Mr. Allnutt, to whose exhaustive articles on “English Provincial Printing” in the second volume of Bibliographica all subsequent writers on the subject must needs be indebted, conscientiously includes among his notes one on the edition of Archbishop Parker’s De Antiquitate Ecclesiae Britannicae printed for him by John Day, in all probability at Lambeth Palace, where a small staff of book-fashioners worked under the archiepiscopal eye. Eton is a good deal farther “out of bounds” than Lambeth, but the employment of the King’s Printer, John Norton, and a dedication to the King saved Sir Henry Savile from any interference when he started printing his fine edition of the works of S. John Chrysostom in the original Greek. The eight folio volumes of which this consists are dated from 1610 to 1613, and in these and the two following years five other Greek books were printed under Savile’s supervision. After this his type was presented to the University of Oxford, where a fairly flourishing press had been at work since 1585.
That printing at Oxford made a new start in 1585 was due no doubt to the example of Cambridge, which two years earlier had at last acted on a patent for printing granted by Henry VIII in 1534, the year, it will be remembered, in which restrictions were placed on the importation of foreign books on account of the proficiency in the art to which Englishmen were supposed to have attained. In the interim Printers to the University seem to have been appointed, but it was not till 1583 that a press was set up, whereupon, as soon as a single book had been printed, it was promptly seized by the Stationers’ Company of London as an infringement of the monopoly granted by their charter. Although the Bishop of London seems to have backed up the Stationers, Lord Burghley (the Chancellor of the University) and the Master of the Rolls secured the recognition of the rights of the University. Forty years later they were again attacked by the Stationers, and the Privy Council forbade the Cambridge printer to print Bibles, Prayer Books, Psalters, Grammars, or Books of Common Law, but in 1628 the judges pronounced strongly in favour of the full rights of the University, and the next year these were recognized with some modifications by the Privy Council. Up to this time there had been three printers, Thomas Thomas (1583-8), John Legate (1588-1610), and Cantrell Legge (1606-29), the University Library possessing (in 1902) 34 books and documents printed by the first, 108 by the second, and 55 by the third, or a total of 197 for a period of forty-six years. From 1628 to 1639 the majority of Cambridge books bear no individual names on them, but have usually the imprint “Cantabrigiæ, ex Academiæ celeberrimæ typographeo.” But Thomas and John Buck and Roger Daniel, in various combinations, were responsible for a good many publications.
While Burghley was Chancellor of Cambridge, Dudley, Earl of Leicester, held the Oxford Chancellorship, and doubtless felt that, charter or no charter, it concerned his honour to see that his University should be allowed all the privileges possessed by the other. Under his auspices a press was started late in 1584 or early in 1585 by Joseph Barnes, an Oxford bookseller, to whom the University lent £100 to enable him to procure the necessary equipment, and on Leicester’s visiting the University on 11 January, 1585, a Carmen gratulatorium in four elegiac couplets was presented to him, printed on an octavo leaf at the new press. The first book to appear was a Speculum Moralium Quaestionum in uniuersam Ethicen Aristotelis, by John Case, a former fellow of S. John’s, with a dedication to Leicester by the author and another by the printer. In the latter the promise was made “ea solum ex his prælis in lucem venient que sapientum calculis approbentur & Sybille foliis sint veriora,” but the remaining publications of the year were a polemical treatise by Thomas Billson, two issues of a Protestant adaptation of the Booke of Christian exercise appertaining to Resolution, by Robert Persons, the Jesuit, and two sermons. In 1586 no fewer than seventeen books were printed (a number not again attained for several years), and among them was an edition of six homilies of S. Chrysostom, “primitiæ typographi nostri in græcis literis preli.” After this the press settled down to an average production of from eight to a dozen books a year, including a fair number of classical texts and translations, with now and then a volume of verse which brings it into connection with the stream of Elizabethan literature. Among the more interesting books which it produced, mention may be made of the Sixe Idillia of Theocritus (1588), poems by Nicholas Breton and Thomas Churchyard (1592), Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon (1599), the Microcosmus of John Davies of Hereford (1603), Captain John Smith’s Map of Virginia, with a description of the Countrey (1612), and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). In the ’twenties of the seventeenth century the average annual output was still only 14; in the ’thirties, under the fostering care of Laud, it had risen as high as 25. In 1641 it was but 19. Then, on the outbreak of the Civil War, the King came to Oxford, and under the stress of official publications and royalist controversy the numbers shot up to about 147 in 1642, followed by 119 in 1643, about 100 in 1644, and 60 in 1645. Then they become normal again, and in 1649 under the Parliamentary régime sink as low as seven. These statistics are taken from the various works of Mr. Falconer Madan, mentioned in our bibliography, and from the same source we learn that until the nineteenth century the annual average of production, calculated by periods of ten years, never exceeded thirty-two.
Similar causes to those which brought about the sudden increase in the Oxford output in 1642 led to the establishment of presses at Newcastle and York. In 1639, when Charles I marched against the Scots, his head-quarters were at Newcastle, and the Royal Printer, Robert Barker,[61] printed there a sermon by the Bishop of Durham, the Lawes and Ordinances of Warre, and some proclamations. In March, 1642, again Barker was in attendance on the King at York, and printed there His Majesties Declaration to both Houses of Parliament, in answer to that presented to him at Newmarket, and some thirty-eight other pieces. Another London printer, Stephen Bulkley, was also given employment, and in the years 1642-4 printed at York some twenty-eight different pieces. Bulkley also attended the King at Newcastle in 1646, when he was in the hands of the Scots, and remained printing there and at Gateshead until the Restoration, when he returned to York, where a Puritan press had in the meantime been set up by Thomas Broad.
Charles I left York on 16 August, 1642, and six days later the Royal Standard was raised at Nottingham. His Majesties Instructions to his Commissioners of Array, dated “at our Court at Nottingham, 29th August, 1642,” were printed by Barker at York. Two days later the King ordered that the press should be brought to Nottingham, but we next hear of Barker at Shrewsbury, where he served the King’s immediate needs, and then remained at work for the rest of the year and the greater part of 1643 reprinting Oxford editions and publishing other royalist literature. After the capture of Bristol for the King on 2 August he removed once more and printed there during 1644 and 1645.
During the confusion of the Civil War an Exeter stationer, Thomas Hunt (the local publisher of Herrick’s Hesperides), had a book printed for him—Thomas Fuller’s Good Thoughts in Bad Times—which is described in the dedication as the “First Fruits of the Exeter Presse,” and another is said to have been printed there in 1648. But we hear of no other presses being set up. After the Restoration printing was allowed to continue at York. Otherwise provincial printing outside the Universities was once more non-existent. The arrival of William of Orange caused some broadsides to be printed at Exeter in 1688, and in the same year Thomas Tillier printed at Chester, not only An account of a late Horrid and Bloody Massacre in Ireland on a single leaf, but also a handsome folio, The Academy of Armory, for Randall Holme, who rewarded him for any risk he may have run by devising for him a fancy coat. Nevertheless, despite the change of Government, the Act of Parliament restricting printing to London, Oxford, Cambridge, and York was not allowed to expire till 1695. A press was set up at Bristol the same year. Plymouth and Shrewsbury followed in 1696, Exeter in 1698, and Norwich in 1701, the first provincial newspaper, The Norwich Post, dating from September in that year. By 1750 about seventy-five provincial towns possessed presses, cities and small country places starting them at haphazard, not at all in the order of their importance. The dates for some of the chief are as follows (all on the authority of Mr. Allnutt): 1708, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; 1709, Worcester; 1710, Nottingham; 1711, Chester; 1712, Liverpool; 1715, Salisbury; 1716, Birmingham; 1717, Canterbury; 1718, Ipswich, Leeds, and Taunton; 1719, Manchester and Derby; 1720, Northampton; 1721, Coventry and Hereford; 1723, Reading; 1731, Bath; 1737, Sheffield; 1745, Stratford-on-Avon; 1748, Portsmouth.
As a side-consequence of the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695, it became possible for any private person to buy a printing press, hire a journeyman printer, and start printing any books he pleased. Several private presses were thus set up during the second half of the eighteenth century, the most famous of them being that of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham. Walpole started in 1757 by printing two of the Odes of his friend Gray, and at intervals during the next twenty-seven years printed several of his own works, and a few other books, of which an edition of Grammont’s Mémoires was the most important. Walpole’s example was followed by George Allan, M.P. for Durham, and Francis Blomefield, the historian of Norfolk; also in the nineteenth century by Thomas Johnes, who printed his translation of Froissart in four large quarto volumes at his own house at Hafod in Cardiganshire in 1803-5, and followed them up with a Joinville in 1807 and a Monstrelet in 1810. Between 1813 and 1823 Sir Egerton Brydges caused a number of interesting literary reprints to be issued for him in limited editions from a press in or near his house at Lee Priory in Kent. The work of both these presses, like that of Walpole’s, was perhaps equal to the best commercial printing of its day, but was not superior to it, and perhaps the same may be said of the few reprints manufactured, in still more jealously limited editions, by E. V. Utterson between 1840 and 1843 at Beldornie House, Ryde. Sir Thomas Phillipps, who printed numerous antiquarian documents between 1822 and 1862 at Middle Hill in Worcestershire, and between 1862 and 1872 at Cheltenham, set even less store by typographical beauty and accuracy. The other private presses of the first half of the nineteenth century are not more interesting, though that of Gaetano Polidori at Park Village East, near Regent’s Park, 1840-50, has become famous as having printed Gabriel Rossetti’s Sir Hugh the Heron in 1843, and Christina Rossetti’s first volume of verse four years later, Polidori being the grandfather of the young authors on their mother’s side.
Passing north of the Tweed, where the most formidable competitors of the London printers now abide, we find the first Scottish press at work at Edinburgh in 1508. In September of the previous year Andrew Myllar, a bookseller who had gained some experience of printing at Rouen, and Walter Chapman, a merchant, had been granted leave to import a press, chiefly that they might print an Aberdeen Breviary, which duly appeared in 1509-10. The books which anticipated it in 1508 were a number of thin quartos, The Maying or Disport of Chaucer, dated 4 April, the Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane, dated 8 April, the Porteous of Noblenes, “translated out of franche in scottis be Maistir Andrew Cadiou,” dated 20 April, and eight undated pieces, three of them by Dunbar (The Goldyn Targe, The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, and the Twa Marrit Wemen and the Wedo, with other poems), the others being the Ballad of Lord Barnard Stewart, Orpheus and Eurydice, the Buke of Gude Counsale, Sir Eglamoure of Artoys, and A Gest of Robyn Hode. All these have survived (some of them much mutilated) in a single volume, and it is at the reader’s pleasure to decide whether they represent the harvest of some careful person who bought up all Chapman and Myllar’s fugitive pieces, or are merely the remnants of a much larger output. The Aberdeen Breviary, which the printers were encouraged to produce by protection against the importation of Sarum books from England or abroad, is really handsomely printed in black and red. At the end of one of the four or five copies of it now known is an addendum, the Officium Compassionis Beatae Virginis (commemorated on the Wednesday in Holy Week), which bears the colophon “Impressum Edinburgi per Johannem Story nomine & mandato Karoli Stule,” which Scottish bibliographers assign to about 1520. A fragment of a Book of the Howlat may belong to the same period. Thus although Scottish writers, such as John Vaus and Hector Boece of Aberdeen, had to send their books to France to be printed, it is possible that presses were at work in Edinburgh or elsewhere in Scotland, of which nothing is now known.
The next printer of whom we have certain information is Thomas Davidson, who in February, 1541 (1542), produced a handsome edition of The New Actis and Constitutionis of Parliament maid be the Rycht Excellent Prince Iames the Fift. This was his only dated book, but he issued also a fine edition of The hystory and croniklis of Scotland, translated by “Johne Bellenden, Archdene of Murray, chanon of Ros,” from the Latin of Hector Boece, and some smaller works.
The next Scottish printer is John Scot, whom the best authorities, despite the fact that he is first heard of in Edinburgh in 1539, refuse to identify with the John Skot who printed in London from 1521 to 1537. Whoever he was, he had no very happy existence, as notwithstanding some efforts to please the Protestant party, the work he did for the Catholics twice brought him into serious trouble. His first dated book, Archbishop Hamilton’s Catechism, did not appear till 29 August, 1552, and was printed not at Edinburgh, but at St. Andrews. How he had been employed between 1539 and this date we have no means of knowing. At St. Andrews Scot printed Patrick Cockburn’s Pia Meditatio in Dominicam Orationem (1555), and probably also Lauder’s Dewtis of Kingis (1556). Scot also printed controversial works on the Catholic side by the Abbot of Crosraguell (Quentin Kennedy) and Ninian Winzet, and for the opposite party The Confessione of faith Professit and Belevit be the Protestantes within the Realme of Scotland (1561). He issued also two editions (1568 and 1571) of the works of Sir David Lindesay, while his undated books include some of Lindesay’s single poems.