These are truths universally acknowledged, that the Bible is one of the world's great collections of literature, and that the King James Bible is one of the finest pieces of English prose. Yet almost nothing is known of how these truths came to be. This is not because there is nothing to know, but because, in the first place, people believed that there was nothing to know. The King James Bible, since its publication, has ‘held the position of an English classic’ (Revised Version, preface): if so, what possible story could there be? None, naturally. But the truth is that the King James Bible was generally scorned or ignored as English writing for a century and a half after its publication.

This book had its origins in that fact. To read John Selden's observation from the middle of the seventeenth century that the King James Bible's language ‘is well enough so long as scholars have to do with it, but when it comes among the common people, Lord, what gear do they make of it’ was to realise that the cliché of the King James Bible's immediate success as an English classic had to be questioned. To find that Selden's was not a lone voice was to know that there was a story to be told, and to find that no one had recognised the existence of such a story, let alone told it, was to have to try to understand it and tell it myself.