The forgotten masterpiece that helped shape the modern English language
As our new Education Secretary rethinks how we learn about language, Eliot Wilson on one of the most forgotten and seminal English texts
Five hundred years ago this year, the first copies of an English translation of the New Testament appeared in London. The brilliant young theologian and linguist William Tyndale, then studying in Germany, was the first scholar to translate the New Testament directly from the original Greek text into English, but his work had not been authorised by the Church and copies were only available clandestinely.
The Tyndale Bible was merely the beginning. Over the coming decades, three pioneering works in English were written which are some of the richest sources of the language we still speak today. And one of them deserves considerably more public renown than it receives in modern society.
It was Groucho Marx who joked, “Oh, that Shakespeare! What did he do? Nothing but string together a load of old clichés”. We cannot tell how many familiar idioms were invented or first recorded by William Shakespeare’s electrifying imagination and effusive hand, but it is hundreds, perhaps thousands.
While Shakespeare was writing his later plays—King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest—the second treasure-house of modern English was in production. In 1604, James VI and I, King of Scots for nearly 40 years but recently crowned King of England, commissioned a new translation of the Bible. It was a huge project: 47 scholars, arranged into six committees.
Language with power and beauty
Between them, in 1611, they produced the King James Bible, or the Authorised Version. Dignified and sonorous and described by even the militant atheist Christopher Hitchens as “a giant step in the maturing of English literature”, it gave the language a fresh injection of phrases and axioms which have endured.
There is a third rich seam of English idiom which looms less large in the public imagination. It was written earlier than the other two sources, and, unlike the King James Bible, it was largely the work of one overall hand and mind. It is still employed in some form for its original purpose; yet it is a text with which many are no longer familiar, as those who regularly attend Anglican services now number only half a million or so.
The first version of the Book of Common Prayer was published in 1549. England had broken with Rome in the early 1530s, and at Henry VIII’s death in 1547, his son Edward VI, only 11 years old, brought to the throne a distinctly more austere and Protestant sensibility. The task of creating an English liturgy, the forms of morning and evening prayers, the administration of the sacraments and other ceremonies, fell principally to one man: Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury.
It was an enormous task. The early stages of the English Reformation in the 1530s had been principally political, concerned with jurisdiction, authority and who had the power to annul Henry VIII’s first marriage, to Katharine of Arágon, and free him to wed Anne Boleyn. The theological arguments were fierce: whether the Eucharist really was the body and blood of Jesus Christ; whether man could achieve salvation by good works or it was imputed to him by God; whether prayers for the dead had any effect on their souls. The Church of England contained a broad spectrum of theological opinion, and accommodating as many as possible in the liturgy was challenging.
A distinct idiom: plain but dignified and elevated
Cranmer had to break new ground in crafting a solemn and appropriate liturgical form in a language which was still new. Early modern English, the version of our language we hear in Shakespeare and at the Tudor and Stuart courts, had only begun to develop a hundred years before, when the Court of Chancery had begun using English rather than Norman French.
Unlike some contemporary bishops, Cranmer was a scholar, not a politician. Only 43 when he was named Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533, he had studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, and held a fellowship there. He became a well respected theologian, one of the scholars approached by the Crown to work on the case for annulling Henry VIII’s first marriage.
What flowed from Cranmer’s pen was a distinct idiom. One that was plain but dignified and elevated, designed to be memorable. It has a rhythmic cadence which recalls its roots in spoken worship. From it have emerged phrases which retain power and beauty, even for non-believers.
“Give peace in our time, O Lord.” “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” “Not by any to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in fear of God.” “Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.”
Astoundingly influental
English is comfortably the world’s most widely spoken language, used by 1.5 billion people, nearly a fifth of humanity. It probably has the largest vocabulary, estimated at between 500,00 and one million words. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said in a 1977 interview:
“I find English a far finer language than Spanish… English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers—for any idea you take, you have two words… I think that, of all languages, English is the most physical of all languages.”
Within less than 75 years, this country laid the foundations of the modern English language, the world’s lingua franca. Shakespeare’s reputation is eternal, and the Bible needs no advertisement. But the Book of Common Prayer is an astoundingly influential artefact, and any other country would shout its glories.
Within the Church of England, the Prayer Book Society has been championing its use for more than 50 years. Former Cabinet minister Lord Gove has often spoken enthusiastically about not only the ethics but the linguistic beauty of the Prayer Book.
That the Book of Common Prayer is a religious text does not diminish its influence. Religion does not take place in a vacuum and should not be left to the churches. The English should take pride in Cranmer’s work and say to the world, here, this beauty we have wrought, it echoes down the ages, it shaped our language and just as surely us. In Cranmer’s own words: “Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.”