Bishop and Irish scholar. Had the Old Testament translated into Irish. Short biography and "Pointers for Prayer".

William Bedell 1571-1642

William Bedell was was born December 1571, at Black Notley in Essex, of an ancient and respectable family.He was a a graduate of Cambridge University where he studied at Emmanuel College. After ordination he ministered in the British Embassy in Venice, There he formed friendships with scholars, with whom he examined and compared the Greek Testament. He also studied Hebrew with the chief rabbi of the Jewish synagogue. On his return to England, he lived at Bury St. Edmunds, and married the widow of the Recorder of that town. They had four children, two of whom died young. In 1615 he was appointed to Horningshearth, where he resided twelve years.

He was appointed Provost of the University of Dublin in 1627 on the recommendation of Archbishop Ussher to the Fellows. He served for two years and was highly successful in restoring religious observance in Trinity College. He brought in the rule that divinity students from Ireland would both study and use the Irish language in worship and he introduced an annual grant to encourage this. He pursued his own study of the language and had the Old Testament translated into Irish.

Bedell was appointed bishop of Kilmore in 1629, serving there until his death in 1642. On his arrival in Kilmore he faced considerable difficulties. Shortly after his arrival he wrote that “The plantations are raw and the churches ruined; any cathedral is without steeples”. His cathedral was “without steeple, bell or font” and he devoted much of his energies to its repair, and to the refurbishment of other churches in the diocese. He observed with much regret that “the English had all along neglected the Irish, as a nation not only conquered but undisciplinable, and that the clergy had scarce considered them as part of their charge, but had left them wholly in the hands of their own priests, without taking any other care of them, but the making them pay their tithes."

Bishop Bedell is remembered for his saintly life and his work of translating the scriptures into the Irish language due to a desire to reach out to the native Irish. he studied Irish, and secured the services of competent persons to translate the whole Bible into that language. He, himself, revised the whole, comparing it with the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, so as to correct the errors in the English.His Irish neighbours called him “optimus Anglorum”, the best of the English. His nobility, charity and ecumenism were renowned in an age of tyranny, injustice and bitter divisions in Ireland and Great Britain. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called Bedell “the most faultless character in all ecclesiastical history”.

As Bishop, Bedell’s devotion to the Irish language was legendary. He spoke it wherever possible. He also insisted that his clergy be able to speak, read and write the language correctly. He instructed that prayers were to be read in Irish in the cathedral every Sunday. In 1631 he published a short summary of Christian Doctrine in Irish and later an Irish grammar. Whilst some landed gentry in County Cavan objected to the Dublin authorities about Bedell’s promotion of the Irish language, regarding him to be in breach of the anti-Irish laws of the time, Bedell replied that his Irish-speaking flock needed religious instruction, and that this could not wait until they could speak English.

When he was 70 years old there was a rebellion in 1641 which lasted until 1652. Many English and Scots planters were driven off their lands, some being killed and others left to die from exposure and hunger. The leader of the rebels visited Bedell and assured him no harm would come to him. Bedell sheltered hundreds of fugitives from the rebels. He with his sons and families were imprisoned and later placed in Drumcor rectory under a form of “house arrest”. He died of a fever there aged 71, in 1642. His last words were, “Whether we live or die we are the Lord’s”. His death was mourned by the Confederates and many others. He was buried in a simple plot in a corner of Kilmore churchyard.

POINTERS FOR PRAYER

+ Pray for those who continue to translate the scriptures.

+ Pray for those who are willing to try to understand other peoples’ culture.

+ Pray for the ownership of the Irish language by people of all political and religious backgrounds.

+ Pray for those Christians who have been faithful “even unto death”.

Text copyright - The Dean of Belfast, 2005.