On turning to examine the presses at work at the same time as Caxton's one cannot but be struck by the scarcity of illustrations. Lettou and Machlinia, though they produced over thirty books, had no ornaments that we know of beyond a border which was used in their edition of the Horae ad usum Sarum, and passed into the hands of Pynson. They seem to have been without everything except type, not having even initial letters.
The St. Alban's press was a step in advance. A few cuts were used in the Chronicles, and the Book of St. Alban's contains coats of arms, produced by a combination of wood-cutting and printing in colour.
The Oxford press was the most ambitious, and was in possession of two sets of cuts, in neither case intended for the books in which they were used. One set was prepared for a Golden Legend, but no such book is known to have been issued at the Oxford press. One of these cuts appears as a frontispiece to Lyndewode's Constitutions. It represents Jacobus de Voragine writing the
Golden Legend, so that it did equally well for Lyndewode writing his law-book. Others of the series are used in the Liber Festialis of 1486, but as that was a small folio and the cuts were large, the ends were cut off, and they are all printed in a mutilated condition. The other cuts used in the Festial are small, and form part of a set for a Horae, but no Horae is known to have been printed at the Oxford press. It would be natural to suppose in this case that these cuts had been procured from some other printer who had used them in the production of the books for which they were intended; but the most careful search has failed to find them in any other book. Besides these cuts the Oxford press owned a very beautiful border, which was used in the commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle by Alexander de Hales and the commentary on the Lamentations of Jeremiah by John Lattebury, printed in 1481 and 1482. The printers owned nothing else for the adornment of their books but a rudely cut capital G, which we find used many times in the Festial.
The poverty of ornamental letters and borders is very noticeable in all the English presses of the fifteenth century. Caxton possessed one ambitious letter, a capital A, which was used first in the Order of Chivalry, and a series of eight borders, each made up of four pieces, and found for the first time in the Fifteen O'es. They are of little merit, and compare very unfavourably with French work of the period.
The best set of borders used in England belonged to Notary and his partners when they started in London about 1496. They are in the usual style, with dotted backgrounds, and may very likely have been brought from France. Pynson's borders, which he used in a Horae about 1495, are much more English in style, but are not good enough to make the page really attractive; in fact almost the only fine specimens of English printing with borders are to be found in the Morton Missal, which he printed in 1500. In this book also there are fine initial letters, often printed in red. It is hard to understand why, as a rule, English initial letters were so very bad; it certainly was not from the want of excellent models, for those in the Sarum missals, printed at Venice by Hertzog in 1494, and sold in England by Frederic Egmont, contain most beautifully designed initials, as good as can be found in any early printed book.
Wynkyn de Worde, when he succeeded in 1491 to Caxton's business, found himself in possession of a large number of cuts, a considerably larger number than ever appeared in the books of Caxton's that now remain to us. The first illustrated book he issued was a new edition of the Golden Legend, in which the old cuts were utilised. This was printed in 1493. In 1494 a new edition of the Speculum Vite Christi was issued, of which only one complete copy is known, that in the library at Holkham. It
probably contains only the series of cuts used by Caxton in his edition, for the few leaves to be found in other libraries have no new illustrations. About the same time (1494) De Worde issued several editions of the Horae ad usum Sarum, one in octavo (known from a few leaves discovered in the binding of a book in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford) and the rest in quarto. In the quarto editions we find the large series of pictures, among which are the three rioters and three skeletons, the tree of Jesse, and the Crucifixion, which occur in Caxton's Fifteen O'es. It is extremely probable that all the cuts in these editions had belonged to Caxton. The two cuts in the fragment of the octavo edition, however, are of quite a different class, evidently newly cut, and much superior in style and simplicity to Caxton's. It is much to be regretted that no complete copy of the book exists, for the neat small cuts and bold red and black printing form a very tasteful page.
A curious specimen of engraving is to be found in the Scala Perfectionis, by Walter Hylton, also printed in 1494. It represents the Virgin and Child seated under an architectural canopy, and below this are the words of the antiphon beginning, 'Sit dulce nomen d[=n]i.' These words are not printed from type, but cut on the block, and the engraver seems to have treated them simply as part of the decoration, for many of the words are by themselves quite unreadable and bear only
a superficial resemblance to the inscription from which they were copied.