The English Reformation
In 1534, Henry VIII severed England's ties with Rome through the Act of Supremacy, declaring himself head of the Church in England. What followed was a sustained campaign of religious transformation that intensified under Edward VI and, after a brief Catholic restoration under Mary I, became permanent under Elizabeth I. The Elizabethan Act of Supremacy of 1559 and the subsequent penal laws criminalised Catholic worship, the celebration of Mass, and the priesthood itself.
The consequences for Catholics who refused to conform were severe. Recusancy — the refusal to attend Church of England services — brought heavy fines and imprisonment. Functioning as a Catholic priest in England constituted legal high treason, punishable by execution. By the end of Elizabeth's reign in 1603, an estimated two hundred Catholics had been put to death for their faith.
The English College at Douai
It was against this backdrop that William Allen, a former Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, conceived a plan to preserve English Catholic scholarship and train priests for the dangerous mission of ministering to Catholics in England. On 29 September 1568, he founded the English College at the University of Douai in the Spanish Netherlands (now northern France).
The college became the intellectual heart of English Catholicism in exile. It attracted a remarkable concentration of Oxford-educated scholars who had left England rather than conform to the new religious settlement. Over the course of its existence, the college sent more than three hundred priests back to England, knowing that capture likely meant death. Approximately one hundred and sixty of these missionaries were executed, becoming known as the Douai Martyrs. The first to die was Cuthbert Mayne, put to death in 1577.
Gregory Martin and the Translation
Among the scholars who gathered at Douai was Gregory Martin, one of the original students at St John's College, Oxford, and a close friend of Edmund Campion. Martin arrived at the college in 1570, was ordained in 1573, and spent two years helping to establish the English College in Rome before returning to the continent.
In 1578, political unrest in the Low Countries forced the college to relocate temporarily to Rheims. It was here, in October 1578, that Martin began his monumental work of translating the entire Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English. Working with extraordinary discipline — translating roughly two chapters each day — he is believed to have completed the entire text by July 1580, a span of less than two years.
His work was not solitary. Allen, together with Richard Bristow and Thomas Worthington, reviewed Martin's translation daily and prepared the extensive theological annotations that would accompany the text. These notes were not mere commentary; they were carefully argued responses to the doctrinal claims of the Protestant Reformers, addressing contested passages of Scripture point by point.
Publication
The Rheims New Testament, 1582
The New Testament was published first, in 1582, while the college was still at Rheims. It appeared in quarto format in a print run of only a few hundred copies, accompanied by dense annotations. The text was distinctive for its heavily Latinate vocabulary — a deliberate choice reflecting the translators' fidelity to the Vulgate and their conviction that certain theological concepts were best expressed in terms closely derived from the Latin.
Gregory Martin did not long survive his achievement. He had contracted tuberculosis, and died on 28 October 1582, the same year his New Testament was published. He was approximately forty years old. William Allen delivered his funeral sermon. His tomb in Rheims was lost during the French Revolution.
The Douai Old Testament, 1609–1610
Although Martin had completed the Old Testament translation by 1580, financial difficulties prevented its publication for nearly three decades. It finally appeared in two quarto volumes from Douai — Genesis through Job in 1609, and Psalms through 2 Maccabees (together with the apocryphal books) in 1610. By this time the college had returned to Douai from Rheims, which is why the complete work bears the names of both cities.
Reception and Legacy
The completed Douay-Rheims Bible entered a hostile environment. In England, possessing it was a criminal offence. Yet its influence extended beyond Catholic circles. The translators of the King James Version, published just one year after the Douai Old Testament in 1611, acknowledged the Rheims New Testament in their preface and drew upon it significantly. Scholarship has shown that roughly a quarter of the proposed revisions to the Gospels in the KJV adopted readings from the Rheims text.
The Douay-Rheims remained the sole authorised English Bible for Catholics for over three centuries. In the mid-eighteenth century, Bishop Richard Challoner would undertake a substantial revision that made the text more accessible to contemporary readers — though at the cost of much of Martin's distinctive Latinate character.
The text presented on this site is Martin's original, as it appeared in 1582 and 1609–1610, with only light modernisation of spelling and punctuation. It is a monument to the faith and scholarship of a community that risked everything to preserve the word of God in English.