Holy Island: A Lenten Pilgrimage to Lindisfarne
The Bible did not really belong to the people and become a part of their lives until the invention of the printing press brought wide  distribution in the vernacular and the Reformation gave them freedom to read it.  In Green's Short History of the English People is this testimony: "No greater moral change ever passed over a nation that passed over England in the latter part of the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth.  England became the people of a book, and that book was the Bible.  Because of it, the whole moral tone of the nation was changed."