Owing to the disfavor in which Wyclif's doctrines were held, no English versions had been printed until the Protestant divine William Tyndale highly resolved to make the holy book more familiar to the ploughboy than to the bishop.
Educated at both Oxford and Cambridge, Tyndale imbibed the doctrines first of Erasmus, then of Luther, and finally of Zwingli.

Applying for help in his project to the bishop of London and finding none, [Sidenote: 1524] he sailed for Germany where he completed a translation of the New Testament, and started printing it at Cologne.

Driven hence by the intervention of Cochlaeus and the magistrates, he went to Worms and got another printer to finish the job.

[Sidenote: 1526] Of the six thousand copies in the first edition many were smuggled to England, where Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, tried to buy them all up, "thinking," as the chronicler Hall phrased it, "that he had God by the toe when he indeed had the devil by the fist." The money went to Tyndale and was used to issue further editions, of which no less than seven appeared in the next ten years.
The government's attitude was that Having respect to the malignity of this present time, with the inclination of the people to erroneous opinions, the translation of the New Testament should rather be the occasion of continuance or increase of errors among the said people than any benefit or commodity towards the weal of their souls.
But the magistrates were unable to quench the fiery zeal of Tyndale who continued to translate parts of the Old Testament and to print them and other tracts at Antwerp and at Cologne, until his martyrdom at {285} Vilvorde, near Brussels, on October 6, 1536.

In 1913 a monument was erected on the place of his death.
Under the leadership of Tyndale on the one side and of More on the other the air became dark with a host of controversial tracts.
[Sidenote: Controversial tracts] They are half filled with theological metaphysic, half with the bitterest invective.