William Tyndale and English History

Abstract

William Tyndale is among the intellectual forebears of the English Revolution. David Rollinson's The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500–1800 provides much useful information about the world in which Tyndale grew up. Rollinson perceptively called the events of 1640–1960 ‘the revolution that the Protestant Reformation as envisaged by William Tyndale had always implied’. Tyndale came from Gloucestershire, where there was a strong Lollard tradition. He was the English Luther; but — though he did not live to see the distinction drawn — he was the father of English nonconformity rather than of Anglicanism. At a conference held in Oxford in 1994 to celebrate the quincentenary of Tyndale's birth, services were held in Anglican college chapels. Tyndale was safely out of the way before the compromise Church of England emerged: he was burnt as a heretic in 1536.