In the 1500s, Catholics persecuted Protestants and Protestants persecuted Catholics.
While Elizabeth I ruled in England, many Catholics fled to Europe, where they worked on an English Bible for Catholics (partly in the hope that England would become Catholic again some day).
They followed the Catholic rule that any translation had to use the Latin Vulgate, not the original Greek and Hebrew.
It was not a particularly good translation, and priests used it much more than the laity.
The New Testament was published in Rheims, France, in 1582 and the Old in Douai, France, in 1609.
The motivation behind this version was that Catholics had learned that the English people liked having the Bible in their own language—but all the previous translations had been by “heretics” (Protestants, that is).
