April 4, 1519
Coventry, England

Shoemakers
and Widows

It has long been my cherished wish to cleanse the Lord’s temple of barbarous ignorance, and to adorn it with treasures brought from afar, such as may kindle in generous hearts a warm love for the Scriptures.

—Erasmus of Rotterdam, Enchiridion Militis Christiani

A Spring Day in Coventry

It was a spring day, not unlike any other April morning, but for seven parents this would be their last. Six men and one woman walked in procession to the Little Park, where stakes were set in the ground. Bundles of straw and sticks lay piled nearby. Today, seven would face the heretic’s fire. They were ordinary people who could have lived in a hundred different hamlets of England. Their names are preserved, though none of them lived a life worthy of the historian’s pen: “Mistress Smith, Widow; Robert Hatchets, a Shoemaker; Archer, a Shoemaker; Hawkins, a Shoemaker; Thomas Bond, a Shoemaker; Wrigsham, a Glover; Landsdale, a Hosier,
martyred at Coventry.”

The entry is brief. What crime demanded the torments of such a desperate end? The old document answers: “The principal cause of the apprehension of these persons, was for teaching their children and family the Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments in English.”¹

Their frightened children, forced to provide evidence against them, recited what they had been taught.

Our Father who art in Heaven . . .

Out of the mouths of babes came the damaging testimony to light the fires of Coventry.

Hallowed be thy name . . .

With each new English phrase, the clerics’ persecuting zeal flamed higher, fanned by the simple words that rolled from the children’s lips.

Give us this day our daily bread . . .

Their parents had been caught earlier and forced to carry a bundle of sticks, reeds, and straw as a warning that scripture was not to be translated into the common English tongue.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors . . .

They were relapsed heretics, obstinately refusing to heed the law of God’s holy church.

And lead us not into temptation . . .

The tear-filled voices continued, urged on by their inquisitors.

But deliver us from evil . . .

There was little hope of last-minute mercy.

For thine is the kingdom . . .

Sin worthy of death had been committed. All that remained was the final Amen.

Only the Widow Smith received a reprieve. She was dismissed and sent on her way. Unhappily for her, the examination lingered till dusk, when Simon Mourton, the bishop’s summoner, offered to escort her home in the gathering dark. Taking her arm, he heard the rustle of papers in her long sleeve.

“What have ye here?” he asked, pulling a precious roll from its hiding place. The Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer greeted his eyes, but the words from Sinai did not appear in the lofty Latin of the centuries but rather in the vulgar English. “Come, as good now as another time,” he said, and he returned her to the bishop, who condemned her with the six men sentenced earlier.²

And so they were burned. Their children were warned to forget the offending words placed in their memory by loving parents and to remember only the fate they had suffered. The same fate awaited them if they ever again dared to compromise God’s word by reducing it to their mother tongue.

The Rustle of a Turning Page

It is hard for us today, with our Bible comfortably resting in the fold of our hands, to understand the sacrifices required to bring it out of the darkness of an earlier age to the light of modern eyes. We ponder in shock that a standard question of the Inquisition was, “Have you read or do you own the scriptures in the common tongue?”

We hear the familiar rustle of a turning page, we read the beautifully crafted words, we feel the emotion created by the rhythmic cadence of oft-repeated lines, we discuss the meaning of parables, and we stand in awe at the Savior’s mercy. We teach our families of Jonah and a great fish, of Jacob’s love for Rachel and Ruth’s love for Naomi, and of the good Samaritan, the prodigal son, and the Sermon on the Mount. We hear the words of Jesus and picture him walking on the Sea of Galilee, feeding five thousand with a few
barley loaves, and cleansing the temple of the money changers. We follow Paul from Athens to Corinth to Ephesus and read letters penned to beloved converts. Reading sacred writ is as easy as setting a table, walking a dog, or smelling a flower in the backyard.

With our Bible resting on our lamp stands and bookshelves, do we ever wonder if our own courage equals that of shoemakers and widows? And if not, are we sufficiently grateful for the ease with which we reach for divine truth? Do we realize the faith demanded of former souls whose hunger for the harvest of God’s words cleared the forests of resistance, dug out the stumps, piled the rocks, and turned the hard soil so that the seed of the word might be planted in fertile minds?

A Fire in the Bones

We do not know the exact English words the children spoke to the friars of Coventry. The man who put the beautiful Lord’s Prayer into the English of the King James Bible had not yet discovered his life’s calling. But he was being prepared. The heretic’s fire could only be equaled by another fiercely burning fire, and God lit such a fire in the bones of a man named William Tyndale.

When Jeremiah was arrested for preaching in Jerusalem, he was placed in the stocks as punishment. In his misery he told the Lord he was through with calling his generation to repentance. Could God not see what they did to him? But as he sat there, a public spectacle for the mocking scorn of his fellow citizens, he realized that God’s word had a power greater than all the hostility mustered against it. “His word was in mine heart,” Jeremiah wrote, “as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay” (Jeremiah 20:9).

A few years ago in Little Sodbury, England, I stood behind a small wooden pulpit—the one used by young William Tyndale in his early years when the voice of God began to stir within him—and I felt a spiritual tug of holiness. Great deeds had been done for future generations and must not be forgotten. I sat in the old scarred chairs of the dining hall in the Walsh Manor and reflected on my own love for the two great Testaments. In the upstairs bedroom where Tyndale studied and prayed, the hallowed words I first heard as a boy from my mother’s lips drifted through my mind with the casual ease of beloved friends, and the warmth poured in. Here the great vision was born in his soul. Here God kindled the fire in his bones, knowing that a boy prophet, who would not be born for three centuries, would need the gracious words of James.

As I traveled to Oxford, London, Cologne, and Worms—the stopping places on the road to William Tyndale’s own inevitable Carthage—I felt a certain blush of soul that Tyndale had not been part of my conscious memory. For many years I had been lifted and inspired by the voices he gave to prophets and apostles and to Jesus himself, and yet, he stood unacknowledged in the tablets of my mind. His life is still shrouded in the mist of secrecy in which he moved while he lived, always one step ahead of the heresy hunters until he had safely captured the sacred words in the black ink of the printer’s craft, words that cried out to echo in English ears.

Greater Than the Greatest Fiction

The English language was gifted with two men of genius: William Shakespeare and William Tyndale. Shakespeare’s bell has tolled across the landscape of history, his name a portrait boldly hanging on the wall of our memory. He penned timeless phrases such as tongue-tied, green-eyed jealousy, the crack of doom, without rhyme or reason, to budge an inch, laughingstock, slept not a wink, the long and short of it, leapfrog, and hundreds of other everyday phrases that slip easily from our lips.

Tyndale’s bell tower stands silent, the rope slack, the bell ringer asleep, and yet, not even Shakespeare’s influence has been so broad or his words read more lovingly. What a carillon would sound if we realized the spoken word of faith and the dialect of belief we owe to William Tyndale.

Atonement, Jehovah,mercy seat, the still small voice, let there be light, in my Father’s house are many mansions, a man after his own heart, with God all things are possible, be not weary in well doing, the powers that be, I stand at the door and knock, and eat, drink and be merry are all Tyndale’s creations. He gave them birth; time has nursed them to maturity.

Tyndale’s life reads like a novel of greater fact than fiction could imagine. It is filled with heroes and villains, secrecy, exile, loving friends, and scheming betrayers. He knew the smugglers’ secret marks and their intense fraternal loyalty. He tasted the salt of shipwreck and braved the despair of lost manuscripts buried under the waves. Intrigue, safe houses, bribes, spies, covert conversations, drunken apprentices speaking too freely into eager ears, aliases, last-minute flight, imprisonment, and loneliness all wove their spell into the riddles of his hidden world. He drew Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Martin Luther, and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey into the magnetic circle of the intensity of his belief. Enemies went to all ends to stop him; friends went to the stake for his cause.

Hailed as a saint and condemned to the blackest pit of hell, William Tyndale lived in a world-changing time, a world of whispers and shouts. He altered that world more than any of his contemporaries, and in doing so he brought all of us closer to God.

Notes

^1. Foxe, Acts and Monuments,4:557.

^2. Ibid.