The history of the English Bible is unknown to many people who regularly read scripture. It is a story of deprivation, perseverance and achievement.

The Catholic Church had maintained a grip on the Bible for a thousand years, ensuring on pain of death that the Latin version was the only scripture available. In the late 1300's and early 1400's scholars and theologians began to rebel against the Church's monopoly and began to produce 'English' Bibles, initially scribed laboriously by hand and using the Latin text 'word for word' as the source.

William Tyndale was a man with the divine mission to make the Bible accessible to the common Englishman. Not satisfied with the Latin Bible as his source, he went back to the original Hebrew and Greek and produced an English Bible. After years of evading capture Tyndale was arrested and in 1536 he was burnt at the stake as a heretic under the orders of the Church and King Henry VIII, but his legacy lives on in the English Bible which today still comprises nearly 90% of his beautiful, resonant translation.