If you check Thomas More and others, you'll find a big part of their objection was to commoners getting hold of scripture...
"They will say haply, the scripture requireth a pure mind and a quiet mind; and therefore the lay-man, because he is altogether cumbered with worldly business, cannot understand them. If that be the cause, then it is a plain case that our prelates understand not the scriptures themselves: for no layman is so tangled with worldly business as they are. The great things of the world are ministered by them; neither do the lay-people any great thing, but at their assignment. ‘If the scripture were in the mother tongue,’ they will say, ‘then would the lay-people understand it, every man after his own ways.’ Wherefore serveth the curate, but to teach him the right way? Wherefore were the holy days made, but that the people should come and learn? Are ye not abominable schoolmasters, in that ye take so great wages, if ye will not teach? If ye would teach, how could ye do it so well, and with so great profit, as when the lay-people have the scripture before them in their mother tongue? For then should they see, by the order of the text, whether thou jugglest or not: and then would they believe it, because it is the scripture of God, though thy living be never so abominable. Where now, because your living and your preaching are so contrary, and because they grope out in every sermon your open and manifest lies, and smell your unsatiable covetousness, they believe you not when you preach truth. But, alas! the curates themselves (for the most part) wot no more what the new or old Testament meaneth, than do the Turks: neither know they of any more than that they read at mass, matins, and evensong, which yet they understand not: neither care they, but even to mumble up so much every day, as the pie and popinjay speak, they wot not what, to fill their bellies withal. If they will not let the lay-man have the word of God in his mother tongue, yet let the priests have it; which for a great part of them do understand no Latin at all, but sing, and say, and patter all day, with the lips only, that which the heart understandeth not." - THE OBEDIENCE OF A CHRISTIAN MAN
You wrote:
“If you check Thomas More and others, you’ll find a big part of their objection was to commoners getting hold of scripture...”
Completely false. This is what More wrote:
“The whole Bible long before Wycliff’s day was by virtuous and well-learned men translated into the English tongue, and by good and godly people with devotion and soberness well and reverently read.” (Dialogues III)
“The clergy keep no Bibles from the laity but such translations as be either not yet approved for good, or such as be already reproved for naught [bad translations or notes] as Wycliff’s was. For, as for old ones that were before Wycliff’s days, they remain lawful and be in some folks’ hand. I myself have seen, and can show you, Bibles, fair and old which have been known and seen by the Bishop of the Diocese, and left in laymen’s hands and women’s too, such as he knew for good and Catholic folk, that used them with soberness and devotion.” (Ibid)
So much for your claim.
“Very few people had access to the scripture in the common tongue. That is what made Tyndale (and Wycliffe before him) so important - they pried the scripture out of hte hands of the few and gave it to the masses.”
So true, so true. and for that he was hated.