The idea was taken up by James I six months after his coronation as King of England. The resolution to produce a new translation was put before the Hampton Court conference in January 1604, although it hadn’t officially been on the agenda. It was proposed by John Reynolds, the president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford – a man who had been born into the Roman Catholic faith, but had crossed over to the Puritan Protestant side.

You can read more about the Hampton Court conference here.

Fifty-four translators were appointed and divided into groups, with each group given a run of consecutive books of the Bible to work on. They were instructed to consult closely with each other, and read each other’s efforts, to ensure consistency of style. They were to follow the 1568 Bishops’ Bible as much as they could, as King James had expressed a firm dislike of the Geneva. Most importantly, there were to be no opinionated marginal notes, only those needed purely for clarifying the meanings of Hebrew and Greek terms.

Where the translators found the Bishops’ translation inadequate, they were to refer to the other English versions in the following order of preference: Tyndale; Matthew-Tyndale; Coverdale; Great; Geneva.

The preliminary translation work took four years. This was followed by nine months of review and revision, carried out in London. A final revision was carried out by Myles Smith (who wrote the preface) and Thomas Bilson. The finished work was printed in London, by Robert Barker, printer to the King.

The King James Bible, also known as the Authorised Version, remained the standard English Bible until the eve of the 20th century. Revised editions appeared in 1629, 1638, 1762 (all produced at Cambridge) and 1769 (Oxford). A measure of its influence is that, when a final version of the rival Geneva was published in 1644, it retained all the controversial marginal notes, but now appended to the King James text.