The King James Version is more than four hundred years old, and in the United States, Canada, Australia and most other countries anyone may print it, quote it, record it or put it online without asking. It is the most widely used public-domain Bible in the world, and many free Bible websites and apps are built on it.

In the United Kingdom, the position is different. There, the right to print the Authorized Version, as it is usually called in Britain, belongs to the Crown, and is exercised by printers holding royal letters patent. Many King James Bibles carry a notice such as this one:

Rights in the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible are vested in the Crown.

This article explains how that came about, who holds the rights now, and what difference it makes.

The Crown’s rights in the King James Version are not copyright in the ordinary sense. Copyright is created by statute and lasts for a fixed term. The Crown’s claim rests on the royal prerogative: powers the monarch held by ancient right, before and independently of Parliament. From the sixteenth century English monarchs claimed control over the printing of certain books important to church and state, including the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and statutes. They granted the right to print these by letters patent, formal open letters conferring a privilege.

When Parliament passed modern copyright laws, it left these prerogative rights alone. The current statute, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, says in section 171 that nothing in it affects “any right or privilege of the Crown subsisting otherwise than under an enactment.” Because the right does not come from a copyright statute, it has no expiry date. It should not be confused with Crown copyright, the statutory copyright in works made by government officials, which does expire.

How far the prerogative extends, and how it would apply to new forms of publication, has seldom if ever been tested in a modern court. Lawyers who have written about it describe its scope as uncertain. In practice it is respected by publishers and administered by licence.

The King’s Printer

The first King James Bible was “Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Maiestie,” in 1611 (see The King James Version). The office of King’s Printer (or Queen’s Printer, depending on the monarch) carried the patent for printing Bibles in England.

Robert Barker had inherited the office from his father, Christopher Barker, who had acquired it under Elizabeth I. The patent was valuable, because every parish church needed a Bible and Prayer Book and many households bought one, and it was fought over. Barker borrowed heavily to pay for the 1611 Bible, fell into disputes with his partners and financiers, and spent his last years in a debtors’ prison. His firm also printed the notorious “Wicked Bible” of 1631, which omitted “not” from the seventh commandment.

The patent remained with the Barker family and their partners until 1709. It then passed to the heirs of Thomas Newcomb and Henry Hills, and from 1710 John Baskett began buying shares in it, gaining control by the 1730s. Baskett’s printings were handsome but careless: his Oxford folio of 1717 printed “the parable of the vinegar” for “the parable of the vineyard” in a chapter heading, and was nicknamed the “Vinegar Bible.”

In 1769 Charles Eyre bought the remaining years of the Baskett privilege, and a patent of 1799 went to George Eyre, Andrew Strahan and John Reeves. Through these partnerships the office passed to the firm of Eyre & Spottiswoode, which held it from the nineteenth century until 1990.

The privileged presses

Two other printers have long had their own right to print the Bible in England: the university presses of Cambridge and Oxford, often called the “privileged presses.”

Cambridge’s right goes back to letters patent of Henry VIII in 1534, which allowed the university to print “all manner of books.” Cambridge did not begin printing until the 1580s, partly because the Stationers’ Company in London, which guarded its own monopolies, resisted. The first Cambridge Bible, an edition of the Geneva Bible, appeared in 1591, printed by John Legate. Cambridge’s editions of the King James Version in 1629 and 1638 corrected many of the errors of the London printings.

Oxford’s right was confirmed by a charter of Charles I in 1636, obtained through Archbishop William Laud, who was Chancellor of the University. Oxford became a major Bible printer from the later seventeenth century, and it was at Oxford that Benjamin Blayney produced the revised text of 1769 that most King James Bibles still follow.

For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the King’s Printer, the universities and the Stationers argued and bargained over who could print what. The result was a shared monopoly: in England and Wales, only the King’s Printer and the two university presses could print the Authorized Version, and the price of Bibles reflected the lack of competition.

Scotland goes its own way

Scotland had its own King’s Printer for Scotland, with its own Bible patent. In the 1830s a campaign against the Bible monopolies, led in Scotland by the Coldstream minister Adam Thomson, argued that the privileges kept Bibles expensive for the poor. When the Scottish patent expired in 1839, the government did not renew it as a monopoly.

Instead, new letters patent created a body usually called the Bible Board, made up of the Lord Advocate, the Solicitor General for Scotland, the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and other members. The Board did not print Bibles itself. It licensed Scottish publishers to print them and kept watch over the accuracy of their texts. Glasgow and Edinburgh firms, among them William Collins of Glasgow, became major Bible publishers under this system, and Collins Bibles were sold throughout the English-speaking world. From 1890 the Board’s licensing was limited to the Bible, the New Testament and the Psalms.

The Scottish arrangement showed that the Crown’s rights could be used to guard the text rather than to restrict supply: anyone suitably qualified could be licensed, and prices fell.

Who holds the rights today

In 1990 Cambridge University Press took over the Bible list of Eyre & Spottiswoode and, with it, the office of Queen’s Printer. With the accession of Charles III in 2022 the title became King’s Printer again. As the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge administers the Crown’s rights in the Authorized Version in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, licensing other publishers on the Crown’s behalf. Oxford University Press retains its own privilege as a university press. In Scotland, the Bible Board continues to license printing.

The credit line in many British publications reflects this arrangement: extracts from the Authorized Version are “reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.”

What it means in practice

For most readers, the Crown’s rights make no difference. Quoting verses of the King James Version in a sermon, an essay or a book is ordinary practice everywhere. Cambridge’s published permissions notice has stated that applications are not required for liturgical use of up to 500 verses, less than a complete book, and that other uses should be referred to its permissions department. Terms of this kind can change, and anyone planning a substantial publication in the United Kingdom should check the current position with the patentee.

The rights matter mainly to publishers. A firm wishing to print and sell a complete King James Bible in the United Kingdom needs to do so under licence, which is why British editions name the patentee. Publishers outside the United Kingdom need no permission to print the King James Version in their own countries, and have done so freely for centuries. The complete English Bible printed by Robert Aitken of Philadelphia in 1782, generally regarded as the first printed in America, appeared after the colonies’ break with Britain had set aside the royal patent; before that, colonial readers had relied on Bibles imported from Britain.

Some questions remain open. It is not clear how the Crown’s rights would apply to a website hosted abroad and read in Britain, or exactly which form of the text they cover: the 1611 printing, Blayney’s 1769 text, or both. Modern scholarly editions, such as David Norton’s New Cambridge Paragraph Bible (2005), carry their own copyright in their editorial work, quite apart from the Crown’s rights.

A different kind of freedom

The history of the King James Version shows that control over Scripture can serve different ends. Royal privilege funded printers, guarded the text against careless editions (not always successfully), and also kept prices high. Scotland’s reform kept the oversight but opened the market.

Open Word Bible takes a different route to freedom of use. Rather than waiting for rights to expire or depending on how a jurisdiction treats them, it dedicates its translation, notes and data to the public domain under CC0 from the start, so that they can be printed and reused in any country without permission. It translates from the SBL Greek New Testament and the Westminster Leningrad Codex, not from the King James Version or any other English Bible, which it uses only for comparison. Its drafts are AI-assisted and await review by named human reviewers. For how other translations have become free to use, see Public domain and open Bibles.

Sources

  • Black, M. H. Cambridge University Press, 1584–1984. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
  • Campbell, Gordon. Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 1611–2011. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
  • Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (c. 48), section 171. legislation.gov.uk.
  • Herbert, A. S. Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible, 1525–1961. London: British and Foreign Bible Society, 1968.
  • McKitterick, David. A History of Cambridge University Press. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992–2004.
  • Norton, David. A Textual History of the King James Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  • Cambridge University Press. “Royal Connections.” cambridge.org.
  • National Library of Scotland. Records of the Bible Board (archive descriptions). manuscripts.nls.uk.
  • Bible quotations: this article quotes notices and imprints rather than Bible verses; the King James Version text is public domain outside the United Kingdom.