The forgotten book that shaped modern English as much as Shakespeare

Five hundred years ago this year, the first copies of William Tyndale's English New Testament slipped into London, smuggled from Germany where the young theologian had translated directly from Greek. It was a dangerous act, unauthorised by the Church, but it lit the fuse for a transformation of the English tongue.

Over the following decades three works would anchor the language we speak today. Tyndale's Testament began the shift. The King James Bible, completed in 1611 by 47 scholars working in six committees, cemented it with sonorous authority. But there is a third source, earlier than the Authorised Version and largely the product of a single mind, that has faded from public view despite its reach.

The first Book of Common Prayer appeared in 1549, the year after the boy king Edward VI succeeded Henry VIII. With the break from Rome barely two decades old, the task of forging an English liturgy fell to Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. A Cambridge scholar rather than a court politician, Cranmer was 43 when he took the post in 1533. He had already helped build the legal case for Henry's first annulment; now he had to write the prayers of a new church in a language still finding its feet.

Early modern English had only emerged a century earlier when the Court of Chancery swapped Norman French for English. Cranmer's challenge was to make that vernacular sound solemn without becoming opaque. His solution was a style plain but elevated, rhythmic enough to be memorised, dignified enough to carry the weight of ritual.

Give peace in our time, O Lord. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Not by any to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in fear of God. Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.

Those lines, and dozens more, have outlived the controversies that birthed them. They surface at funerals, weddings and state occasions, spoken by believers and non-believers alike. Christopher Hitchens, no friend of religion, called the King James Bible "a giant step in the maturing of English literature"; the same could be said of Cranmer's book, which preceded it by more than sixty years.

A language gone global

English is now the world's most widely spoken tongue, used by roughly 1.5 billion people. Its vocabulary, swelled by Germanic and Latin roots, is estimated at between 500,000 and one million words. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that English felt "the most physical of all languages" because every idea carries two registers, one Saxon, one Romance. That dual heritage was already audible in Cranmer's cadences.

Within 75 years of Tyndale's New Testament, the foundations of modern English were laid. Shakespeare's genius is undisputed; the King James Bible needs no marketing. Yet the Book of Common Prayer, still in use in some Anglican parishes, attracts a fraction of the attention. The Prayer Book Society has championed it for more than half a century, and former Cabinet minister Lord Gove has spoken publicly of its linguistic beauty as well as its ethics.

Why it matters now

As the new Education Secretary reviews how language is taught, the case for restoring Cranmer to the curriculum grows stronger. The phrases he crafted are not relics; they are living infrastructure, the shared vocabulary of a nation that once ruled a quarter of the globe and now exports its tongue through screens and servers. Recognising the Prayer Book's role is not an act of piety but of cultural honesty.

In Cranmer's own instruction to the reader: "Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest." The language has done the digesting; it is time the credit caught up.