Baskets full of the heretical books were now carried outside to
the rood, the cross that soared by the north tower, to be burnt. A great fire was lit, despite heavy rain. Barnes and the others carried their faggots round the flames three times, and then hurled them into the fire, as a reminder of what would happen to their own bodies half a mile away at Smithfield should they lapse back into gospelling and Luther-reading.
On 3 March, the Steelyard merchants in London wrote to warn their colleagues abroad that More and Wolsey were on the hunt for heretical books, and that care must be taken with imports.
The first copy of the Testament was landed within a few days. We do not know the time and place that this pioneer arrived on its native coast, of course, for it slipped ashore furtively, but copies were certainly being sold in the early spring of 1526. In March 1528, Bishop Tunstall interrogated John Pykas, a Colchester baker and gospeller, in the same chapel where Tyndale had vainly asked for Tunstall’s patronage. Pykas confessed that ‘about two years last past he bought in Colchester, of a Lombard of London, a New Testament in English and paid for it four shillings’. To Tunstall’s irritation, he added that he ‘read it through many times’.
A steady flow of Testaments was maintained by the skills and mercenary instincts of the smugglers. The nearer an Englishman was to the North Sea coast, the closer he was to the genius of Tyndale. The diocesan records of Lincoln show that crews of Hull seamen, after visiting Protestant Bremen, spoke with awe of how ‘the priest and all that were in the church, old and young, would sing after their mother tongue’. Bishop Nix of Norwich complained in 1530 that ‘the gentlemen and the commenty [commonality] be not greatly infect, but merchants and such that hath their abiding not far from the sea’.
Englishmen had traded freely until 1275, when Edward I imposed a duty on export of wool and hides. In 1303, the system was expanded, and merchants had to pay special duties on imported wines as well as exported cloth, with a ‘custom’ of 3d in
the pound value on all other goods entering or leaving the country. Permanent staffs of customs officials were established. Geoffrey Chaucer, whose poetry made him the most significant figure in the English language before Tyndale, had been appointed controller of the Customs and Subsidy of Wools, Skins and Tanned Hides in the port of London in 1374; the father of the man who would betray Tyndale had recently been made ‘customer’ at Poole in Dorset.
Smuggling had thrived since the imposition of duties. The first great smuggling fortune had been made by the Lombard Nicholas Sardouche 150 years before Tyndale; he specialised in the illegal export of wool to Italy and the Netherlands, but also made a turn from Venetian cloth of gold and Cornish tin. The customers were in permanent warfare with smugglers and with their own black sheep. Controllers were appointed to watch over collectors. Each kept a half of the seal of the port, so that a ship could not be cleared from customs without the say so of both men, and each rendered a separate account to the exchequer. That was the theory. In practice, corruption was so common that a third set of officials – ‘surveyors’ – were brought in, to little avail. Venice regularly voted a sum for the admiral of the state galleys to use to bribe English officials on the annual visit of the fleet to England and Flanders. Florentine merchants favoured landing their cargoes on the quays at Southampton, where their bribes enabled them to escape most duties throughout the century.
Merchants smuggled high duty cloth and wines, of course, but also more humble goods: brushes, felt hats, playing cards, pins, tennis balls, fans, bridles, girdles, swan feathers, leather buckets, pepper, spices, and treacle.
Books, however, were exempt from customs duties. An Act of 1483, imposing widespread duties on imports and restricting the immigration of foreign craftsmen, expressly allowed free entry and sale for ‘any Books, written or printed’. Foreign printers, mainly
Dutch and Belgian, set up agencies in London and staffed them with their fellow countrymen. Large quantities of textbooks, primers and missals were printed in Antwerp and Paris for the English market. The flourishing Antwerp printers Christoffel van Ruremund and Johannes Hillen produced little else. There was thus a flourishing and legitimate trade in imported books that served as cover for those dealing in banned works by Luther and Tyndale.
Londoners were notoriously hostile to foreigners, and fretted at the freedoms given them. An Italian visitor noted that, though in Bruges he had been welcomed and complimented by all, Londoners treated foreigners ‘with the utmost contempt and arrogance … they look at us askance by day, and at night they sometimes drive us off with kicks and blows of the truncheons …’. The constant pressure to repeal the 1483 privileges, backed up by sporadic rioting against immigrant craftsmen, was resisted until 1533. An Act was passed acknowledging that ‘a marvellous number of printed books had and still do come in … whereby many of the King’s subjects be destitute of work’. From Christmas 1533, anyone importing books for resale, or buying them, was to forfeit the books and be fined 6s 8d per copy. Only people granted a special licence were allowed to import books printed in English, or to sell, give or publish such books. The penalty was imprisonment during the king’s pleasure, and the forfeiture of all possessions, thus reducing the malefactor’s unfortunate family to penury.
Bible smuggling was made particularly dangerous by the heresy legislation. Detection involved a lengthy and sometimes lethal stay in a damp and unhealthy cell. At least one Flemish printer–bookseller died in a London prison, as we shall see, after his arrest for running pirate Tyndale editions. But it continued apace. Flat printed sheets were hidden in the inbound cargoes of woad, madder and alum for cloth-making, iron and steel tools,
cannon, glassware, and luxuries, wines, raisins, figs, and ‘all manner paper and parchment’. Books were stacked in barrels and casks which false cargo manifests declared to contain wine or oil; they were carefully wrapped and hidden in the meal in sacks of flour or slipped into boxes of furs. Correspondence from Tyndale’s supporters in London, and the cash and letters of credit from his backers for which More searched long and fruitlessly, were carried in chests with hidden compartments. Bales and cases with contraband were marked with a dab of colour or a twist of cloth, identifiable to the smugglers. This could make a consignment vulnerable – More seized a large shipment, after breaking a prisoner under interrogation, and extracting from him ‘the shipman’s name that had them, and the marks of the fardels [bundles]’ – but most cargoes got through.
London was the major destination. Wharves and warehouses ran along the north bank of the Thames from St Katherine’s in the east, downriver from the Tower, through to Westminster. There were other quays and depots on the south bank, from Bermondsey as far as the archbishop’s palace at Lambeth. The long estuary of the Thames abounded with creeks and quiet anchorages, at Deptford, Greenwich and Tilbury. Smugglers frequently offloaded contraband into small boats as they lay at anchor in the estuary waiting for the tide or wind to turn. Canvey Island provided a bleak and muddy depot for storing such cargoes. The customs men employed ‘tide-waiters’ who joined ships as they anchored off Gravesend, staying aboard as the tide carried them up to London to prevent cargo being run ashore, but there were more ships than tide-waiters.
The Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk coasts had many isolated creeks and ‘dries’, where a boat was left high and dry at low water and her cargo could be walked ashore. Inland from the coast were discreet tracks, ‘cart gaps’ and ‘drove roads’ and ‘padders’, used for driving cattle and sheep, which kept clear of villages and hamlets.
Flemings had the lion’s share of the business. They ran cloth and wool out of England, and beer; the crews had a taste for English beer, and scarcely a cargo was seized that did not include barrels of beer, which the crew had tried to pass off as drinking water. They avoided the large ports, berthing at Drypool rather than Hull, and in Norfolk they regularly used Brancaster, Cromer and Happisburgh, a huge expanse of coast that had only a handful of customs searchers. There were English ships, too, most commonly of 30 tons burden, overmanned by Dutch standards with crews of ten and more. Walberswick in Suffolk had five masters capable of taking a ship to Iceland, the Low Countries and France, and eighty ordinary seamen of whom eighteen could navigate the coastal waters as far as London. The usual pay for a voyage from Yarmouth to Antwerp and back was 10s. Crewmen were allowed to engage in trade on their own account, and shared in the profits of any smuggling, piracy or wrecking that was done.
Losses were high, with ships wrecked on the shifting sandbanks and treacherous harbour entrances of the east coast. The lodesmen, or coastal pilots, were a professional body, whose members had to pass examinations held in Newcastle, Hull and Bristol; their Guild of the Holy Trinity and St Clement, later, as Trinity House, to be responsible for the navigation marks in British and colonial waters, was founded a dozen years before its pilots guided the first Bible cargoes to land.
The East Anglian coast was taxing. Haisborough Sand lies eight miles off the north Norfolk coast, steep-to with heavy breaking swells, an evil place if there is any north in the wind. The seas build up quickly over the bars at the river mouths. Further south, there are shoals and tide rips on the approaches to Great Yarmouth; dangerous shoals lie well offshore to the east of the Thames estuary, the Galloper, Gabbard, Drill Stone, the Falls. Informers were an additional peril. A new system of rewards was introduced in Henry’s reign, which gave informers half the fines levied on the
smugglers they betrayed. A London haberdasher named George Welplay employed his servants to spy on the Suffolk coast.
The governor of the Merchant Adventurers Company nonetheless told the statesman Thomas Cromwell that smuggled cargoes went to and from Antwerp on every tide. The skippers of herring busses and hoekers from the cod fishery, pinks and smacks, often ran cargoes when fish were hard to find, slipping between the sandbanks into the many rivers of the coast, the Stour, Blackwater, Crouch, Orwell, Deben. The local fishing communities supported the smugglers, who gave them work as dockers, carters, lookouts and draymen. A customs searcher based at Lynn in Norfolk would be spotted long before he made his way to Heacham, Burnham, Wells or Cley; the Suffolk smuggling ports, Walberswick, Southwold, Aldeburgh and Woodbridge, were equally remote from officialdom. In theory, a vessel with smuggled goods was seized and sold off with its cargo to the benefit of the crown. In practice, it was often sold back to the smugglers for a fraction of market value.
Risks were offset by the handsome profits on offer. It cost the London merchant Sir John Fulford less than £50 to built a coaster, the
Dorothy Fulford
; he expected the vessel to pay for herself within nine months. Smuggling Testaments was good business.
Thomas More convinced himself that the evangelicals had formed a great conspiracy and were distributing some Tyndale copies free of charge. ‘I was by good honest men informed that in Bristol,’ he wrote, ‘there were of these pestilent books some thrown into the streets and left at men’s doors by night, that where they durst not offer their poison to sell, they would of their charity poison men for naught.’ Catholics in France made the same claim. A city ordinance at Laon in France a little later required all ventilation shafts giving on to the street from basements to be sealed off. This was because ‘there come men secretly sent from the city of Geneva, carrying little books … These men throw these books
secretly by night into the cellars and basements through the air vents … [S]hortly after, a fair number of inhabitants who were avid for novelties abandoned the Catholic religion and adopted the new one, which was called Lutheran, and all because of these little books.’
This was wishful thinking. The unpalatable fact was that people paid, and paid handsomely, for the Testament. John Tyball of Steeple Bumpstead in Essex confessed that he had bought his copy of Tyndale for 3s 2d. His friend Thomas Hilles paid 3s for the volume he bought at Whitsun in 1526. Tyball also had a copy ‘of the gospel of Matthew and Mark in English’, the rare sheets surviving from the aborted Cologne printing, as well as ‘certain of Paul’s epistles in English after the old translation’, meaning hand-copied Lollard manuscripts.
We do not know whether Tyndale had completed Matthew’s gospel and had started on Mark before Cochlaeus uncovered him in Cologne. Robert Ridley, Tunstall’s chaplain, complained that ‘M William hichyns, otherwais called M W tyndale, and frear William roy, manifest Lutheranes heretikes and apostates’, were doing great damage ‘by their commentares and annotations in Mathew & Marcum in the first print …’
The wholesale price, landed in England, was around 2s 8d for a bound copy. This corresponds to the eight groats apiece for five copies paid by one William Furboshore in the Suffolk town of Stowmarket. He marked them up to the retail price of between 3s and 4s charged by most bookrunners. This was a very reasonable amount – hugely so, compared with the £2 10s or more needed to buy a hand-copied Lollard Testament – and well within the pocket of a skilled craftsman. Spanking profits were made, nonetheless. In 1528, John Raimund – the English spelling of Ruremund – was denounced in London for ‘causing 1500 of Tyndale’s New Testaments to be printed at Antwerp, and for bringing 500 into England’. Raimund was an alias of Hans van Ruremund, also
known as van Endhoven, who had printed a pirate edition at Antwerp to have smuggled on to the English market. A judgement was later secured on van Ruremund’s behalf against the Antwerp bookseller Francis Byrkman for £25, the amount still outstanding from a bill of £28 17s 3d for the supply of 729 copies of Tyndale. The wholesale price in Antwerp was thus 9½d a copy. Once shipped to England, readers paid up to 4s a copy, a mark up of 500 per cent.
They did so willingly.