500 years of William Tyndale and the English Bible

On 30 June 1513, the young king, Henry VIII, arrived in Calais determined to reassert his title as "King of England and France."

His army, together with the flamboyant and hugely expensive royal paraphernalia that accompanied it, spent three months achieving little before returning home to a plague-ridden England, with measles for the King and a miscarriage for Queen Catherine.

In that year William Tyndale, born in Gloucestershire from a modest family, was working towards his Masters’ degree at Oxford which he was awarded two years later, the year of his ordination. Since he must be 24 years of age before ordination, this would bring his birth to 1491 - coincidentally, the same birth-year as the King himself.