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mark of all Tyndale’s writing is its brilliant resonance when read aloud. From the trivium , he moved on to the quadrivium , of arithmetic, music, astronomy and geometry. Whether Tyndale was musical or not, we do not know, though singing and playing music were a favourite student pastime; but the sense of rhythm and cadence that floods his work shows that he had a sensitive ear. He did not write poetry either and was somewhat sour to colleagues who did, and yet his images and his gift for the mood of words reveal a poetic temperament.
    Public teaching was by lecture and disputation. The master took a set text and expounded on its meaning. His students had to provide interpretations and glosses on it, and to launch quaestiones , or investigations, into its aspects. Formal debates and oratory were held on dies disputabilis . In front of the young scholars, or sophisters, masters and bachelors argued on either side of an interpretation or proposition – usually one proponent and two opponents – until the presiding master gave his determination or final judgement.
    Oxford was known as the Vineyard of the Lord for its learning and its beauty – ‘a place gladsome and fertile, suitable for a habitation of the gods’ Wycliffe had written of it – but Tyndale found its teaching sterile and antiquated. He improved himself ‘in knowledge of tongues and other liberal arts’, laying the basis of his translating genius. He devoted much attention to theology, and, so the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe recorded, ‘read privily to certain students and fellows of Magdalen College some parcel of divinity, instructing them in the knowledge and truth of the scriptures’. He found the Oxford theologians, however, to be ‘old barking curs … beating the pulpit with their fists for madness’.
    The great enemies in his life – Sir Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey, and two bishops of London, Cuthbert Tunstall and JohnStokesley – were between fifteen and eighteen years older than him. Thomas More, for example, had gone up to Oxford in 1492. They were closer to the swirling anarchy, intrigues and assassinations of the dynastic wars; they were more conservative, more fearful of change than Tyndale. In 1515, while Tyndale was still at Oxford, More was on a diplomatic mission to Antwerp. Here he had begun to write Utopia , his evocation of a magical island of happiness and fair play, where reason and justice reign; but Utopia means a ‘non-place’, as the name of its great city, Amaurotum, comes from the Greek for ‘darkly seen’, and for More this ideal was an irony reflecting on the brutishness of reality.
    Tyndale’s generation had less reason to fear change and disorder. He was restless at Oxford and scornful of the status quo. He found the student to be crushed by tradition and censorship: ‘he is sworn that he shall not defame the university, whatsoever he seeth’, he said, ‘and when he taketh his first degree, he is sworn that he shall hold none opinion condemned by the church; but what such opinions be, that he shall not know.’
    The influence of Scholasticism, with its attempts to reconcile classical learning with Christian revelation, was all-pervading. It involved the minute examination of the Bible as the source of the absolute truth of God, against which human knowledge must be reckoned. Elaborate glosses were built on verses, sentences and individual words. Some of these glosses touched deep issues of faith, but many were ludicrous; the number of angels who could be gathered on the point of a needle was discussed in one example, while another, cited by Erasmus, posed the question of whether Christ could have taken on the likeness of a mule, and, if so, whether a mule could be crucified. Tyndale himself attended a degree ceremony for doctors of divinity at which a formal disputation was heard over whether the widow has more merit than the virgin.
    This was mere ‘sophistry’, Tyndale said, and he was at war with