The study of these French books of Hours is not an easy one, as there is so much confusion between printers and publishers. In some cases I am afraid the publishers used the words “printed by” in a quite unwarrantable manner, and claimed to have produced books which they had done nothing more than pay for. Then again quite half the editions produced for sale in England are without any imprint, so that we are left to conjecture who was the printer from the type or cuts used in the books. To further bewilder us, sets of cuts passed from printer to printer, and are very untrustworthy guides in assigning books. If one printer issued a Horae with a fine set of cuts they were promptly copied by his rivals, who in their turn sold their old sets to less wealthy printers, in fact some sets of cuts change hands almost every year.
These books are all got up in the same style, the text surrounded on every page by deep borders containing figures of saints and martyrs or pictures from the Dance of Death.
One unique edition, printed by Jean Poitevin about 1498, was picked up lately in Ireland and bought by the librarian of Trinity College, Dublin, for a small sum.
A service book of great interest is the first edition of the Sarum Manual, of which the only known copy is in the library at Caius College. It bears on its first leaf a Latin inscription stating that it was given to the College of the Annunciation of the Blessed Mary at Cambridge by Humphrey de la Poole, son of the Duke of Suffolk, for the use of the college, in September, 1498. The book is a folio of 164 leaves, beautifully printed in red and black by Berthold Rembolt of Paris. It has no date, but the Greek in the printer’s device reads ΧΕΡΕΘΗΚΙ, and must therefore be after 1496, when it read ΧΕΡΕΘΙΚΗ, and as the book was presented in 1498 we may fairly safely fix the date of printing about the beginning of 1498. Unfortunately the last leaf is missing, which may have contained an imprint giving the exact date and stating for whom the book was printed.
The last service book to be noticed is a Sarum Missal printed by Jean du Pré at Paris in 1500. Unfortunately all the copies of this book are imperfect, though from the three copies known an exact collation can be made. Another Missal was printed at Paris in the same year by Higman and Hopyl for two unknown persons, I.B. and G.H.
All these service books though most interesting liturgically are almost the most uninteresting class of book to the bibliographer. They were issued by well-known printers, and are hardly different from the great mass of foreign service books. From them early in the sixteenth century, however, we derive a good deal of information about the stationers, especially as regards the provincial presses; for in the case of a town like York hardly anything seems to have been printed beyond liturgical books.
So far the books we have been speaking of have been for the most part in Latin, with some sentences here and there in English, printed, of course, for the English market, but not of much interest from the point of view of literature. But we now come to another small group of English books, printed entirely in English, of very much greater interest.
In 1492 and 1493, when, just after the death of Caxton, the English press was almost at a standstill, Gerard Leeu of Antwerp printed four English books of considerable interest. Three of them were reprints of books already printed by Caxton, Lefevre’s History of Jason, the History of Paris and Vienne, and the Chronicles of England. The fourth book was The Dialogue or Communyng between the Wise King Solomon and Marcolphus. Of this there does not seem to have been any other English edition, though many Latin ones were printed in the fifteenth century, and it is possible, though hardly probable, that Caxton might have printed an edition which has entirely disappeared.
Lefevre’s History of Jason is a small folio of ninety-eight leaves, illustrated with a number of half-page cuts clearly made to illustrate the book in which they first appear. They were used in several editions of the Jason in different languages, the earliest in Dutch having been printed by Bellaert at Haarlem about 1485. There are copies of the English edition at Trinity College, Dublin, and in the library at Chatsworth, and a third copy, slightly imperfect, is in the University Library.
The History of Paris and Vienne, which was printed exactly three weeks after the History of Jason, is a still rarer book, only one copy being known, which is in the library at Trinity College, Dublin. It, like the Jason, is illustrated with a series of half-page wood engravings, which Mr Conway, in his History of the Woodcutters of the Netherlands, conjectures to have been originally used in an edition printed by Bellaert at Haarlem, which has now entirely disappeared, and then to have passed from his possession into the hands of Gerard Leeu. It is a small folio of forty leaves, and the copy at Dublin is bound up with the Jason and the Chronicles.