The privilege of printing and publishing the KJV belonged to the King’s Printer, but as the two universities had the freedom to print any book whatsoever Cambridge published its first KJV in 1629. Oxford exercised its right in 1675 only. John Fell dean of Christchurch and bishop of Oxford was chief of a syndicate that took over in 1671 the management of the University Press, installed in the Sheldonian Theater built in 1668-1669 by Christopher Wren.
In-quarto KJVs were often bound with the psalms and the Book of Common Prayer to form a liturgical book compared to the Catholic missal.
Psalms in ballad meter previously published by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins were gathered in 1562 by the publisher John Day, with the addition of new psalms by Tomas Norton and John Markant, and translations of versified prayers. The Sternhold-Hopkins versions were sung to music borrowed mostly from the French Calvinist Psalter, and, after the 1621 Thomas Ravencroft edition, to music composed by late Tudor and early Stuart English composers such as Ravencroft himself, Thomas Tallis, John Dowland or John Milton – father to the poet. In spite of criticism aimed at the lack of philological accuracy of the text – for example by the authors of the Puritan Bay Psalm Book in 1640 – 200 editions of the Sternhold-Hopkins version were published between 1550 and 1640.