On October 4, 1535, the first complete Bible printed in English came off the press, translated mostly by Miles Coverdale. Where it was printed is not certain: Zurich, Cologne and Antwerp have all been proposed, and the book itself says nothing. Coverdale had been at work since about 1532, and he built his New Testament on the translation of William Tyndale, who had published his English New Testament in 1526 and was strangled and burned at Vilvoorde in October 1536.
He worked from translations. Coverdale said so himself in the preface, listing five interpreters he had used: the Latin Vulgate, Luther's German, the Swiss German of Zwingli and Leo Jud, Erasmus's Latin New Testament, and Tyndale's English. The result was uneven. The Psalms are the part that survived, and the Coverdale Psalter is still the version used in the Book of Common Prayer.
The book exists because of a change in royal policy. Henry VIII had broken with Rome in 1533 and been declared supreme head of the church, and English Bibles had been banned since the Oxford Constitutions of 1409, which forbade translating scripture or owning an unlicensed translation. Tyndale's New Testaments were smuggled in by the thousand. They were publicly burned. By 1535 the political calculation had turned, and a Bible in English was useful to a king who had just removed the pope's jurisdiction.
It took two more years for that to become official. The Coverdale Bible was never licensed by name, but Thomas Cromwell backed it, and in 1537 a revised edition, the Matthew Bible, was licensed and ordered to be set up in every parish church. The Great Bible of 1539, also arranged by Cromwell, was the one actually chained to the lecterns.
The wording came from Tyndale more than from anyone else. Roughly 80 per cent of Tyndale's New Testament survived into the King James Bible of 1611. Coverdale's own contribution was the Old Testament books Tyndale had not reached, and a plain, rhythmic English that fixed phrases like the valley of the shadow of death in the language.