William Tyndale - Foxe's Book of Martyrs - Burned for making English Bibles in 1500's

The acts and monuments of John Foxe, 1563, Chapter 12.

The Life and Story of the True Servant and Martyr of God - William Tyndale.

Tyndale's Old and New Testaments were the first English translation of the scriptures taken directly from the original Hebrew and Greek languages. They remain, as the Times of London put it, 'the basis of all English language Bibles until the recent fiascos. It's phrases and cadences, both homely and pungent, are so woven into the language as to be rarely recognised as the work of an individual author [i.e., Wm. Tyndale].' Tyndale's 1526 New Testament was the first ever printed in English. In the 1530's he also translated the first fourteen books of the Old Testament. He thus became the first man to translate anything from Hebrew into English -- as Hebrew was virtually unknown in England at that time.