William Tyndale, an English reformer, born at North Nibley, Gloucestershire, about 1484, executed at Vilvoorden, in Brabant, Oct. 6, 1536. He was educated at Oxford and Cambridge, took orders, and was tutor and chaplain in the house of Sir John Welch near Bristol. He sympathized with the reformation, and while in this family he translated the Enchiridion Militis, or " Soldier's Manual," of Erasmus into English. His boldness of speech induced suspicion, and he went to London, where he began his translation of the New Testament. He was soon compelled to flee again, and with the promise of an annuity of £10 from Alderman Munmouth, on condition of praying for the souls of the alderman's parents, he went to Hamburg, where for a year he gave himself to his work; thence to Cologne, where the first ten sheets of his translation were put to press; and thence to Worms, where in 1525 two editions were published anonymously. They had speedy and wide circulation. The edict of the bishop of London, forbidding under heavy penalties their use or their possession, only increased the demand.

Tyndale was lampooned by Sir Thomas More in seven books of elaborate abuse, and plots were laid to arrest him, which he foiled by removing in 1528 to Marburg, where he published his work on "The Obedience of a Christian Man." In 1529 a fifth edition of the New Testament was printed; and in 1530 appeared Tyndale's translation of the Pentateuch. A new edition of the New Testament, revised and corrected, was issued at Antwerp in 1534, in which Tyndale avowed his responsibility for the work. At the instance of the English government he was arrested at Antwerp, and after 18 months' imprisonment at Vilvoorden was strangled and then burned at the stake. The works of Tyndale and Frith his assistant, collected and published after the reformation was established, were issued in London in 3 vols. 8vo in 1831, and by the "Parker Society" in 1848-'50. The translation of the New Testament was the principal model and basis of the King James version, and its diction is but little more obsolete. An edition of it was published in London in 1836, edited by George Offor (reprinted, Andover, Mass., 1837). A memorial was erected to Tyndale at Nibley Knoll, Gloucestershire, in November, 1866.