had but to translate to him bits of the Bible
out of the Latin, which he did not understand,
into his familiar Anglo-Saxon tongue, and he
would cast it into the rugged Saxon measures
which could be sung by the common people.
So far as we can tell, it was so, that the Bible
story became current in Anglo-Saxon speech.
Bede himself certainly put the Gospel of John
into Anglo-Saxon. At the Bodleian Library, at
Oxford, there is a manuscript of nearly twenty
thousand lines, the metrical version of the
Gospel and the Acts, done near 1250 by an
Augustinian monk named Orm, and so called
the Ormulum. There were other metrical versions
of various parts of the Bible. Midway
between Bede and Orm came Langland's
poem, "The Vision of Piers Plowman,"
which paraphrased so much of the Scripture.

Yet the fact is that until the last quarter of
the fourteenth century there was no prose version
of the Bible in the English language. Indeed,
there was only coming to be an English
language. It was gradually emerging, taking
definite shape and form, so that it could be
distinguished from the earlier Norman French,
Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon, in which so much of
it is rooted.

As soon as the language grew definite enough,