According to this account, Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, having heard of the invention of printing at Haarlem, where John Gutenberg was then at work (a strange fact which might simplify the researches on early printing!), persuaded Henry VI. to endeavour to introduce the art into England. For this purpose, Robert Turner, an officer of the Robes, taking Caxton as an assistant, set out for Haarlem, where, after infinite trouble and considerable bribery, a workman named Frederick Corsellis was persuaded to return with them to England. On his arrival he was sent under a strong guard to Oxford, and there set up his press, under the protection of the King.
It is needless to say that the whole story is a fabrication, and a curiously clumsy one. At the beginning of 1461 Henry VI. was deposed by Edward, so that these events must have taken place in or before 1460, and it is strange, with all the materials ready, nothing should be done for nearly ten years. The information about Gutenberg, who invented printing at Mainz and was never outside Germany, being engaged at printing in Haarlem, is preposterous. Lastly, no trace of the documents has ever been found. It is strange how Atkyns should have fixed on the name Corsellis for his mythical printer, for this uncommon name was that of a family of wealthy Dutch merchants settled in London at the time. Just ten years after the publication of Atkyns’ book, a Nicholas Corsellis, lord of the manor of Lower Marney, Essex, was buried in the church there, and on his tomb are some verses beginning,
“Artem typographi miratam Belgicus Anglis
Corsellis docuit.”
Are we to infer from this that the family was a party to the fraud?
The story, however, was revived about the middle of the eighteenth century, when Osborne, the bookseller, in his catalogue of June 1756 offered for sale an edition of Pliny’s Letters, printed by Corsellis at Oxford in 1469. In his note he added that the printer had produced other works in 1470, and that fragments of a Lystrius of this date were known. Herbert continues the story as follows: “This raised the curiosity of the book collectors, who considered this article as a confirmation of what R. Atkins had asserted about printing at Oxford. They all flocked to Osborne’s shop, who instead of the book, produced a letter from a man of Amsterdam filled with frivolous excuses for not sending them to him. They were disappointed, and looked on the whole as a Hum; however, the Plinii Epistolæ and G. Lystrii Oratio afterwards appeared at an auction at Amsterdam and were bought for the late Dr Ant. Askew, and were sold again at an auction of his books by Baker and Leigh in Feb. 1775.”
These two books passed apparently to Denis Daly, then to Stanesby Alchorne, afterwards to Lord Spencer, and are now in the Rylands Library. The forgeries were made by a certain George Smith, much given to that class of work, and passed on to Van Damme, a bookseller of Amsterdam, who sold the Pliny to Askew for fifteen guineas. The inscriptions in the books are the clumsiest forgeries, which could not deceive anyone, while the books themselves were apparently printed at Deventer, early in the sixteenth century, by a well-known printer, Richard Paffroet. Listen now to the remarks of the erudite Dr Dibdin in the Bibliotheca Spenceriana. “Meerman has a long and amusing note concerning Van Damme and George Smith, from which it would appear that the latter had imposed upon the bookseller, Van Damme, in the annexed subscription to the volume, and that Van Damme acknowledged the imposition to one Richard Paffraet of Deventer. If this be true, the Dutch bibliopole acted a very dishonest part in selling the volume to Dr Askew for fifteen guineas!” If instead of long arguments about the types of the books or the probabilities of the dates, they had considered the books themselves, it might surely have occurred to them that it was at least unlikely that the physician, Gerard Lystrius, a friend and contemporary of Erasmus, should have published a work in 1470, while the next work issued by him did not appear until 1516. Besides the forged imprint, the Lystrius has at the end a long spurious note in Dutch purporting to be written by J. Korsellis in 1471, stating that the book had been sent him by his brother, Frederic Corsellis, from England. In order to kill two birds with one stone, the writer drags into the note the mythical inventor of printing, Laurens Janszoon Coster.
Oxford’s claim to having introduced printing into England was first disputed by the Cambridge University librarian, Dr Conyers Middleton, in his Dissertation on the Origin of Printing, published in 1735. He originated the theory that a numeral x had fallen out of the date or been accidentally omitted, and, after citing several early examples of such a mistake, continued: “But whilst I am now writing, an unexpected Instance is fallen into my hands, to the support of my Opinion; an Inauguration Speech of the Woodwardian Professor, Mr Mason, just fresh from our Press, with its Date given ten years earlier than it should have been, by the omission of an x, viz. MDccxxiv., and the very blunder exemplified in the last piece printed at Cambridge, which I suppose to have happen’d in the first from Oxford.” Middleton also brought forward what has remained the strongest argument against the authenticity of the date, the occurrence in the book of ordinary printed signatures, which are found in no other book until several years later. Finally, he pointed out the very great improbability of the interval of eleven years between the book of 1468 and the two books of 1479. The last person to cling to the 1468 date, doubtless from a sense of duty, is Mr Madan of the Bodleian. In his exhaustive work on the early Oxford press, after having fully put forward the arguments for and against, he sums up the situation as follows: “The ground has been slowly and surely giving way beneath the defenders of the Oxford date, in proportion to the advance of our knowledge of early printing, and all that can be said is that it has not yet entirely slipped away. It is still allowable to assert that the destructive arguments, even if we admit their cumulative cogency, do not at the present time amount to proof.”
Another earlier writer on this question ought to be mentioned, Samuel Weller Singer, since he wrote a small book entirely confined to the question of the authenticity of the date. It was entitled “Some account of the book printed at Oxford in 1468. In which is examined its claim to be considered the first book printed in England.” A small number of copies were privately printed; and the author came to the conclusion that, in his own words, “The book stands firm as a monument of the exercise of printing in Oxford, six years older than any book of Caxton’s with date.” Singer is said to have changed his views on the subject later on, and to have called in and destroyed as many copies as possible. His book may be classed as a curiosity for another reason. The original issue was said to consist of fifty copies privately printed, and as many copies as possible were afterwards destroyed by the author, yet it is a book of the commonest occurrence in secondhand catalogues.
The researches of later years, carried out more scientifically, have produced some definite information. In the first place, the source of the type in which the book is printed has been ascertained. It was used in 1477 and 1478 at Cologne by a printer named Gerard ten Raem, who printed five books with it; a Vocabularius Ex quo issued in October 1477, two issues of a Modus Confitendi published in January and October 1478 and a Donatus and Æsopus moralizatus, both without date. These books are very rare; the only one in the British Museum or Bodleian being the Donatus. The Rylands Library contains the Modus Confitendi with the October date. The University Library possesses the Modus of January and the unique copy of the Æsop.