There is nothing here to encourage the idea which Mr. Proctor seems to have entertained that Colard Mansion had already begun work on his own account, and that Caxton obtained his help for his English books. It seems more likely that it was Caxton who made the start, and that the first two books printed at Bruges were both in English, the first being the Recuyell, and the second The Game and Pleye of the Chesse, a translation of a moral treatise in which the functions of the chessmen were used as texts for sermonizing, written in Latin by Jacobus de Cessolis. After this a new type was cut and another didactic book, Les Quatre Derennières Choses, a treatise of the Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven) printed in it in French. These three books probably appeared in 1475 and the early months of 1476. By this time Charles the Bold was picking a quarrel with the Swiss, and his disastrous defeat at Morat on 21 June, 1476, must have powerfully quickened the desire with which we may reasonably credit Caxton, of being the first printer in his native land. He made arrangements to rent a shop in the Sanctuary at Westminster from the following Michaelmas and departed for England, taking with him the newer of the two types and leaving the older one to Colard Mansion, who printed with it the original French of Lefèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, and the same author’s Les Fais et prouesses du noble et vaillant cheualier Jason, and then abandoned it, having already cut a larger type for his own use.
The first dated book produced by Caxton in England was The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophers, a translation by Earl Rivers (the brother of Edward IV’s queen) from a French version of an anonymous Latin book of the fourteenth century. Caxton was entrusted by the Earl with the oversight of the translation, and contributed to it an amusing Epilogue, in which he gives some unfavourable remarks about women attributed to Socrates, with his own comments. The Epilogue is dated 1477, and in one copy more minutely, 18 November. Though this is the first dated English book, it cannot be said that it was the first book printed in England, as it was probably preceded both by Caxton’s English version of Lefèvre’s Jason, and also by some of the thin quartos in the same type.
Among the earlier books printed by Caxton after he set up his press at Westminster was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, of which later on he printed a second edition which he imagined to be from a better text, and ornamented with clumsy pictures of the pilgrims. He printed also in separate volumes most of Chaucer’s other works, including his translation of Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae; also Gower’s Confessio Amantis, some of the shorter poems of Lydgate, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and several translations of French romances (Charles the Great, Paris and Vienne, the Four Sons of Aymon, etc.), translations of Aesop and of Reynard the Fox, Higden’s Polychronicon, and the Chronicles of England, the Golden Legend (the name given to the great collection of Lives of the Saints by Jacobus de Voragine), several editions of the Hours of the Blessed Virgin, a Latin Psalter, a decorative edition of the Prayers called the Fifteen Oes with a border to every page (see Plate XXVII), numerous moral treatises and books of devotion, and several Indulgences. In all just one hundred books and documents issued from his press, printed in eight different types (including that left behind at Bruges). More than twenty of these books he had translated himself, and to others he contributed interesting prologues or epilogues. While many printers on the Continent easily surpassed him in typographical skill, few published more books which can still be read with pleasure, and his prefaces and epilogues show a real love of good literature (especially of Chaucer) and abundant good sense, kindliness, and humour. Caxton died in 1491 while engaged on translating into English the Latin Lives of the Fathers, and the account-books of the churchwardens of S. Margaret’s, Westminster, show that he was buried in its churchyard, four torches being supplied at a cost of two shillings and sixpence, and another sixpence being charged for the bell.
During Caxton’s lifetime only one other Englishman set up a press, an anonymous schoolmaster at St. Albans, who began work in 1480 (possibly in 1479) and printed till 1486, producing first six scholastic books and then two English ones. He appears to have borrowed some type from Caxton, so that it was presumably with the latter’s goodwill that he reprinted his version of the Chronicles of England, adding thereto an appendix entitled Fructus Temporum, or Fruits of Time. It is from Wynkyn de Worde’s reprint of this edition in 1497 that we obtain our only knowledge of the printer, for we are there told that it was “compiled in a booke and also enprynted by one sometyme scolemayster of saynt Albons, on whose soule God haue mercy.” His other popular book was that famous trio of treatises Of Haukyng and Huntyng and also of Cootarmuris, commonly known as the Book of St. Albans. The second treatise, which is in metre, ends with the words “Explicit Dam Julyan Barnes in her boke of huntyng,” and this is the only basis for the popular attribution of all three treatises to a hypothetical Juliana Bernes or Berners, who is supposed to have been the daughter of Sir James Berners (executed in 1388), and Prioress of the Nunnery of Sopwell, a dependency of St. Albans, of which the list of prioresses has conveniently perished.[47]
Between 1478 and 1486 or ’87, some seventeen books were printed at Oxford by Theodoric Rood of Cologne, who towards the end of his career was in partnership with an English bookseller named Thomas Hunte. The earliest of his books,[48] all of which are in Latin, was an Exposition on the Apostles’ Creed wrongly attributed to S. Jerome. By the accidental omission of an X this is dated MCCCCLXVIII, i.e. 1468, but such misprints are common in early books, and no one now maintains that it was printed until ten years later. Among the other books printed at Oxford we may note an edition of Cicero’s Pro Milone, the spurious Letters of Phalaris, and a very large folio, Lyndewode’s Provincial Constitutions of the English Church. That the Oxford press came to an end so soon and that none was started at Cambridge during the fifteenth century may be attributed to a statute of Richard III’s permitting the free importation of books into England. Although this measure was amply justified by the interests of learning, it made it practically impossible for any scholastic press to maintain itself in the limited English market against the competition of the fine editions which could be imported from Italy.
Caxton’s press was at Westminster, which in the fifteenth century was much more sharply distinguished for business purposes from the city of London than it is now. The first press set up within the city itself was that of John Lettou, whose surname shows him to have been a native of Lithuania, which in Caxton’s time, as in Chaucer’s, was known in England as Lettowe. Mr. Gordon Duff thinks that John Lettou must have learnt to print at Rome and brought his punches with him to England, as the type with which he started to print here is indistinguishable from one used by a small printer at Rome, who bore the curiously English name John Bulle, though he came from Bremen. Lettou printed an Indulgence in 1480, and also a commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, a curiously learned work for a city press, but which he was commissioned to print by a certain William Wilcocks, for whom the next year he printed also a commentary on the Psalms.
After 1482 Lettou was joined by William of Mechlin, or Malines, in Belgium, usually known by the Latin name of his birthplace, Machlinia. Lettou and Machlinia printed five law books together, and then Lettou disappears and Machlinia in 1483 started working by himself, at first at a house near the bridge over the Fleet, where he printed eight books, and then in Holborn, where he printed fourteen. When working by himself he printed in addition to law books some works of a more popular character, a Book of Hours, the Revelation to a Monk of Evesham,[49] Speculum Christiani (a devotional work interspersed with English verse), the Chronicles of England, and several editions of “A little treatise against the Pestilence” by a certain Bishop Canutus of Aarhus. One of these editions was the first English book which has a titlepage. It is printed in two lines, and reads:—
“A passing gode lityll boke necessarye &
behouefull agenst the Pestilens.”
The exact date at which Machlinia died, or gave up work, is not known. He was printing in 1486, but his books after that are undated. We may take 1490 or a little earlier as the year of his disappearance, and it is practically certain that his stock of books was taken over by Richard Pynson from Normandy, who probably began printing in 1491 or 1492 (his first dated book was finished in November of the latter year), and while he was getting his workshop ready commissioned Guillaume Le Talleur of Rouen to print two law books for him for sale in England.
Up to the death of Caxton the only native English printer besides himself was the unidentified schoolmaster-printer at St. Albans, Thomas Hunte, who joined Theodoricus Rood at Oxford, being only a stationer. After his death, for over twenty years there was no native Englishman at work as a master printer[50] at all. Two of the three presses at work were in the hands of Wynkyn de Worde of Lorraine and Richard Pynson of Normandy, and the third was worked for some time with two French partners by Julyan Notary, who was probably a Frenchman himself, since in 1498 he spells his name as Notaire.