A 16th-century scholar and gifted linguist, who besides his native English mastered German, French, Spanish, Italian and Latin, as well as the original languages of the Scriptures, Greek and Hebrew. He is believed to have been born in 1494, in North Nibley, a village in Gloucestershire (England) and took it upon himself to clandestinely translate the Bible into the English of his day. His was the first English translation of the Scriptures to draw, besides from Latin, directly from Hebrew and Greek texts. In 1535, Tyndale was arrested for the unauthorized translation of the Scriptures. He was jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde (Flanders) and tried by Catholic officials of the Inquisition from Leuven. Being found guilty for heresy he was publicly strangled, prior to being burnt at the stake in 1536, the same year as his contemporary Desiderius Erasmus died. Much of his work eventually found its way into the later King James Version of the Bible. His works were published in the new medium of print, which allowed for its wide distribution. Many of them were printed in Antwerp, on the presses of Merten de Keyser, who besides the first complete English Bible translation, also produced the first complete French Bible. William Tyndale's translation of the Bible introduced new words into the English language, such as peacemaker, scapegoat and beautiful.