[60] Before the incorporation of the Company brought English printing more easily under supervision, at least a few books had been issued by English printers with spurious foreign imprints, of which the most impudent was “At Rome under the Castle of St. Angelo.”

[61] Robert Barker himself was imprisoned for debt in the King’s Bench at London in 1635, and died there in 1646. What is here written applies to his deputy, who may have been his son of the same name.

[62] The assertion by Mr. Charles Evans (American Bibliography, p. 3) that one of these, “the Crowninshield copy, was privately sold by Henry Stevens to the British Museum for £157 10s.,” despite its apparent precision, is an exasperating error.

XXIX. WESTMINSTER, CAXTON, C. 1488
BONAVENTURA. MEDITATIONES. (PART OF SIG. K 5 RECTO)
CHRIST RAISING THE DAUGHTER OF JAIRUS

CHAPTER XIV

ENGLISH WOODCUT ILLUSTRATIONS

A few illuminated manuscripts of English workmanship and a few with illustrations in outline have come down to us from the fifteenth century, but amid the weary wars with France and the still wearier struggles of Yorkists and Lancastrians, the artistic spirit which had been so prominent in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries seems to have died out altogether. Until the reign of Queen Elizabeth, or perhaps we should rather say until the advent of John Day, few English books were illustrated, and of these few quite a large proportion borrowed or copied their pictures from foreign originals. Nevertheless, English illustrated books are rightly sought after by English collectors, and though we may wish that they were better, we must give the best account of them we can.

As we shall see in a later chapter, there is some probability that an engraving on copper was specially prepared for the first book printed by Caxton, The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye. For the present, however, we must concern ourselves only with illustrations on wood, or on soft metal cut in relief after the manner of wood, a difference of more interest to the technical student than to book-lovers. The first English books thus illustrated appear in or about 1481, the year in which Jean Du Pré began the use of cuts in Paris. England was thus fairly well to the front in point of time; it is the quality which is to seek. The first of these illustrated books was probably an undated edition of the Mirrour of the World, a translation of a French version of a Latin Speculum or Imago mundi. Besides some woodcut diagrams copied from drawings found in the French manuscripts, this has ten little cuts, seven of the masters of the seven liberal arts, one of the author, and two of the Creation. Two of the cuts illustrating the arts were used again almost at once in Caxton’s third edition of the Parvus et Magnus Cato, a book of moral instruction for children in a series of Latin distichs. In 1481 also Caxton ornamented the second edition of the didactic treatise, The Game and Play of the Chess (from the Latin of Jacobus de Cessolis), with sixteen woodcuts, representing the characters after which the different pieces and pawns were called. The pictures are clumsy and coarsely cut, comparing miserably with the charming little woodcuts in the Italian edition printed at Florence, but they illustrate the book, and may conceivably have increased its sales. In any case, Caxton seems, in a leisurely way, to have set about producing some more, since by or about 1484 appeared three of his most important illustrated books, the Golden Legend, the second edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and an Aesop. The Golden Legend is ornamented with eighteen large and thirty-two smaller woodcuts; the Aesop with a full-page frontispiece and one hundred and five smaller cuts; the Canterbury Tales with a large cut of the Pilgrims seated at a round table, and with some twenty smaller pictures of the different story-tellers on their horses, some of these being used more than once. For the Aesop, like many other foreign publishers, Caxton sent his illustrators to the designs made for the Zainers at Augsburg and Ulm, and quickly imitated all over Germany, and the copies he obtained are merely servile and so clumsy as occasionally to attain to unintended humour. Foreign influence is also evident in some at least of the cuts in the Golden Legend; on the other hand, we may be sure that the device of the Earl of Arundel on leaf 3 verso, a horse galloping past a tree, must have been made in England. Original, too, of necessity, were the illustrations to the Canterbury Tales, for which no foreign models could have been found. But the succession of pilgrims, each decked with a huge string of praying-beads and mounted on a most ungainly horse, is grotesque in its cumulation of clumsiness, though when we find that the miller really has got a kind of bagpipe, we recognize that the illustrator had at least read his text.