The Council of Toulouse in it's canon was clear:
“We prohibit also that the laity should be permitted to have the books of the Old or New Testament; unless anyone from motive of devotion should wish to have the Psalter or the Breviary for divine offices or the hours of the blessed Virgin; but we most strictly forbid their having any translation of these books.”
A Psalter or Breviary...that's it, but nothing else. Anything else was corrupt and unauthorized by decree. The laity were not permitted to read the Bible on their own.
We owe a debt to those who sought to overcome this hateful decree.
The Council of Toulouse did ban the possession of vernacular Bibles for the laity without a license; not because the Church wished to discourage the authentic study of Scripture, but because the Bible was used as a tool for the promotion of the Albigensian heresy. In the Middle Ages, Bibles contained glosses, either in between verses or in the margins. These glosses served to guide the reader's interpretation of the text. A decently translated Bible could contain glosses which might lead the reader to reject the Church. Or the translation of the Bible could be perverted to support a heretical doctrine. For these reasons, some very poor and incorrectly translated bibles were burned.
The uncritical anti-Catholic also assumes that because there were relatively few bibles, knowledge of Scripture was limited. That was hardly the case. Catholics transmitted biblical knowledge in other forms. There were books which paraphrased stories in the Bible as is done today in children's books. The visual arts abounded in Scriptural themes. Stained-glass windows were the poor man's Bible. There were Miracle plays, which were the forerunners of modern Western theatre, as well as poems recounting Bible stories. Even the illiterate had access to the Bible through their families. Only a minority of people were literate during the Middle Ages, but sometimes one person in the family could read (often a woman) and the Bible, being the most widely-owned book in the Middle Ages, was read aloud.
The assumption driving this myth of bible-banning is that the Church, during the Middle Ages, was a big bad oppressor who wanted her flock to be ignorant so that it wouldn't challenge her power and her doctrines.
So the charge that the Church was against knowledge of Scripture is entirely unfounded. It's true that in some periods and some places vernacular versions of the Bible were rare or non-existent, but that's not the same thing as saying that the Church did not want the laity to read the Bible.
You can find out more about this heresy ion the Catholic Encyclopedia or In Karl Keating's "Catholicism and Fundamentalism".