William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536) was an English scholar and reformer who became the principal translator of the Bible into English in the Reformation era. Working in exile on the Continent, he produced the first printed English New Testament (1526) directly from the Greek, along with portions of the Old Testament from the Hebrew, shaping the language of all later English Bibles. He also wrote influential polemical and doctrinal works, including The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) and The Parable of the Wicked Mammon (1528). Betrayed and arrested near Brussels, he was tried for heresy and executed by strangling and burning at Vilvoorde in 1536; his dying prayer, "Lord, open the King of England's eyes," was answered within a few years by the licensing of the English Bible.
The Obedience of a Christian Man
The Obedience of a Christen Man
Of the Covetousness of the Spiritualty
Of the Covetousness of the Spiritualty
Tyndale's catalogue of the exactions by which the clergy fleece the realm. Beginning with their seizure of the tithe — "the tenth of all the realm" — he enumerates their temporal lands, mortuaries, offering-days, and privy tithes, and the endless fees for churchings, weddings, burials, hallowings, and priests' first masses. The indictment climaxes in his image of the clergy flaying the laity: "the parson shears, the vicar shaves, the parish priest polls, the friar scrapes, and the pardoner pares; we lack but a butcher to pull off the skin." He likens the spiritualty to horseleeches, caterpillars, and wolves in lambs' skins, to be known and judged by their works.
Of Matrimony, and the Pope's Dispensations
Of Matrimony, and the Pope's Dispensations
The close of Tyndale's section on the obedience of children, treating Christian matrimony. Tyndale argues that lawful marriage — made with the consent of parents and friends — may not be dissolved by the Church's vows and traditions, and he attacks the way the clergy separate those whom God has joined. Above all he assails the Pope's traffic in dispensations, releasing men from monastic profession and priestly vows for money, closing with the famous gibe that to sell a benefice outright is reckoned simony, but to resign it on a pension and redeem it again is held no simony at all: "O crafty jugglers and mockers with the word of God!"