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the Schoolmen and the tiresome armoury of ‘their predicaments,universals, second intentions, quiddities, haecceities and relatives’. He had a particular interest in the Bible, and may have already thought of translating it; in the only reference to his childhood that he made, he remarked that he had heard as a boy ‘how that king Athelstane caused the holy scripture to be translated into the tongue that then was in England, and how the prelates exhorted him thereto’. He said that the teaching of the scripture at Oxford ‘is so locked up with such false expositions and with false principles of natural philosophy’ that students could not enter into the true spirit of the Bible; instead, they were kept outside, and ‘dispute all their lives about words and vain opinions, pertaining as much unto the healing of a man’s heel as the health of his soul’.
    He was, nonetheless, attentive to his studies. He graduated Bachelor of Arts, as William Hychyns, on 4 July 1512, and Master of Arts three years later. He had no reputation yet as a firebrand. Foxe says that his manners and conversation at this time were such that ‘all they that knew him reputed and esteemed him to be a man of most virtuous disposition and of life unspotted’. It was a condition of his MA degree that he stay for a year at Oxford to teach in the Schools. At a date not before 1516, therefore, ‘spying his time’, as Foxe put it, Tyndale ‘removed from thence to the university of Cambridge, where he … made his abode a certain space, being now farther ripened in the knowledge of God’s word …’.
    Cambridge was then more radical and more Lollard-influenced than Oxford. Erasmus had taught there from 1510 to 1514, and humanism was becoming rooted, fresh and open after the musty staleness of the Schoolmen. Erasmus had gone on to edit and publish a Greek New Testament in 1516 as a purer alternative to the Latin Vulgate, for the original was, of course, written in Greek. In 1518, Richard Croke gave the first public lectures on the Greek language at Cambridge. Tyndale thus acquired the necessary fundamentals for his future work on the New Testament: the original text and the fine-tuned Greek needed to translate it.

    The Lollards kept reform ideas alive, and, despite the flames and pits that pursued them, they had undergone a revival since Tyndale’s birth. Cells persisted in Buckinghamshire. In 1506, Bishop Smyth dealt with sixty cases at Amersham and twenty at Buckingham. Two were burnt. The others recanted and did penance. Bishop Fitzjames of London prosecuted more than forty Lollards in 1510, and a further thirty-seven in 1517. On each occasion, four relapsed heretics were burnt in the Lollard pit; the death sentence was mandatory for those who had recanted once and then resumed their heresy. Several Lollard cells were denounced to Archbishop Warham in Kent, particularly around Tenterden, Cranbrook and Benenden. In 1511 and 1512, the archbishop obtained fifty abjurations and handed five to the secular powers for burning. During the same period, Bishop Geoffrey Blythe of Lichfield dealt with seventy-four alleged heretics, a third of them women. Seven ‘godly martyrs’, including a widow, were burnt at Coventry in 1519.
    This was as yet no great threat to the Church. Few or none were learned, so Foxe said, being ‘simple labourers and artificers, but as it pleased the Lord to work in their knowledge and understanding by reading a few English books, such as they could get in corners’. Illiterates learnt Bible passages off by heart in English; some of the Buckinghamshire heretics could reel off the Epistle of St James and the Apocalypse.
    But the Lollards persisted with the ideas for which Wycliffe had been cursed. The charges against them were generally a combination of the heresies condemned a century before at Constance: reading the scriptures in laboriously hand-copied English manuscripts, disbelief in transubstantiation, and mockery of