentioned by Smith, and one conjecture is that the seventeenth-century Puritans almost adopted Wycliffe as one of their own. Smith was not a Puritan so perhaps he sought to distance himself from their champion. If we had written the preface to the Authorised Version, it is likely that we would have mentioned both Wycliffe and Tyndale rather than the largely unknown Trevisa, but that it is the largely unknown Trevisa who is mentioned is especially interesting because of the link that he establishes between the two better-known men. It also reminds us that the Lord chooses His own instruments and they are very much “earthen vessels that the excellency of the power may be of God” (2 Corinthians 4:7).
Finally, the writer of the Prologue to the Wycliffe Bible, probably John Trevisa but preferring to remain anonymous, referred to the completed work not as his own but as the “gifte of God”16 to the English people. The translator acknowledges himself to be merely “a simple creature” through whom God gives to a people the precious gift of His Word in their own language, the Word by which the Gospel of His grace is made known. To God alone belongs the glory.
Footnotes
1 The word clerk originally meant a churchman or clergyman, hence the word cleric.
2 David C. Fowler, The Life and Times of John Trevisa, p. 231.
3 W. R. Cooper, John Trevisa, the Translator of Wycliffe B: A consideration of the evidence. http://www.tyndale.org/tsj25/cooper.html
4 A gloss is a brief note in the margin, or, indeed, in the text, supplying the meaning of a word. Hence, our more familiar word glossary.
5 Summarised from Mary Dove, The First English Bible, p. 79.
6 Mary Dove, The Earliest Advocates of the English Bible: The Texts of the Medieval Debate; (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010), p. 80. I trust I have updated correctly the medieval English.
7 Ibid., p. 81.
8 Ibid., p. 80.
9 Ibid., p. 84-85.
10 Mary Dove, The First English Bible, p. 35.
11 Ibid., p. 89-142.
12 Ralph S. Werrell, The Roots of William Tyndale’s Theology; (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2013), p. 40. I am very much indebted to Mr. Werrell’s book for this section.
13 Ibid., p. 41.
14 Ibid., p. 178.
15 Ralph Hanna, Sir Thomas Berkeley and his Patronage, p. 878.
16 Dove, The Earliest Advocates of the English Bible, p. 84.