Say What?
The average person couldn’t read at all at the time Latin or otherwise, but many years later, when Wycliff translated the Bible into english, people were killed by the Church:
One of Wycliffe’s followers, John Hus, actively promoted Wycliffe’s ideas: that people should be permitted to read the Bible in their own language, and they should oppose the tyranny of the Roman church that threatened anyone possessing a non-Latin Bible with execution. Hus was burned at the stake in 1415, with Wycliffe’s manuscript Bibles used as kindling for the fire. The last words of John Hus were that, “in 100 years, God will raise up a man whose calls for reform cannot be suppressed.” Almost exactly 100 years later, in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses of Contention (a list of 95 issues of heretical theology and crimes of the Roman Catholic Church) into the church door at Wittenberg. The prophecy of Hus had come true! Martin Luther went on to be the first person to translate and publish the Bible in the commonly-spoken dialect of the German people; a translation more appealing than previous German Biblical translations. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs records that in that same year, 1517, seven people were burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church for the crime of teaching their children to say the Lord’s Prayer in English rather than Latin.
First, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is propaganda. More importantly, the issue wasn’t Wycliffe translating the Bible into English - it was his heretical teachings.
What was the lingua franca of (Western) Europe in the 4th Century? 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th?
You would be surprised. It starts with an L and ends in N.
And don’t even attempt to quote Foxe as an authoritative source.
Lollard Bibles were commonly confiscated from people suspected of being heretic and given to people know not to be. Why do you assume that a person who reads only English cannot be deceived by a bad translation, translation itself being a matter of interpretation, not just simple transliteration?