While there was thus very little secret printing in England, exiled Protestants, Catholics, and Nonconformists all in turn made frequent recourse to foreign presses, and apparently succeeded in circulating their books in England. Religious repression, however, though the chief, was not the only cause of English books being printed abroad. From a very early time the superior skill of foreign printers had procured them many commissions to print service-books for the English market, alike on account of their greater accuracy, their experience in printing in red and black, and the more attractive illustrations which they had at their disposal. Not long after 1470 a Sarum Breviary was printed abroad, possibly at Cologne. Caxton employed George Maynyal, of Paris, to print a Missal (and probably a Legenda) for him in 1487, and Johann Hamman or Herzog printed a Sarum Missal in 1494 as far away as Venice. When the Paris printers and publishers had won the admiration of all Europe by their pretty editions of the Hours of the Blessed Virgin, they competed with each other for the English market. Early in the sixteenth century Wolfgang Hopyl printed some magnificent Sarum Missals and also an Antiphoner and Legenda, besides some very fine editions of Lyndewood’s Constitutions. Breviaries, Missals, and Primers were also poured out for English use by François Regnault, and in lesser numbers by nearly a dozen other Paris firms, and Martin Morin and other printers plied the same trade at Rouen, while Christoffel van Remunde, of Endhoven, was busy at Antwerp. The predominance of the foreign editions of these books over those printed in England may be estimated from the fact that of 105 Sarum service-books printed before 1540 in the possession of the British Museum, one was printed at Basel, one at Venice, eleven at Rouen, twelve at Antwerp, as many as fifty-six at Paris, and only twenty-four in England.[58]
In addition to service-books, a good many of the smaller Latin grammatical works were printed for the English market in France and the Low Countries, their destination being occasionally stated, but more often inferred from the appearance in them of English explanations of Latin words or phrases. A few attempts were also made to issue popular English works in competition with those produced at home. The most formidable of these rivalries was that of Gerard Leeu at Antwerp, who, after printing three entertaining books (The History of Jason, Knight Paris and the Fair Vienne, and the Dialogue of Salomon and Marcolphus), embarked on a more important work, The Chronicles of England, and might have seriously injured the home trade had he not met his death in a quarrel with a workman while the Chronicles were still on the press.[59]
Soon after 1500 another Antwerp printer, Adriaen von Berghen, in addition to Holt’s Lac Puerorum, published the commonplace book of a London merchant which passes under the name of Arnold’s Chronicle, and is famous as containing the earliest text of the Nutbrown Maid. A little later still, Jan van Doesborch was at work at the same place, and between 1505 and 1530 produced at least eighteen popular English books, including Tyll Howleglas, Virgilius the Magician, Robin Hood, and an account of recent discoveries entitled, “Of the new landes and of the people found by the messengers of the kynge of portyngale named Emanuel.”
Doesborch’s books are poorly printed and illustrated, but his texts are not noticeably worse than those in contemporary editions published in England. The reverse is the case with two English books produced (1503) by the famous Paris publisher, Antoine Vérard, The traitte of god lyuyng and good deying and The Kalendayr of Shyppars. These have the illustrations which book-lovers prize so highly in the Kalendrier des Bergers and Art de bien viure et de bien mourir, but the translations seem to have been made by a Scot, only less ill equipped in Scottish than in French. In a third translation, from Pierre Gringore’s Chasteau de Labeur, Vérard was more fortunate, for the Castell of Labour was rendered into (for that unpoetical period) very passable verse by Alexander Barclay. Vérard, however, had no cause to congratulate himself, for both Pynson and De Worde reprinted Barclay’s translation with copies of the woodcuts, and the other two books in new translations, so that in future he left the secular English market alone.
It may be supposed that the Act of 1534, restricting the importation of foreign books into England, finally put an end to competition of the kind which Leeu, Vérard, and Doesborch had attempted. But isolated English books have continued to appear abroad down to our own day, and form a miscellaneous, but curious and interesting appendix in the great volume of the English book trade. From 1525 onwards, however, until nearly the end of the seventeenth century, compared with the masses of theological books alternately by Protestant and Roman Catholic English exiles, printed in the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland, and France, the output of secular work sinks into insignificance. The stream begins with Tyndale’s New Testament, of which a few sheets were printed at Cologne (see Plate XXVIII), two editions at Worms, and half a dozen or more at Antwerp before it was suffered to appear in England.
The first English Bible is believed to have been printed (1535) by Christopher Froschauer at Zurich, the second (1537) at Antwerp, the third (1539) was begun at Paris and completed in England. Besides their New Testaments, Tyndale and George Joy published a good many controversial works at Antwerp. In the next generation the city became one of the strongholds of the Romanist exiles after the accession of Elizabeth, and Hans de Laet, John Fouler, Willem Sylvius, and Gillis van Diest the younger were frequently called on in 1564-6 to provide paper and print for Stapleton, Harding, William Rastell, and the other antagonists of Bishop Jewel.
In 1528 and the following year books by Tyndale, Roy, and Frith appeared purporting to be printed by “Hans Luft at Malborowe in the land of Hesse.” A later book with this imprint has been shown by Mr. Sayle to have been printed at Antwerp; whether these earlier works were really produced at Marburg, or, as has been conjectured, at Cologne, or again at Hamburg, is still uncertain. In the ’forties and ’fifties Christopher Froschauer printed several English Protestant books at Zurich, including A faythfull admonycion of a certen trewe pastor and prophete sent unto the germanes, translated from Luther’s Warnunge, with the pleasing imprint “at Grenewych by Conrade Freeman in the month of may 1554.” In the ’fifties, again, Jean Crespin and other Geneva printers worked for John Knox, and the Geneva New Testament was produced there in 1558 and the Bible in 1560. In the ’sixties, as we have seen, many treatises attacking Bishop Jewel were issued at Antwerp, others appeared at Louvain, and about the same time (1566), at Emden, G. van der Erven was printing for exiled Puritans some of their diatribes against the “Popish aparrell” (i.e. the surplice) which Elizabeth prescribed for the English Church.
In 1574 we encounter at Amsterdam a curious group of nine little books “translated out of Base-Almayne into English,” in which Hendrik Niclas preached the doctrines of the “Family of Love.” From that time onwards a good deal of theological literature on the Protestant side was published by Amsterdam presses. Richard Schilders at Middelburg was also an extensive publisher of this class of book. Presses at Leyden and Dort made similar contributions, but on a smaller scale. On the Roman Catholic side the head-quarters of propagandist literature, as we have seen, were at first at Antwerp and Louvain, at both of which places John Fouler had presses. In the ’eighties the existence of the English college at Rheims caused several Catholic books to be printed there, notably the translation of the New Testament which was made in the college itself. For like reasons much Catholic literature was published from 1602 onwards at St. Omer, and from 1604 onwards at Douai. Books of the same class, though in smaller numbers, appeared also at Paris and Rouen.
Individually the books from the presses we have been naming, both on the Romanist and the Puritan side, are unattractive to look at and dull to read. Collectively they form a very curious and interesting episode in English bibliography, which deserves more study than it has yet received, though Mr. Sayle has made an excellent beginning in his lists of English books printed on the Continent in the third volume of his Early English Printed Books in the University Library, Cambridge. Since then Mr. Steele and Mr. Dover Wilson have made important contributions to the subject, but much still remains to be done.
It was doubtless the existence of these foreign safety-valves which rendered the course of English printing after the grant of a charter to the Stationers’ Company so smooth and uneventful.[60] Two violations of the terms of the charter were winked at or authorized, in some way not known to us, by the Crown. The first of these was the printing of a few books for the use of foreign refugees by Antony de Solempne at Norwich. Most of these books were in Dutch, but in 1569 Antony Corranus, previously pastor of the Spanish Protestant congregation at Antwerp, published through de Solempne certain broadside tables De Operibus Dei in Latin, French, Dutch, and English, of which copies only of the first and second have been traced. In 1570 another English broadside commemorated the execution at Norwich of Thomas Brooke. Archbishop Parker seems to have resented the publication, unexamined, of the De Operibus Dei, but de Solempne placed the royal arms and a loyal motto (Godt bewaer de Coninginne Elizabeth) on some of his books, and seems in some way or another to have secured the Queen’s protection.