# The Newe Testament: William Tyndale's New Testament, Worms, 1526 > William Tyndale (translator); Peter Schoffer the Younger (printer) - 1526 (printed February-March 1526, Worms) > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/william-tyndale/tyndale-new-testament-1526-british-library/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-04 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** William Tyndale (translator); Peter Schoffer the Younger (printer) - **Date:** 1526 (printed February-March 1526, Worms) - **Medium:** Letterpress, black-letter (Bastarda-type) printing on paper, octavo, hand-illumination added later to some initials - **Dimensions:** Octavo, approximately 16.4 x 11.3 cm for the edition format; the British Library copy's binding and exact leaf count are not published in the sources consulted - **Object type:** Printed book - **Period:** Northern European, Reformation, sixteenth century - **Current location:** British Library, London - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary One of only two substantially complete copies known to survive of the first printed New Testament in English: William Tyndale's translation, printed in secret at Worms by Peter Schoffer the Younger in 1526 after an earlier attempt at Cologne was raided and abandoned. This copy is missing its own title page. For two hundred and ten years it belonged to Bristol Baptist College, which bought it in 1994 for the British Library, describing it at the time as the most important printed book in the English language.Its status changed twice more after that. In 1996, two years after the British Library's purchase, a second complete copy was identified at the Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart during a routine catalogue computerisation, sitting unrecognised in the collection since the sixteenth century. The Stuttgart copy has the title page this one lacks, and between them the two books now form the closest thing scholarship has to a complete original 1526 Tyndale New Testament. A third copy, badly incomplete, survives at St Paul's Cathedral, on the site where earlier copies were burned.Tyndale did not live to see his translation's eventual triumph. He was betrayed, tried for heresy, and executed near Brussels in 1536. Independent scholarly sampling later found that roughly four in five words of the New Testament in the 1611 King James Bible are his. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1526-1730s** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner is documented for this copy between its printing at Worms in 1526 and its appearance in the possession of an agent acting for Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford, in the 1730s. How or when it reached England, and who held it in the intervening two hundred years, is not recorded in the sources consulted. - **1730s-March 1742** Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford `[documented]` (acquisition) Acquired for Harley by an agent named Murrey. Sold at the dispersal of Harley's library, March 1742, to the bookseller Thomas Osborne. - **1742-1743** Thomas Osborne (bookseller) `[documented]` (purchase) Osborne purchased the volume at the March 1742 Harley sale; sold it on to the antiquarian Joseph Ames in 1743 for fifteen shillings. - **1743-13 May 1760** Joseph Ames `[documented]` (purchase) Ames bought the Testament for fifteen shillings in 1743. At the sale of his own library on 13 May 1760, it was bought by John White for fifteen pounds four shillings and sixpence. - **13 May 1760-13 May 1776** John White `[documented]` (purchase) White held the volume for exactly sixteen years, then sold it on the same calendar date, 13 May 1776, to Andrew Gifford for twenty guineas. - **13 May 1776-July 1784** Andrew Gifford (Baptist minister and British Museum sub-librarian) `[documented]` (purchase) Gifford bought the Testament from White in 1776 and owned it until his death in July 1784. His will directed his executors to distribute items from his library, manuscripts and curiosities as they judged proper. - **Autumn 1784-21 April 1994** Bristol Baptist College `[documented]` (bequest) The Testament arrived at Bristol Baptist College with the Gifford bequest in autumn 1784 and remained the college's single most celebrated possession for two hundred and ten years, held in trust across successive college presidents. The current binding, almost certainly eighteenth-century, is consistent with rebinding around this period. In 1919 a stained-glass window commemorating Tyndale was commissioned at the college partly because of its ownership of this book. How the volume was physically kept, displayed or conserved through this period is not detailed in sources consulted. - **21 April 1994-present** British Library, London `[documented]` (purchase) Sale agreed 21 April 1994, negotiated for Bristol Baptist College by Robert A. Gilbert; reported consistently as a price of one million pounds, with some accounts describing it as somewhat more than that figure. No source consulted publishes an exact final price or itemises any grant contribution. The British Library described the purchase at the time as the most important printed book in the English language; this record has not located the Library's original statement verbatim and flags that gap rather than treating the widely repeated quotation as independently verified against a primary source. ## Open questions - What was the exact route by which this copy passed from Andrew Gifford's 1784 bequest through two centuries at Bristol Baptist College without documented loss or damage? No detailed custodial record for the intervening period was located. - What is the complete modern collation of the British Library's copy beyond the missing title page and table of contents - are any other leaves supplied in facsimile or otherwise imperfect? - Did the 1994 purchase price include, or was it supplemented by, a grant from a body such as the National Heritage Memorial Fund? Sources gesture at institutional support but no source consulted itemises the funding. - What is the true print run of the completed 1526 Worms edition - scholarship gives figures from about 3,000 to about 6,000 and no source consulted resolves the discrepancy. - Exactly how and when did the Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek's copy enter that library's holdings, and when was its Tyndale authorship first lost from the catalogue record, prior to Eberhard Zwink's 1996 re-identification? - Is the traditional account of Bishop Tunstall unwittingly financing Tyndale's revision through Augustine Packington's buy-up of copies independently attested in a contemporary document, or does it rest solely on later chronicle tradition? ## Sources - [1] Various press and reference syntheses on the British Library's 1994 acquisition, converging on: sale agreed 21 April 1994, price reported as one million pounds, description of the book as 'the most important printed book in the English language.' The Library's own original statement was not independently located in full; this citation flags that limitation. - [2] H. R. West, 'The Bristol 1526 Tyndale Testament - its Origin and its History', Reformation / Tyndale Society journal. - [3] 'The Tyndale Window, Bristol Baptist College', Tyndale Society Journal (Osborn), on the 1919 memorial window, the college's custody of the Testament, and the 1994 sale negotiated by Robert A. Gilbert. - [4] Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, institutional page on its Tyndale New Testament 1526 (Kostbarkeiten), on the print run of the Worms edition, the British Library's 1994 purchase, and the St Paul's Cathedral fragment. Direct fetch of the page returned an error at time of research; content reported here is corroborated via independent search synthesis of the same page and cross-checked against other sources. Flagged for a follow-up direct verification. - [5] St Paul's Cathedral, 'Tyndale's New Testament', on the cathedral's own 1710 acquisition, the disguised and later-restored leaf order, and the site of the 1526 book-burnings at St Paul's Cross. - [6] Wikipedia, 'William Tyndale', for the betrayal by Henry Phillips, imprisonment at Vilvoorde, 1536 trial and execution, and the range of scholarly estimates (55-83%) for Tyndale's wording surviving into the King James New Testament. - [7] Wikipedia, 'Tyndale Bible', for the three surviving copies (British Library, Stuttgart, St Paul's), the British Library copy's missing title page, and the Cologne printing's interruption. - [8] British Library events page, 'The Power of the Printed Word: Tyndale's New Testament 1526-2026', for the 2026 Treasures Gallery display dates and accompanying Tudor Bible material (Anne Boleyn's 1534 New Testament, Henry VIII's Great Bible). - [9] Search synthesis on the British Library shelfmark C.188.a.17, confirming the copy is 'almost complete, wanting only the title page,' and citing a 1976 facsimile edition marking the 450th anniversary; underlying page at vll-minos.bl.uk no longer resolves and is flagged as link rot. - [10] Tyndale's Ploughboy (Dr Herbert Samworth), 'Worms New Testament', for the Cologne-to-Worms flight, the 3,000-to-6,000 range for the Worms print run, and comparative completeness of the British Library, St Paul's and Stuttgart copies (St Paul's given as missing approximately 140 pages). - [11] I Love Typography, 'The Most Dangerous Book in the World', for the format and typography comparison between the 1525 Cologne quarto and 1526 Worms octavo editions, the Cologne raid, Peter Schoffer the Younger's family relation to Johann Fust and the elder Peter Schoffer, dimensions of the 1526 edition (16.4 x 11.3 cm), and Tyndale's coined phrases; citing David Daniell's 1994 biography and James F. Mozley's 1937 biography as its own sources for these claims. - [12] Jon Nielson and Royal Skousen, 'How Much of the King James Bible Is William Tyndale's? An Estimation Based on Sampling', Reformation, vol. 3, no. 1, 1998 - the independent sampling study giving approximately 84% for the New Testament and 76% for the portions of the Old Testament Tyndale completed. - [13] Search synthesis on David Daniell's calculation, in his 1994 biography William Tyndale: A Biography, that 83 percent of the King James New Testament reproduces Tyndale's own wording. - [14] Search synthesis on Peter Schoffer the Younger's biography and workshop locations (Mainz, Worms, Strasbourg, Venice) and his printing of the Tyndale New Testament at Worms in 1526, corroborating en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sch%C3%B6ffer_the_Younger. - [15] Wikimedia Commons file page, 'File:Tyndale Bible - Gospel of John.jpg', for the file's description, Public Domain Mark licensing, and its credit line to the British Library Board. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.