Henry Savile and the King James Bible: the Second Oxford Company

Topic: Henry Savile and the King James Bible: the Second Oxford Company

Overview

Savile is the only King James translator who is also a central figure in the Neville material, so his Bible work is a natural place to look for a lexical bridge between the 1611 text, his 1591 Tacitus, Grenewey's 1598 Tacitus, Neville's letters and Shakespeare. This packet records a full verse-aligned collation built to test exactly that, and reports both what it found and what it did not.

Two results are firm and new. Savile's company was measurably the most conservative and the most Grecising of the six. And the "blot out" evidence previously offered as a Savile lexical fingerprint does not survive inspection of the base text his company actually worked from.

1. Verified Sourced Facts

A. Company membership and assignment

• Savile sat on the Second Oxford Company, headed by Thomas Ravis, assigned the

four Gospels, Acts and Revelation. Fellow members included George Abbot, John Harmar, Giles Tomson, John Peryn and Ralph Ravens.

• The company met in Savile's own lodgings at Merton, and Savile took a leading role

after Ravis's death in 1609.

• The Bible translator is the same man as the Warden of Merton and Provost of Eton

(1549-1622) who translated four books of Tacitus as The Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba (1591). Checked because "Henry Savile" is a name that needs disambiguating in this project.

• Evidence level: compiled sources, not primary. The six-company division and the

membership list rest on standard scholarship (Campbell; the translators' biographies) rather than on a record inspected in this pass. Surviving records do not assign individual verses to named hands, and no claim here does so.

B. The base text was the 1602 folio, not the 1568

• The companies were instructed to revise the Bishops' Bible, and the copy they worked

from was the 1602 folio (STC 2188). EEBO-TCP's Bishops' text, A10708, is the 1568 first edition. For most of the Bible the difference is orthographic; in the New Testament it is not, because the Bishops' New Testament was substantially revised for the 1572 folio and reprinted thereafter.

• The Bodleian holds a copy of the 1602 carrying the translators' manuscript

corrections: Arch. A b.18, fully digitised.

• Object: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/8f45d791-61c5-42f2-9ce3-a27ee8ac7e90/
• IIIF manifest: https://iiif.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/iiif/manifest/8f45d791-61c5-42f2-9ce3-a27ee8ac7e90.json
• Pointer page: https://www.textandtranslation.org/digitized-1602-bishops-bible/
• Navigation, derived and checked in this pass: canvas = 2 x folio + 40 (recto),

+ 41 (verso).

• A second consequence, verified on the leaf: the **Psalter printed in the 1602 is the

Great Bible Psalter**, not the 1568 Bishops' Psalter. Psalm 51:1 prints "do away mine offences", where the 1568 Bishops' reads "wype out my wickednesse". Any table that sets the KJV Psalms against "Bishops' 1568" is comparing against a text the translators did not have in front of them.

C. What Savile's company actually did

Collation of 27,311 verses present in all three of Geneva (A10675), Bishops' 1568 (A10708) and the 1611 KJV, grouped by translating company. Spelling was normalised to a comparison skeleton so that variant spellings never count as revisions.

• Most conservative of the six. 86.77% of the wording in the Gospels, Acts and

Revelation is carried over from the Bishops'; 12.98% of verses are word-for-word identical to it — roughly five times the Old Testament narrative rate. The section leads at every verse-length band, so this is not an artefact of shorter verses.

• The Greek historic present restored. Counting only consensus revisions, where

Geneva and the Bishops' agree on a past-tense form and the KJV replaces it with a present: 75 such reversions in the Gospels and Acts, against 3 in the entire rest of the Bible. The individual shifts are said > saith (45), came > cometh (18), found > findeth (5), saw > seeth (4), and one each of called > calleth, went > goeth, took > taketh. This is the sharpest section-specific signal in the whole collation.

• Participles up 43%. Participial density rises from 5.25 per 1,000 tokens in the

Bishops' to 7.53 in the KJV — the largest increase of any company (others: +1% to +14%). The words that most distinguish the section's revisions are the participles themselves: hauing, being, comming, entring, standing. Bishops' "aunswered and sayde" becomes "answering, said" 18 times.

• ἀρχιερεῖς disambiguated. Both parents rendered ἀρχιερεύς and its plural

indifferently as "hye priest". The KJV splits them: singular "high Priest" for Caiaphas, plural "chiefe Priests" for the sacerdotal aristocracy. Counts in the Gospels, Acts and Revelation — Geneva 82/23, Bishops' 80/24, KJV 42/64. Forty consensus instances; the largest single lexical revision in the section.

• Lesser lexical moves in the same direction: astonied > astonished (14),

anon > straightway (5), people > multitude (6), towne(s) > village(s) (7), vessels > bottles (3), witnesse > testimonie (2), halt > lame (2).

• Taken together this is the profile of a company revising sparingly and toward the

Greek — consistent with, though not proof of, the presence of a Greek scholar at its centre.

D. The erasure family: a correction to the Blot-Blood report

The Four-Corpus Blot-Blood report ([local source path removed]) argues that "Savile's King James company introduced blot out in Acts 3:19 and Revelation 3:5", and reads this as evidence that Savile worked inside the lexical system of the Tacitus "wipe away the blot" parallel. This inference must be withdrawn. The underlying facts, all verified:

• Against the 1568 Bishops' the claim looks right. **"Blot ... out" as a verb occurs

0 times in Geneva, 0 times in the Bishops' 1568, and 18 times in the KJV.**

• But in the 1602 base text, **all three New Testament instances were already

printed**, with no correction of any kind:

• Acts 3:19, fol. 441v — "that your sinnes may be blotted out"
• Colossians 2:14, fol. 474r — "when he had blotted out the hand wri[t]ing"
• Revelation 3:5, fol. 491r — "I will not blot out his name"

• In Savile's two verses no King James translator chose the word at all. They

inherited it from the revision of the Bishops' New Testament made between 1568 and 1602.

• Where the word was chosen, it was chosen by other companies, and the working copy

catches them doing it. Eleven manuscript "blot" corrections survive on ten leaves, every one of them in the First Westminster (Genesis-2 Kings) or First Cambridge (Chronicles-Song of Solomon) sections: Exodus 32:33, Deuteronomy 9:14, 25:19, 29:20, 2 Kings 14:27, Nehemiah 4:5, Psalm 51:1, Psalm 51:9, Psalm 69:28, and Psalm 109:13 and 109:14 on a single leaf.

• Three verses the 1611 changed are unannotated in this copy — Isaiah 43:25,

Isaiah 44:22, Jeremiah 18:23 — so the First Oxford company's work is not recorded here.

Two of the report's negative claims survive the check and are strengthened by exact counts:

• **"Wipe away" occurs exactly three times in each of the three versions, and every

one of them is tears** — Isaiah 25:8, Revelation 7:17, Revelation 21:4. No English Bible in the comparison ever wipes away a moral stain.

• **The noun "blot" appears twice in Geneva, once in the Bishops', twice in the KJV,

and only ever at Job 31:7 and Proverbs 9:7. It never occurs anywhere in the New Testament. The nominal collocation "wipe away the blot" is therefore absent from all three Bibles, and the Savile / Grenewey / Shakespeare / Neville phrase has no biblical model at all** — which is the report's strongest point and is untouched by the correction above.

2. Negative Results

Three independent tests were run for a lexical bridge between the KJV's revisions in Savile's books and the four comparison corpora. All are null. They are recorded here so the question is not silently reopened.

• Revision-direction test. For each consensus revision, does a corpus already

prefer the KJV's word over the parents' word, more than the 1590-1620 print baseline predicts? Savile's Tacitus scores +0.021 on his own section — indistinguishable from zero — while scoring significantly on the Prophets (+0.248) and OT poetic (+0.208), sections he had nothing to do with. The only statistically significant positive on Savile's own section belongs to a control corpus, Wotton's letters (+0.253).

• Rare-phrase test. Of the trigrams the KJV introduces that are rare in the period

baseline, Grenewey's Annales is elevated 4.13x on Acts (Fisher one-sided p = 0.0049), but this fails Bonferroni correction across the 28 tests run (p = 0.138), and the six shared phrases are Roman provincial administration — "Syria and Cilicia", "hauing receiued authoritie", "citie was filled". Revelation, which Savile's company also revised but which contains no Roman administration, gives zero of 457. The effect tracks subject matter.

• Direct usage check. Savile's Tacitus uses anon at 18.9x the period rate — he

is among the heaviest users of the word in print — and his company's Bible systematically removed it in favour of straightway. On chief, the single largest revision in his section, his Tacitus sits at 1.1x baseline: unremarkable.

Bottom line: the structural and stylistic profile of the Second Oxford Company is real and specific, but nothing in this analysis links the 1611 revisions to Savile's own English, and nothing links them to Grenewey, Neville or Shakespeare. Any future argument on this lane has to clear the Wotton control.

3. Evidence Images

Packet: SOURCE NOTES

Psalm 51:1, fol. 199v — printed "do away mine offences" struck, "Blot out my transgressions" written in the margin:

Psalm 51:9, fol. 200r — "hide" for "Turne", "blot" above "put", "mine iniquities" for "my misdeeds":

Acts 3:19, fol. 441v — the printed 1602 text already reads "blotted out", unannotated. This is one of the two verses previously attributed to Savile's company:

Whole-leaf plates for all ten annotated leaves are assembled in Blot Corrections 1602; the full collation is in Savile KJV Collation.

4. Method and Reproducibility

Pipeline: [local source path removed]

• build verses — verse-aligns the three witnesses into bible align. Note: the

Bishops' Psalter is nested a level deeper in A10708 than the other books and was missed on a first pass; the loader now searches both depths.

• emnorm — early-modern spelling skeletons (u/v, i/j, y/i, long s, doubled

letters, silent final e, gh, macron abbreviations). Known gap: -our/-or and -cion/-tion are not merged, which leaves roughly 1% residual noise in the introduced-token counts and exactly one contaminated pair in the revision inventory.

• analyze1 ... analyze5 — retention, substitution inventory, direction test,

phrase test, significance.

• erasure — the blot / wipe / put-out audit across all three versions.
• bodtool, build plates — Digital Bodleian IIIF retrieval and plate assembly.

5. Notes on Access and Restraint

• The company assignment is compiled scholarship. Do not let it become "Savile chose X"

for any individual reading: the work was collaborative, company drafts were reviewed further, and the surviving records do not assign verses to named hands.

• Psalm 51's "blot out my transgressions" is the most quotable line in this material and

the most dangerous. It belongs to the First Cambridge company. It is not Savile-adjacent evidence and must never be cited as such.

• The 86.77% retention figure is measured against the 1568 Bishops', not the 1602 the

companies used, and the New Testament is where those editions diverge. Treat it as "against the Bishops' tradition" until it can be re-run.