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Additional Information
• Summary of Tyndale's Life
• Back Cover Text
• Sample
• Commendations
| Sample |
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The quiet, serious student shuffled into the lecture hall, shivered, and buried his feet in a pile of rushes. It was six o'clock in the morning and he had already attended chapel at five. The students huddled alongside one another for warmth and prepared for the dull, three hour lecture that would follow. William Tyndale looked around at the bare, cheerless room, with its large, shuttered windows and tiled floor strewn with rushes. Everything was dismal and cold, yet typical of the seven or eight colleges that made up the university town of Oxford in 1513. The lecture, without heart or life, rambled on for three boring hours until, around ten o'clock, William trooped out to the dining hall; here he shared a penny piece of beef with three friends and sat down to his bowl of broth and a lump of hard oatmeal cake. The meal finished, the students returned to their lectures until five when supper was served, not much better than their lunch.
Student life was harsh and many of the young men maintained themselves in food, lodging, clothes and amusements for fifty shillings a year. They were too poor to work by candlelight during the long winter evenings, and studies therefore continued in the form of debates and discussions; in this way a number of students could share one candle. At nine or ten o'clock, being without fire, they would run about for half an hour to generate sufficient heat before going to bed. The undergraduate was invariably in his middle teens, and the lot of the graduate was little better than that of his junior. It was perfectly acceptable for many of the students to beg, both in the town and on their way home for three months' summer vacation; it was considered an act of charity to give to the pale and ill-clad student.
But most students could look forward to a better future. Their frugal days of study would soon break into rich livings in the Church, or the ample rewards of the management of a family estate; it was a small sacrifice to bear now, in anticipation of the luxury and ease that would follow.
William Tyndale threw himself into his studies unaware of what lay before him. With no large family estate, and growing unrest with the Church within his soul, nothing was certain. And it was as well that the young graduate did not know the course that lay ahead. For almost all of the remaining twenty-two years of his life, Tyndale would own no home and receive no assured income. He was destined to live in poverty, and as an outlaw in constant fear for his life. Every daylight hour, and as far as his meager candle-money would allow, long into the night also, he would be found hunched over his desk squinting in the half-light at the books before him, and carefully inscribing on the bare sheets that lay to hand words that would change the heart of England. Unknown to the young scholar he was shortly to enter a contest that would give to England its most priceless treasure and rob it of its finest men; a contest that would demand of William Tyndale the unceasing labor of his remaining years, but would issue in the first English New Testament in print and in the cruel death of its translator. It was to be a battle that would change the course of history, and a battle in which every man would be involved from pope to ploughman. Few would be more involved than the King of England himself who, in this very year, was sailing across the channel eager to dazzle the world with his magnificence and ignorant of the importance of the frail scholar at Oxford.
