Well could he in exchanges shieldies[3] sell,
This worthy man full well his wit beset;[4]
There wiste no wight that he was in debt,
So stedfastly did he his governance
With his bargains, and with his chevisance.[5]"
When we look at William Caxton as the apprentice to a London mercer, his position does not at first sight appear very favourable to that cultivation of a literary taste, and that love of books, which was originally the solace, and afterwards the business, of his life. Yet a closer insight into the mercantile arrangements of those days will show us that he could not have been more favourably placed for attaining some practical acquaintance with books, in the way of his ordinary occupation. When books were so costly and so inaccessible to the great body of the people, there was necessarily no special trade of bookselling. There were indeed stationers, who had books for sale, or more probably executed orders for transcribing books. Their occupation is thus described by Mr. Hallam, in his 'Literature of Europe:'—"These dealers were denominated stationarii, perhaps from the open stalls at which they carried on their business, though statio is a general word for a shop, in low Latin. They appear by the old statutes of the university of Paris, and by those of Bologna, to have sold books upon commission; and are sometimes, though not uniformly, distinguished from the librarii; a word which, having originally been confined to the copyists of books, was afterwards applied to those who traded in them. They sold parchment and other materials of writing, which, with us, though, as far as I know, nowhere else, have retained the name of stationery, and naturally exercised the kindred occupations of binding and decorating. They probably employed transcribers." The mercer in those days was not a dealer in small wares generally, as at an earlier period; nor was his trade confined to silken goods—such an one as Shakspere describes, "Master Threepile, the mercer," who had thrown a man into prison for "some four suits of peach-coloured satin." The mercer of the fifteenth century was essentially a merchant. The mercers in the time of Edward III. were the great wool-dealers of the country. They were the merchants of the Staple, in the early days of our woollen manufacture; and the merchant adventurers of a later period were principally of their body. In their traffic with other lands, and especially with the Low Countries, they were the agents by which valuable manuscripts found their way into England; and in this respect they were something like the great merchant princes of Italy, whose ships not unfrequently contained a cargo of Indian spices and of Greek manuscripts. John Bagford, who wrote a slight Life of Caxton about 1714, which is in manuscript in the British Museum, says, "Kings, queens, and noblemen had their particular merchants, who, when they were ready for their voyage into foreign parts, sent their servants to know what they wanted, and among the rest of their choice many times books were demanded, and there to buy them in those parts where they were going." Caxton tells us in the 'Book of Good Manners,' which he translated from the French and printed in 1487, that the original French work was delivered to him by a "special friend, a mercer of London, named William Praat." This commerce of books could not have been very great; but it might have been so far carried on by Robert Large, the wealthy master of Caxton, that a lad of ability might thus possess opportunities for improvement which were denied to the great body of his fellow-apprentices. At this particular period there appear to have been but few opportunities even for the sons of parents of some substance to obtain the rudiments of knowledge. There is a petition presented to parliament in the twenty-fifth year of Henry VI., 1446, which exhorts the Commons "to consider the great number of grammar-schools that sometime were in divers parts of this realm, besides those that were in London, and how few there are in these days." The petitioners, who are four clergymen of the city, go on to say that London is the common concourse of this land, and that many persons, for lack of schoolmasters in their own country, resort there to be informed of grammar; and then they proceed thus: "Wherefore it were expedient that in London were a sufficient number of schools and good informers in grammar; and not, for the singular avail of two or three persons, grievously to hurt the multitude of young people of all this land. For where there is great number of learners and few teachers, and all the learners be compelled to go to the few teachers, and to none others, the masters wax rich of money, and the learners poorer in cunning, as experience openly showeth, against all virtue and order of weal public." These benevolent clergymen accomplished the object of their petition, which was that in each of their parishes they might "ordain, create, establish, and set a person sufficiently learned in grammar to hold and exercise a school in the same science of grammar, and there to teach to all that will learn." One of the schools thus established exists to this day, in connexion with the Mercers' Company, and is commonly known as the Mercers' School. We are a little anticipating the period of our narrative, for this petition belongs to Caxton's mature life; but we mention it as an evidence of the extreme difficulty which must have existed in those days for the children of the middle classes to obtain the rudiments of knowledge. It is evident that Caxton belonged to the more fortunate portion, upon whom the blessings of education fell like prizes in a lottery. The evil has not been wholly corrected even during four centuries; but it is devoutly to be hoped that the time is not far distant when, to use the words of the benevolent clergymen who knew the value of knowledge at that comparatively dark period, there shall be in every place a school, and a competent person "there to teach to all that will learn."
Oldys, the writer of the Life of Caxton in the 'Biographia Britannica,' says, speaking of Robert Large, the master of Caxton, "The same magistrate held his mayoralty in that which had been the mansion-house of Robert Fitzwalter, anciently called the Jews' Synagogue, at the north corner of the Old Jewry." This Old Jewry appears to have been in earlier times an accustomed place of residence for the mercers; for there are records still extant of legal proceedings in the time of Henry III. against four mercers of that place, for a violent assault upon two Lombard merchants, whom they regarded as rivals in trade. In the days of their retail dealings they occupied a portion of Cheapside which went by the name of the Mercery. In the fourteenth century their shops were little better than sheds, and Cheapside, or more properly Cheap, was a sort of market, where various trades collected round the old Cross, which remained there till the time of the Long Parliament. When the mercers became large wholesale dealers in woollen cloths and silk, the haberdashers took up their standing in the same place. In the ballad of 'London Lickpenny,' written in the time of Henry VI., the scene in the Cheap is thus described:—
"Then to the Cheap I began me drawn,
Where much people I saw for to stand;
One offered me velvet, silk, and lawn,