A Friar at Cambridge
Miles Coverdale was born around 1488, probably in Yorkshire. He studied at Cambridge, was ordained a priest at Norwich in 1514, and joined the house of Augustinian friars at Cambridge, the order to which Martin Luther also belonged.
The prior of that house was Robert Barnes, who was drawn to Luther's teaching in the 1520s and was later burned at Smithfield in 1540. Under his influence Coverdale joined the circle of Cambridge scholars who met to discuss the new ideas from Germany, and when Barnes was tried for heresy in 1526, Coverdale helped him prepare his defense. By 1528 he had left the friars and was preaching in Essex against the worship of images and confession to a priest. Under threat of arrest, he left England.
According to John Foxe, Coverdale joined William Tyndale at Hamburg in 1529 and helped him translate the books of Moses. The story cannot be confirmed, but Coverdale clearly knew Tyndale's work intimately and built on it for the rest of his life.
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