The very first English translators of the Bible

By the seventh century, the first spark of the idea to translate the Bible into English began to flare. According to the Venerable Bede (673-735), Caedmon, a monastery herdsman and the first English poet, paraphrased portions of the Old and New Testaments. None of the originals of Caedmon’s work are extant, but there seems to be little reason to doubt the copies that we possess of his work on Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel. Bede himself then translated portions of John’s Gospel.
Two centuries later, King Alfred the Great (871–99), the most important medieval ruler of England, became a champion of vernacular (English-language) learning. Alfred was noted above all for his courageous and creative defeats of the invading hordes of Vikings. Detailed engravings and paintings, popular in every British elementary school textbook, show him as a harp-playing minstrel in costume, spying in the camps of the Danes. But there are also legends that he translated the Latin Bible into Old English. While that isn’t exactly true—it was Alfred’s scholars who did any such work—he did translate several Latin texts, such as Pope Gregory I’s Pastoral Care, into English. Much later, King Henry VIII (reign 1509–47) probably took his own inspiration to be a scholar-king from the legends of Alfred the Great. (More on that to come in future posts. Alfred found his way into the Catholic canon of saints. Henry VIII wasn’t so fortunate!)