Though Westminster was joined with London in the earlier lectures, it ceased after 1500 to have any printers of its own, for in that year De Worde moved to London to be nearer the centre of trade, and he was followed almost immediately by Julian Notary. In this lecture I am going to take, besides De Worde, all the printers and stationers who were connected with him in business, and who formed what might be called the popular school of printers, who neglecting legal, political, and learned books, such as were issued by the King’s Printers, confined their attention to books of a lighter and more ephemeral kind.
Wynkyn de Worde, who had probably been an assistant of Caxton’s from the time of the introduction of printing into England in 1476, was certainly married and settled in Westminster by 1480, in which year his wife Elizabeth is mentioned in a deed. He inherited all Caxton’s printing material and continued to lease his old house and printing-office from the Abbot of Westminster, John Esteney, in whose account-book he is entered from the year 1491 onward. Mr Scott, of the British Museum, who first made known these entries, which he had found when calendaring the Abbey muniments, noted that he was called Jan Wynkyn in them, and wrote a letter to the Athenaeum to point out that the printer’s Christian name, hitherto unknown, was John. It appears to me that about this name there is some confusion or mistake.
Wijnand or Wynkyn is itself a Christian name, and De Worde like most other foreign printers made use of his Christian name joined to the name of the place from which he came. Thus we have Joannes Lettou (John of Lithuania), Willelmus de Machlinia (William of Malines), Jan van Doesborch, Christopher van Ruremond, John Siberch, and so on, while we have no example of a surname joined with the name of a place. In all the hundreds of colophons to De Worde’s books, in his patent of denization, even in his will, there is no hint of such a name as Jan, and the combination Jan Wynkyn could only mean John the son of Wynkyn. We must presume that De Worde knew better than the Abbot what his own name was and that the Abbot’s entry is the result of some confusion. I am the more anxious to point out this confusion about the name because entirely without my knowledge and after I had returned my last proof the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography inserted this piece of information, extracted from Mr Scott’s letter, in my notice of Wynkyn de Worde, and thus made me responsible for a statement which I do not in the least believe.
De Worde continued to print in Caxton’s house until some time in 1500, when he moved to the sign of the Sun in Fleet Street. The position of the house can be settled almost exactly. It is described as over against, that is, opposite the Conduit, and this was situated in Fleet Street, just where Shoe Lane entered it on the north side. De Worde’s house being in St Bride’s parish and near the church must have been on the south side of the street and therefore opposite the entrance of Shoe Lane. He rented two houses, one no doubt a dwelling-house, the other his printing-office, and for these he paid a rent of sixty-six shillings and eight-pence. On leaving Westminster De Worde either destroyed or parted with a considerable portion of his printing material. Some of his type used up to this time never appears again, and many of the wood blocks used to illustrate his books are found in the hands of other printers, more especially Julian Notary.
The year 1501 was apparently mostly taken up with settling into his new premises; for this year his output was the smallest during his whole career, and we know of but one dated book issued in it, a new edition of Bishop Alcock’s Mons Perfectionis which appeared on May 27. Three copies of this book are known, in the libraries of Peterborough and Lincoln Cathedrals, and the third in the University Library, which came in the bequest of Mr Sandars.
On April 22, 1502, De Worde issued an edition of the Manipulus Curatorum, which is worthy of notice. It is a very small octavo, printed in a small neat black-letter, and all the copies I have seen, with one exception, have on the title-page the small square early device of the printer. The copy, however, which belonged to Richard Farmer and is now in the Bodleian, has a device of De Worde which so far as I know is found in no other book. It is, like his most common device, divided into three parts. The upper contains the sun, two planets, and thirty-six stars, the middle Caxton’s mark and initials, and the lower the unicorn and Sagittarius above a ribbon containing De Worde’s name in full. The engraver has made a not uncommon mistake and has engraved the large initial C so that it prints the wrong way about. Another device of De Worde’s had the mark reversed, but that was not so obvious an error; in this case the printer seems to have thought the mistake too flaring and to have suppressed the device.
There is a curious little undated tract in the University Library which cannot be later than the beginning of 1502, describing the doings of Margerie Kempe of Lynn, a religious enthusiast who travelled about the country with an axe asking people to cut her head off. In this De Worde used, probably for the last time, the beautiful cut of the Crucifixion which he had inherited from Caxton, but which beginning to split in 1499 had now broken in half and was in other ways more or less damaged.
Unrecorded device of W. de Worde.
In 1504 De Worde began the use of his best known device, first used in a Grammar of Sulpitius, of which the unique copy is in the library of Shrewsbury School. It is square in shape and divided into three parts. In the upper are the sun, two planets, and twenty stars, in the middle Caxton’s initials and mark, and in the lower the printer’s name on a ribbon, above which are a dog and a centaur. This device was used until 1518, when having got cracked and broken it was replaced by an almost exact facsimile. This in its turn was used until 1528, when it was replaced by a third copy. So similar to the eye are these three varieties that no writer on bibliography has noticed the differences, though they form the most valuable date test we have for De Worde’s books, as it was this device he most generally used.