Flames shot skyward as more and more fuel was heaped on the roaring bonfire. But this was no ordinary fire. The intense conflagration was being fed with Bibles as priests and prelates looked on. But by buying the Bibles in order to destroy them, the bishop of London unknowingly helped the translator, William Tyndale, to finance further editions!

In a letter to Pope John XXIII in 1412, Archbishop Arundel referred to “that wretched and pestilent fellow John Wycliffe, of damnable memory, that son of the old serpent, the very herald and child of antichrist.” Climaxing his denunciation, Arundel wrote: “To fill up the measure of his malice, he devised the expedient of a new translation of the scriptures into the mother tongue.” Indeed, what most enraged church leaders was that Wycliffe wanted to give people the Bible in their own language.