They were aimed at removing monopolies, in the form of patents awarded to the King's Printers for England and Wales and for Scotland, respectively, in the publication of the Authorized Version of the Bible in English.
The Bible monopoly was a contentious issue from its start, with the bookseller Michael Sparke set against the first King's Printer, Robert Barker.
By about 1800 the position had changed, with the loss of the American colonies, the rise of evangelical movements in Christianity in the British Isles, and incipient technical innovation in printing.
Following advice from William Laud after their Great Charter of 1636, Oxford over a long period took non-competition payments from the Stationers' Company, in relation with other monopolies, and invested in building up a scholarly press.
[2] A royal order of 1724 addressed the contemporary issues of cheaply-printed Bibles with many errors, that were also expensive, in particular requiring the wholesale price to be printed in the book.
[13] The bookseller George Offor, in evidence to a parliamentary committee, pointed out that the customary loophole of permitting annotated Bibles had been closed by the wording of a renewed monopoly patent.
[19] George Browne's 1859 institutional history of the BFBS emphasised that it was not a campaigning organisation, and in particular concentrated on the supply of Bibles, rather than lobbying against the monopoly.
[21] An appeal was made, reaching the House of Lords in 1828, by George Buchan of Kelloe (1775–1856) representing Scottish Bible societies; he was a leading lay evangelical.
A secondary monopoly-related issue, but one important in the Scottish context, was the refusal of the BFBS to print a metrical psalter with its Bibles, the content being not from the Authorized Version, but translation that was a Stationer's Company monopoly.
[27] At this time the King's Printer for England, holder of the monopoly, was John Reeves (died 1829), appointed in 1800 by William Pitt the younger, in association with the firm Eyre & Strahan.
[28][29] A parliamentary committee was set up, chaired by John Archibald Murray, the Lord Advocate, in 1835, with remit restricted to the Scottish monopoly.
[37][38] A sub-committee of the London Committee of nonconformist ministers, comprising James Bennett, Francis Augustus Cox and Ebenezer Henderson, was set up in 1830 to look into the Bible monopoly.
[39][40] The Baptist minister Thomas Curtis (c.1787–c.1860, from 1833 in the United States), of the London Committee,[39] in 1833 published a pamphlet, querying the accuracy, and the adherence to the 1724 requirements, of the Bible texts printed by the university presses.
[40] Edward Cardwell, who effectively ran the Bible department of the university press in Oxford, replied to Curtis's attack, which was in the form of a letter to Charles James Blomfield, the Bishop of London, in the British Magazine.
In July 1859 Sir George Lewis, the Home Secretary, replied to Edward Baines in the House of Commons in terms suggesting that "free and unlicensed printing of the Bible" was not what the government supported, on the issue of authentication of the text.
[55] A subsequent select committee recommending a free trade solution, Lewis instead renewed the patent in 1860, it being common ground that Bible prices were not likely to decrease further.