Fine Books

by Alfred W. Pollard

Apparently Caxton himself realized that these English-made woodcuts were a failure, for the only two important illustrated books which he issued after this, the Speculum Vitae Christi, printed about 1488 (see Plate XXIX), and the Fifteen Oes of a year or two later, both seem to be decorated with cuts of Flemish origin. The Fifteen Oes (a collection of fifteen prayers, each beginning with O), though I have called it important, is so mainly as proving that Caxton must have printed a Horae of the same measurements (of which it may, indeed, have formed a part), illustrated with a set of very spirited woodcuts, undoubtedly imported from Flanders and subsequently found in the possession of Wynkyn de Worde. That the cuts in the Speculum Vitae Christi are also Flemish is a degree less certain, but only a degree. Some of these were used again in the Royal Book, the Doctrinal of Sapience, and the Book of Divers Ghostly Matters. But the seven books which we have named are the only ones for which Caxton troubled to procure sets of cuts, and of these seven sets, as we have seen, one was certainly and another probably imported, one certainly and another probably copied, and only three are of English origin, and these the rudest and clumsiest.

While our chief native printer made this poor record his contemporaries did no better. Lettou and Machlinia used no woodcuts which have come down to us save a small border, which passed into the possession of Pynson; for use at Oxford two sets of cuts were imported from the Low Countries, one which Mr. Gordon Duff thinks was originally designed for a Legenda Aurea, the other clearly meant for a Horae. These were used together in the Oxford edition of Mirk’s Liber Festivalis, and the cut of the author of the Legenda Aurea (Jacobus de Voragine) is used for Lyndewood in an edition of his Constitutions. At St. Albans some poor little cuts were used in the Chronicles of England, but from the point of view of illustration the anonymous schoolmaster-printer is chiefly memorable for having printed some cuts of coat-armour in the “Book of St. Albans” (The Boke of Haukyng, Huntyng and also of Cote-armuris) in colours.

Wynkyn de Worde inherited Caxton’s stock of woodcuts, and early in his career used some of them again in reprints of the Golden Legend and Speculum Vitae Christi, and in his larger Horae used the full set of cuts which, while in Caxton’s hands, is only known from those which appear in the Fifteen Oes. About 1492 he purchased some ornamental capitals (Caxton had only used a single rather graceful rustic A) and one or more cuts from Govaert van Os of Gouda. In his 1494 edition of Walter Hylton’s Scala Perfectionis (the first book in which he put his name) he used a woodblock consisting of a picture of Christ suckled by His mother with a long woodcut inscription, part of which reads “Sit dulce nomen domini nostri ihesu christi et nomen genitricis virginis marie benedictum,” the whole surrounded by a graceful floral border. In 1495 came Higden’s Polychronicon with a few woodcut musical notes, the “hystorye of the deuoute and right renommed lyues of holy faders lyuynge in deserte” (usually quoted as the Vitas Patrum), with one large cut used six times and forty small ones used as 155, and about the same time a handsome edition of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, with large cuts (two-thirds of the folio page) prefixed to each of the twenty-two books, apparently copied partly from those in a Dutch edition printed at Haarlem in 1485, partly from the illustrations (themselves not original) in a French edition printed at Lyon, of which Caxton, who finished the translation on his death-bed, had made use. In 1496, in reprinting the Book of St. Albans De Worde added a treatise on Fishing with an angle, to which he prefixed a cut of a happy angler hauling up a fish which will soon be placed in a well-filled tub which stands beside him on the bank. This is quite good primitive work and was sufficiently appreciated to be used for numerous later editions, but soon after this De Worde employed a cutter who served him very badly, mangling cruelly a set of rather ambitious designs for the Morte d’Arthur of 1498 (several of them used again in the Recuyell of 1503), and also some single cuts used in different books. For the next half-dozen years De Worde relied almost exclusively on old cuts, but at last found a competent craftsman who enabled him to bring out in January, 1505-6, an English version of the Art de bien vivre et de bien mourir with quite neat reductions of the pictures in Vérard’s edition of 1492. It was, no doubt, the same workman who copied in 1506 the Vérard-Pigouchet cuts in Pierre Gringore’s Chasteau de Labeur as translated by Alexander Barclay, but from the frequent omission of backgrounds it is obvious that in these he was hurried, and they are by no means so good as those in the 1505 edition by Pynson with which De Worde was enviously hastening to compete. The Calendar of Shepherds was another translation from the French, illustrated with copies of French cuts, while in the prose Ship of Fools, translated by Henry Watson from a French version of the German Narrenschiff of Sebastian Brant, Basel originals were reproduced probably from intermediate copies. But when in 1509 Henry VII died, De Worde for once seems to have let his craftsman do a bit of original work for a title-cut to a funeral sermon by Bishop Fisher. In this (see Plate XXX) the bishop is shown preaching in a wooden pulpit, immediately below which is the hearse covered by a gorgeous pall on which lies an effigy of the dead king, while beyond the hearse stands a crowd of courtiers. It is evident that perspective was not the artist’s strong point, as the pavement seems climbing up the wall and the shape of the hearse is quite indeterminate, but the general effect of the cut is neat and pleasing. That it is an English cut is certain. A few months later Bishop Fisher preached another funeral sermon, over Henry VII’s aged mother, Margaret Duchess of Richmond, and when De Worde economically wished to use the same woodcut on the titlepage of his edition of this, there was a craftsman on the spot able to cut out the royal hearse from the block and plug in a representation of an ordinary one, and the similarity of touch shows that this was done by the original cutter.

XXX. LONDON, WYNKYN de WORDE, 1509 BISHOP FISHER. FUNERAL SERMON ON HENRY VII. (TITLE)

As we have already noted in Chapter XII, Wynkyn de Worde was singularly unenterprising as a publisher, and although he lived for nearly a quarter of a century after the accession of Henry VIII, during all this time he printed no new book which required copious illustration. On the other hand, he was a man of fixed habits, and one of these habits came to be the decoration of the titlepage of nearly every small quarto he issued with a woodcut of some kind or other, the title itself being sometimes printed on a riband above it. When a new picture was absolutely necessary for this purpose it was forthcoming and generally fairly well cut, but a few stock woodcuts, a schoolmaster holding a birch for grammatical books, a knight on horseback for a romance, etc., were used again and again, and often the block was picked out (we are tempted to say “at random,” but that would be an exaggeration) from one of the sets already described, which De Worde had commissioned in more lavish days.

One of Richard Pynson’s earliest books was an edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with about a score of woodcuts of the pilgrims obviously influenced by those in Caxton’s second edition, but in no way an improvement on them. It is true that not only is the miller again allowed his bagpipe, but a little mill is placed in the corner of the cut to identify him beyond doubt. On the other hand, the knight’s horse is bedecked with the cumbrous skirts used in the tilt-yard, but which would have become sadly draggled ere much progress had been made along the miry road to Canterbury. The clerk, moreover, is made to carry a bow as if, instead of having his mind set on Aristotle, he were of the lusty sort that loved to get venison where they should not. Round most of the cuts there is a heavy edge of black, as if from an untrimmed block, which does not improve their appearance. Altogether they are poor work, and it was doubtless his recognition of this that caused Pynson in future to rely so largely on the purchase or imitation of foreign blocks. For his edition of Lydgate’s Falles of Princes, a verse rendering of Boccaccio’s De casibus illustrium virorum, issued in 1494, he procured the woodcuts made for the fine French edition (De la ruine des nobles hommes), printed at Paris by Jean Du Pré in 1483. Before 1500 he brought out an Aesop, copying as usual the German cuts. In 1505 he printed Alexander Barclay’s version of Pierre Gringore’s Chasteau du Labeur with cuts closely and fairly skilfully copied from those in the Pigouchet-Vérard editions. In 1506 he went further and procured from Vérard the blocks for a new edition of the Kalendar of Shepherds, which, however, he caused to be retranslated, with sundry remarks on the extraordinary English of the version published by Vérard. In 1509 he produced in a fine folio Barclay’s free rendering of Brant’s Narrenschiff, illustrating this English Ship of Fools with 117 cuts copied from the originals. In 1518 he procured from Froben some border-pieces for small quartos, one showing in the footpiece a boy carried on the shoulders of his fellows, another an elephant, a third Mutius Scaevola and Porsenna.

XXXI. LONDON, PYNSON, C. 1520 BARCLAY’S VERSION OF SALLUST’S JUGURTHA. THE TRANSLATOR AND THE DUKE OF NORFOLK. (REDUCED)

If Pynson had dealt largely in illustrated books the borrowings and copyings here recited might seem insignificant. He published, however, very little English work which can be set against them, and even of the cuts which pass for English the native origin is not always sure. I should be sorry to pledge myself, for instance, as to the provenance of some neat but rather characterless column-cuts in his edition of the Speculum Vitae Christi (fifteenth century). The title-cut to the Traduction and Mariage of the Princesse (Katherine), printed in 1501, is almost certainly English in its heaviness and lack of charm, but despite the fact that they must have been produced in London we can hardly say as much of the two far prettier pictures which adorn the Carmen of Petrus Carmelianus on the treaty of marriage between the future Charles V and the Princess Mary (1508). In the first of these the ambassadors are being received by Henry VII, in the second by the Princess who is attended by her maids, and the latter is perhaps the first English book-illustration with any touch of grace. Unluckily there is a half Spanish, half Low-Country look about it, which suggests that some member of the ambassadors’ suite with an artistic turn may at least have supplied the design, so that one hesitates to claim it too vigorously as English work. We may be more confident about the one good cut (the rest are a scratch lot) in the 1513 edition of Lydgate’s The hystory sege and dystruccion of Troy. In this Henry V is shown seated in a large room, with his suite, while Lydgate in his black habit as a Benedictine presents him with his book. There is a general resemblance between this and another good piece of work, the picture in Alexander Barclay’s translation of Sallust’s Jugurtha (undated) of this other black monk offering his book to the Duke of Norfolk (see Plate XXXI). Probably both were from the same hand. It may be noted that the cut of Barclay was used again in the Myrrour of good maners conteyning the iiii. vertues called cardynall compyled in latin by Domynicke Mancyn, of which he was the industrious translator. In Pynson’s 1516 edition of Fabyan’s Chronicle, besides some insignificant column-cuts of kings and some decorative heraldic work, there is an excellent picture of a disembarkation. In other books we find cuts of a schoolmaster with his pupils, of an author, of a woman saint (S. Bridget, though used also for S. Werburga), etc.

Towards the end of his career in the collection of Chaucer’s works (1526) and reprint of Lydgate’s Falles of Princes (1527), Pynson drew on his stock of miscellaneous blocks rather than allow works with which illustrations had become associated to go forth undecorated.[63] But with his purchase of the border-pieces from Froben in 1518, it would seem that he more or less definitely turned his back on pictorial illustration. Mr. Gordon Duff has shown that a change comes over the character of his books about this time, and has suggested that during the latter years of his life his business was to some extent in the hands of Thomas Berthelet, who succeeded him as King’s Printer. Berthelet himself in the course of his long and prosperous career eschewed illustrations altogether, while he took some trouble to get good capitals and had a few ornamental borders. It is thus hardly too much to say that from 1518 for some forty years, until in 1559 John Day published Cunningham’s Cosmographicall Glasse, book-illustration in England can only be found lurking here and there in holes and corners. In 1526 Peter Treveris issued the Grete Herbal with numerous botanical figures; in 1529 John Rastell printed his own Pastime of People with huge, semi-grotesque cuts of English kings; a few of Robert Copland’s books and a few of Robert Wyer’s have rough cuts of no importance. But when we think of Pynson’s edition of Lord Berners’ Froissart, of Berthelet’s of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, of Godfray’s Chaucer, and of Grafton’s edition of Halle’s Chronicle, all illustratable books and all unillustrated, it is evident that educated book-buyers, wearied of rudely hacked blocks, often with no relevance to the book in which they were found, had told the printers that they might save the space occupied by these decorations, and that the reign of the primitive woodcut in English books, if it can be said ever to have reigned, was at an end.