In the fifth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I it was enacted by Parliament ‘that the Bishops of Hereford, Saint Davids, Asaph, Bangor and Llandaff… shall take such Order amongst themselves…, That the whole Bible…, with the Book of the Common Prayer…, as is now used within this Realm in English, to be truly and exactly translated into the British or WELSH tongue’. This authorization of a version of the Holy Scriptures by the English Parliament is unique, but that does not make the Welsh version the authorized version of the realm. What was endorsed by the 1563 Act was not the validity of the Welsh version as Scripture, but its legality despite being in Welsh. A generation earlier, the Act of Union of England and Wales had proscribed the use of Welsh in ‘any manner office or fees within this realm of England, Wales or other the Kings Dominion’. It so happened, however, that the 1563 Parliament had amongst its members a sufficient number who could be persuaded to put religious need before political expediency, having themselves but recently suffered for their religious convictions. Moreover, it was the good fortune of the Welsh people, in contrast with other Celtic groups, that they had in their midst, at this critical point in their history, men whose competence and scholarly equipment were equal to the task of producing a vernacular version. They were all alumni of the English Universities; and there they had come into contact with those movements which were radically transforming the intellectual, the religious and the political life of Western Europe. These were, of course, the rebirth of learning, the reformation of religion, the growth of national feeling with the accompanying emergence of vernacular literatures – movements whose irresistible onward surge was greatly accelerated by the printing press, an invention of the previous century. It was the dream of these Welshmen that this flood could be channelled to fructify the arid spiritual desert which they saw in their native land; and this they sought to achieve first and foremost by giving the Welsh people the Bible in printed form and in their own tongue.