The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.s8.19

c4.s8.19

5. *Ibid*, p.105, quoting 34 & 35 Henry VIII, c.l. This statute dating to 1542-43 A.D., consisting of just one Article after a preamble read, ‘...The Bible shall not be read in *English* in any church. No women or artificers, prentices, journeymen, servingmen of the degree of yeomen or under, husbandmen, nor labourers, shall read the New Testament in *English*. Nothing shall be taught or maintained contrary to the King’s instructions. And if any spiritual person preach, teach, or maintain any thing contrary to the King’s instructions or determinations, made or to be made, and shall be thereof convict, he shall for his first offence recant, for his second abjure and bear a fagot, and for his third shall be adjudged an heretic, and be burned and lose all his goods and chattels.’ The statute was entitled ‘An Act for the Advancement of True Knowledge’. This restriction, however, may have completely been lifted by the time the ‘authorised version’ of the Bible (King James’s translation) was published in England in 1611.