Few debates on the Bible in the Middle Ages are as neatly divided along confessional lines as that on the medieval vernacular Bible. It is a common misconception, especially in Protestant circles, that people (or, at least, the “common” people) in the Middle Ages did not read the Bible. Biblical literacy was restricted, so it is believed, to the very small intellectual elite of monks and priests, who did everything they could to safeguard this monopoly. Even authors of otherwise solid scholarly works could solemnly declare that “[e]cclesiastical policy was accustomed to withholding Scripture from those ignorant in Latin.” This perception probably originates in the Protestant Church histories of the sixteenth century, such as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which recounted many tales of hapless Christians, burned at the stake for the mere possession of a bible in English. Foxe's book was published in for the first time in 1563, when England's Protestants were still emerging from a period of persecution at the hands of the Catholic Queen Mary I (d. 1558) and were witnessing the continuing persecution of fellow Protestants in many parts of Continental Europe. Needless to say, this perspective deeply colored English Protestant views of church history. Anticlericalism and religious partisanship, however, should not inform a modern analysis of the relationship of the laity and the Bible in this period.