Miles Coverdale

Miles Coverdale was an English friar who left his order, fled abroad, and helped William Tyndale with his translation work. When Tyndale was arrested with the Old Testament unfinished, Coverdale finished the job a different way. He did not have Tyndale's command of Hebrew, so he built from Tyndale's work, the Latin Vulgate, and Luther's German, and in 1535 published the first complete Bible printed in English — a fact he admitted plainly in his preface, saying he wished better scholars had done it.

Four years later he edited the Great Bible, the version chained in every parish church by royal order, so that ordinary people could walk in and read. His ear for English outlasted his scholarship: the Psalms in his wording stayed in the Book of Common Prayer for centuries and are still sung in cathedrals. He served briefly as Bishop of Exeter, fled again under Mary I, and died quietly in London in 1569.