Two particularly influential milestones in English literature were published in the 16th and early 17th Century. In 1549, the “Book of Common Prayer” (a translation of the Church liturgy in English, substantially revised in 1662) was introduced into English churches, followed in 1611 by the Authorized, or King James, Version of “The Bible”, the culmination of more than two centuries of efforts to produce a Bible in the native language of the people of England.
As we saw in the previous section, John Wycliffe had made the first English translation of “The Bible” as early as 1384, and illicit handwritten copies had been circulating ever since. But, in 1526, William Tyndale printed his New Testament, which he had translated directly from the original Greek and Hebrew. Tyndale printed his “Bible” in secrecy in Germany, and smuggled them into his homeland, for which he was hounded down, found guilty of heresy and executed in 1536. By the time of his death he had only completed part of the Old Testament, but others carried on his labours.
Tyndale’s “Bible” was much clearer and more poetic than Wycliffe’s early version. In addition to completely new English words like fisherman, landlady, scapegoat, taskmaster, viper, sea-shore, zealous, beautiful, clear-eyed, broken-hearted and many others, it includes many of the well-known phrases later used in the King James Version, such as let there be light, my brother’s keeper, the powers that be, fight the good fight, the apple of mine eye, flowing with milk and honey, the fat of the land, am I my brother’s keeper?, sign of the times, ye of little faith, eat drink and be merry, salt of the earth, a man after his own heart, sick unto death, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, a stranger in a strange land, let my people go, a law unto themselves, etc.
Ironically, a scant few years after Tyndale’s execution, Henry VIII’s split with Roman Catholicism completely changed official attitudes to an English “Bible”, and by 1539 the idea was being wholeheartedly encouraged, and several new English language Bibles were published (including the “Coverdale Bible”, the “Matthew Bible”, the “Great Bible”, the “Geneva Bible”, the “Bishops Bible”, etc).
The “King James Bible” was compiled by a committee of 54 scholars and clerics, and published in 1611, in an attempt to standardize the plethora of new Bibles that had sprung up over the preceding 70 years. It appears to be deliberately conservative, even backward-looking, both in its vocabulary and its grammar, and presents many forms which had already largely fallen out of use, or were at least in the process of dying out (e.g. digged for dug, gat and gotten for got, bare for bore, spake for spoke, clave for cleft, holpen for helped, wist for knew, etc), and several archaic forms such as brethren, kine and twain. The "-eth" ending is used throughout for third person singular verbs, even though "-es" was becoming much more common by the early 17th Century, and ye is used for the second person plural pronoun, rather than the more common you.
The comparison below of the famous Beatitudes from Chapter 5 of the Gospel According to St. Matthew (in the Wycliffe, Tyndale and Authorized versions respectively) gives an idea of the way the language developed over the period: