Of the early days of this great man but very little is known. Foxe, in his Life of William Tyndale, says that he “was born about the borders of Wales, and brought up from a child in the University of Oxford, where he, by long continuance, grew up and increased as well in the knowledge of tongues and other liberal arts, as especially in the knowledge of the Scriptures, _whereunto his mind was singularly addicted_, insomuch that he, lying then in Magdalen Hall, read privily to certain students and fellows of Magdalen College some parcel of divinity; instructing them in the knowledge and truth of the Scriptures. His manners also and conversation, being correspondent to the same, were such that all they that knew him reputed and esteemed him to be a man of most virtuous disposition and of life unspotted. Thus he, in the University of Oxford, increasing more and more in learning and proceeding in degrees of the schools, spying his time, removed from thence to the University of Cambridge, where, after he had likewise made his abode a certain space, being now further ripened in the knowledge of God’s Word, leaving that University also, he resorted to one Master Welch, a knight of Gloucestershire.” In these few lines Foxe concentrates the history of several years, and these were years of supreme interest and importance both to the man and to us. Nor has subsequent research done very much to fill in this gap, although one or two things are now clear to us. It was for a long time believed that William Tyndale was a son of Thomas Tyndale of Hunts Court, the manor-house of North Nibley, a village in Gloucestershire. Accordingly a monument has been erected upon Nibley Knoll (one of the Cotswold Hills) in his honour--a noble column which is still conspicuous from far in that pleasant country. But it has been shown that this could not have been, and that not to the manor-house, but to a farmhouse, must we look for the birthplace of our hero. At Melksham Court, in the parish of Stinchcombe, there had long lived a family of Tyndales, who, it is said, had originally come from the North of England. This was during the Wars of the Roses, and in order to elude the proscription which in turn visited the adherents of each house, these Tyndales assumed the name of Hutchins.