Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 49.djvu/132

 Rogers and his colleagues. He died in April 1889. His ‘Reminiscences’ were edited by his brother, J. E. Thorold Rogers.

 ROGERS, JOHN (1500?–1555), first martyr in the Marian persecution, born about 1500 at Deritend in the parish of Aston, near Birmingham, was son of John Rogers a loriner, of Deritend, by his wife, Margery Wyatt (cf., John Rogers of Deritand, in ‘Transactions of Birmingham Archæological Section’ [Midland Institute] 1896). After being educated at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, he graduated B.A. in 1526. He is doubtless the John Rogers who was presented on 26 Dec. 1532 to the London rectory of Holy Trinity, or Trinity the Less, now united with that of St. Michael, Queenhithe. He resigned the benefice at the end of 1534, when he seems to have proceeded to Antwerp to act as chaplain to the English merchant adventurers there. He was at the time an orthodox catholic priest, but at Antwerp he met William Tindal, who was engaged on his translation of the Old Testament into English. This intimacy quickly led Rogers to abandon the doctrines of Rome; but he enjoyed Tindal's society only for a few months, for Tindal was arrested in the spring of 1535, and was burnt alive on 6 Oct. next year. The commonly accepted report that Rogers saw much of Coverdale during his early sojourn in Antwerp is refuted by the fact that Coverdale was in England at the time. Rogers soon proved the thoroughness of his conversion to protestantism by taking a wife. This was late in 1536 or early in 1537. The lady, Adriana de Weyden (the surname, which means ‘meadows,’ Lat. prata, was anglicised into Pratt), was of an Antwerp family. ‘She was more richly endowed,’ says Fox, ‘with virtue and soberness of life than with worldly treasures.’ After his marriage Rogers removed to Wittenberg, to take charge of a protestant congregation. He rapidly became proficient in German.

There seems no doubt that soon after his arrest Tindal handed over to Rogers his incomplete translation of the Old Testament, and that Rogers mainly occupied himself during 1536 in preparing the English version of the whole bible for the press, including Tindal's translation of the New Testament which had been already published for the first time in 1526. Tindal's manuscript draft of the Old Testament reached the end of the Book of Jonah. But Rogers did not include that book, and only employed Tindal's rendering to the close of the second book of Chronicles. To complete the translation of the Old Testament and Apocrypha, he borrowed, for the most part without alteration, Miles Coverdale's rendering, which had been published in 1535. His sole original contribution to the translation was a version of the ‘Prayer of Manasses’ in the Apocrypha, which he drew from a French Bible printed at Neuchatel by Pierre de Wingle in 1535. The work was printed at the Antwerp press of Jacob von Meteren. The wood-engravings of the title and of a drawing of Adam and Eve were struck from blocks which had been used in a Dutch Bible printed at Lübeck in 1533. Richard Grafton [q. v.] of London purchased the sheets, and, after presenting a copy to Cranmer in July 1537, obtained permission to sell the edition (of fifteen hundred copies) in England. The title ran: ‘The Byble, which is all the Holy Scripture: in whych are contayned the Olde and Newe Testament truly and purely translated into Englysh by Thomas Matthew, MDXXXVII. Set forth with the kinges most gracyous Lyce[n]ce.’ The volume comprised 1,110 folio pages, double columns, and was entirely printed in black letter. Three copies are in the British Museum. A second folio edition (of greater rarity) appeared in 1538, and Robert Redman is credited with having produced a 16mo edition in five volumes in 1540; of this no copy is known. It was twice reprinted in 1549: first, by Thomas Raynalde and William Hyll, and again by John Day and William Seres, with notes by Edmund Becke [q. v.] Nicholas Hyll printed the latest edition in 1551.

Although Rogers's responsibility for the translation is small, to him are due the valuable prefatory matter and the marginal notes. The latter constitute the first English commentary on the Bible. The prefatory matter includes, firstly, ‘The Kalendar and Almanack for xviii yeares’ from 1538; secondly, ‘An exhortacyon onto the Studye of the Holy Scripture gathered out of the Byble,’ signed with Rogers's initials ‘I. R.’ (the only direct reference to Rogers made in the volume); thirdly, ‘The summe and content of all the Holy Scripture, both of the Old and Newe Testament;’ fourthly, a dedication to King Henry, signed ‘Thomas Matthew;’ fifthly ‘a table of the pryncypall matters conteyned in the Byble, in whych the readers may fynde and practyse many commune places,’ occupying twenty-six folio pages, and 