I don't think we can read too much into possession of a bible in English, in practice they seem to have circulated comparatively widely at the time without too comment (even though they almost certainly derived from Wycliffe's 1st translation - they were ok so long as they purported to be a translation made before 1408, which, of course, they all so purported). In 1528 Thomas More (writing against Tyndale's assertion that the church wouldn't allow an English bible in any man's hand) said that if that were true he agreed it was wrong but that he had "seen and can show you bibles fair and old written in English which have been known and seen by the bishop of the diocese and left in laymen's hands, and women's too, such as he knew for good and catholic folk that used it with devotion and soberness".

According to the contemporary chronicler John Rous Richard had a particular name even in his own age for endowing chantry chapels and colleges of priests. One modern historian described it as an obsession, which doesn't easily fit with radically reforming tendencies. His sister Margaret of Burgundy was chummy with the Low Countries reformers.