It all started around 1515, according to tradition, at the White Horse Inn near Cambridge University, in England. A group of young college lecturers in theology and Bible studies met there regularly to talk about Luther's "heretical" ideas.
From this group would come some of the outstanding leaders of the Protestant movement in England—men like Bible translator Miles Coverdale and future Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer. But no figure in this group would make a more indelible mark on the future of the English Church than an earnest young student of Scripture named William Tyndale.
A native of Gloucestershire, Tyndale had taken his master's degree at Oxford, where he'd studied both Hebrew and Greek. At that time, he'd developed his lifelong love of the Bible. Around 1515, he'd left Oxford to study Greek at Cambridge under the famous scholar Erasmus. There, the radicals at the White Horse Inn fired him with a passion to give the Word of God to everybody in England —not just a privileged few. As he later promised his adversaries, "If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth a plough shall know more of the Scriptures than thou doest."
