preaching. A private chapel stood in the grounds of the manor. It was used as a parish church by villagers who did not attend the grand church of St John the Baptist three miles away in Chipping Sodbury, where Sir John Walsh lies in a side-chapel. The chapel fell into ruins and in 1859 its stones and simple pulpit were moved down the slope into the small hamlet and rebuilt as the church of St Adeline.
Tyndale roamed much further afield to find larger audiences. He went, so Foxe says, ‘specially about the town of Bristol, and also in the said town in the common place called St Austin’s Green’. This was a patch of open ground in front of the old Augustinian convent in Bristol, now called College Green, where wandering preachers gave al fresco sermons and harangued passersby. In a tradition dating back at least a hundred years, preachers walked or rode round the country, speaking in fields, churchyards or on commons and greens, the public spaces in towns and villages. A licence was needed to preach in each diocese that the wanderer visited, at least in theory, but the rule was difficult to enforce and was frequently ignored.
Sermons were preached in English. They were the only part of an otherwise Latin service that most worshippers could understand; indeed, many priests had only a dim grasp of the meaning of the liturgy, and would have been hard pressed to compose half a sentence in Latin. In its core element, however, the Englishsermon relied on the Latin Bible. A preacher began with an exordium , or introduction. He passed to the text of the day, taken from the Bible, before completing the sermon with his peroration. This tradition of preaching a sermon on a text gave the single biblical verse, or part of a verse, a compelling power. One phrase, ‘the righteous shall live by faith’, was particularly popular with Lutheran preachers in 1522, as the encapsulation of the new doctrine of justification by faith; as one verse, ‘thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them’, was favoured by their enemies.
Worshippers thus knew that the Bible was a treasure chest, from which the preacher plucked a single gem of wisdom to flash before them each sermon time. But at all other times, except for the handful who could read Latin, the scripture was locked away in a dead language. As a preacher himself, Tyndale had special reason to resent the Church ban on translation into English.
Bristol was promising ground for a radical preacher. It was a great seaport, second only to London in the value of its trade, and ships’ crews and travellers opened it to Continental thoughts and fashions. We cannot be sure whether Tyndale met Lutherans among the German and Dutch merchants and sailors in the city, nor how extreme he was in his open-air preaching over the winter of 1522–3. But there was already enough force and passion in his ideas to shock and anger the senior clergy of the Gloucester diocese. They did not, of course, compromise their dignity by mingling with unwashed laymen to hear him at St Austin’s Green. He came to their ill-tempered notice over dinner conversations in the panelled hall at Little Sodbury. The Walshes kept one of the best tables in the county, and ‘divers great beneficed men, as abbots, deans, archdeacons and other learned men’ were regularly invited to dine. Tyndale sat with the guests.
The table talk often turned to Luther and the scriptures, and the young tutor ‘did many times therein show his mind and learning’,arguing with his elders and winning points by producing a Vulgate Bible and showing them the passage ‘of open and manifest scripture’ that proved them to be wrong. This did not endear him to them. Divers and sundry times, Foxe reports, ‘the great doctors of divinity waxed weary and bare a secret grudge in their hearts against Master Tyndall’.
They could not be openly hostile while they were enjoying his employers’
Tyndale roamed much further afield to find larger audiences. He went, so Foxe says, ‘specially about the town of Bristol, and also in the said town in the common place called St Austin’s Green’. This was a patch of open ground in front of the old Augustinian convent in Bristol, now called College Green, where wandering preachers gave al fresco sermons and harangued passersby. In a tradition dating back at least a hundred years, preachers walked or rode round the country, speaking in fields, churchyards or on commons and greens, the public spaces in towns and villages. A licence was needed to preach in each diocese that the wanderer visited, at least in theory, but the rule was difficult to enforce and was frequently ignored.
Sermons were preached in English. They were the only part of an otherwise Latin service that most worshippers could understand; indeed, many priests had only a dim grasp of the meaning of the liturgy, and would have been hard pressed to compose half a sentence in Latin. In its core element, however, the Englishsermon relied on the Latin Bible. A preacher began with an exordium , or introduction. He passed to the text of the day, taken from the Bible, before completing the sermon with his peroration. This tradition of preaching a sermon on a text gave the single biblical verse, or part of a verse, a compelling power. One phrase, ‘the righteous shall live by faith’, was particularly popular with Lutheran preachers in 1522, as the encapsulation of the new doctrine of justification by faith; as one verse, ‘thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them’, was favoured by their enemies.
Worshippers thus knew that the Bible was a treasure chest, from which the preacher plucked a single gem of wisdom to flash before them each sermon time. But at all other times, except for the handful who could read Latin, the scripture was locked away in a dead language. As a preacher himself, Tyndale had special reason to resent the Church ban on translation into English.
Bristol was promising ground for a radical preacher. It was a great seaport, second only to London in the value of its trade, and ships’ crews and travellers opened it to Continental thoughts and fashions. We cannot be sure whether Tyndale met Lutherans among the German and Dutch merchants and sailors in the city, nor how extreme he was in his open-air preaching over the winter of 1522–3. But there was already enough force and passion in his ideas to shock and anger the senior clergy of the Gloucester diocese. They did not, of course, compromise their dignity by mingling with unwashed laymen to hear him at St Austin’s Green. He came to their ill-tempered notice over dinner conversations in the panelled hall at Little Sodbury. The Walshes kept one of the best tables in the county, and ‘divers great beneficed men, as abbots, deans, archdeacons and other learned men’ were regularly invited to dine. Tyndale sat with the guests.
The table talk often turned to Luther and the scriptures, and the young tutor ‘did many times therein show his mind and learning’,arguing with his elders and winning points by producing a Vulgate Bible and showing them the passage ‘of open and manifest scripture’ that proved them to be wrong. This did not endear him to them. Divers and sundry times, Foxe reports, ‘the great doctors of divinity waxed weary and bare a secret grudge in their hearts against Master Tyndall’.
They could not be openly hostile while they were enjoying his employers’
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