Before the KJV, translating was against the law, punishable by death. Why?!

William Tyndale was burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English. How could an activity so seemingly innocent be so threatening? It’s not as if a theft or a murder or some other serious crime had been committed. This was simply translating Hebrew and Greek words and sentences into English equivalents. Where’s the threat to national security? Why would this sort of activity be regarded as a way of undermining king and kingdom?
Simply put: The established order and status quo were in danger. By about 1380, translating Scripture into the vernacular became criminal, and attempting to translate the Bible became dangerous and clandestine work, like smuggling Bibles into Saudi Arabia today. There was a lot at stake in such work—quite literally!
Speech has always been dangerous. Language carries ideas that can be infectious. Historically, words have demonstrated more power than swords to stir hearts and speak to souls. Some philosophers have even remarked that without speech and words human beings would be without souls.
In the Middle Ages, the words of God were believed to have been set in stone—complete and forever finished. They were not to be changed in any way. Never mind the issues that are now familiar to us about the reliability (or unreliability) of ancient or original texts, and the methods of transmission of those texts, and so on; for most people in the centuries before the KJV, messing with the particular words of God that they knew in the Latin Bible was like deciding to take a chisel and hammer to the Venus de Milo. Imagine a man who walks into the Louvre in Paris saying to himself, “I think I could take that unseemly angle off her nose with just a tap or two right about … there!”