William Tyndale
William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536) was a Protestant reformer and scholar who translated the Bible into the Early Modern English of his day. While a number of partial and complete Old English translations had been made from the seventh century onward, and Middle English translations particularly during the 14th century, Tyndale's was the first English translation to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, and the first to take advantage of the new medium of print, which allowed for its wide distribution. In 1535 Tyndale was arrested, jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde outside Brussels for over a year, tried for heresy and then strangled and burnt at the stake.

The Bible
Much of Tyndale's Bible eventually found its way into the King James Version (or "Authorised Version") of the Bible, published in 1611, which, as the work of 54 independent scholars revising the existing English versions, is to a large extent based on Tyndale's translations.

575 pages

Facsimile of first printed English NT
This is what it actually looked like.

'With reverence, almost with awe, we here offer to the reader the photographic likeness of a priceless gem in English literature. It is the unique Fragment of that first and fontal edition of the English New Testament, to which Mr. Anderson refers as “the veritable origin of all those millions of English Scriptures now being read in so many different and distant parts of the globe-parts, utterly unknown to our immortal Translator, when he sent the sheets to the press-parts, then untrodden by any Englishman-parts, then undiscovered.”'

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Intro to reprint