THE PRINTERS AT WESTMINSTER.
While the history of the invention and introduction of the art of printing into the various countries of Europe is not only obscure, but still the subject of endless controversy, the history of its introduction into England is now practically settled.
There are no troublesome and incomprehensible documents as in the case of France. No questionable references or undatable fragments such as Dutch and German bibliographers have to contend with. The only attempt that has been made to bring forward an earlier printer than William Caxton is founded upon the misprinted date in the first book printed at Oxford.
In 1664, while the Company of Stationers and the King were quarrelling over the question which had or should have the most power in matters pertaining to printing, a certain Richard Atkyns put forth a tract, now exceedingly rare, called The Original and Growth of Printing. In this tract, intended to uphold the King’s rights, attention was drawn for the first time to the Oxford book. “A book came into my hands,” writes Atkyns, “printed at Oxford, A.D. 1468, which was three years before any of the recited authors would allow it to be in England.” Around this book Atkyns wove a wonderful romance, in the style of the earlier legends about Coster and Gutenberg. Rumours of the new art, he suggests, having reached England, trusted men were sent over to bribe or kidnap an eligible printer and bring him over secretly, along with a press, type, and other impedimenta, to England. This was accordingly done, and a certain Frederick Corsellis was conveyed into England, and set up a press in Oxford. One curious point has escaped all commentators on this story, and that is that a real person named Corsellis did come over to England from the Low Countries about that time, and was an ancestor of several well-known London families in Atkyns’s time, such as the Van Ackers, the Wittewronges and the Middletons.
Atkyns referred for evidence to documents which have never been found, and his story has met with the disbelief it deserved, but the Oxford book with the date of 1468 not only exists, but still has supporters who consider, or say they consider, the date to be genuine.
Singer in the early part of the century wrote a book in favour of its authenticity, though, as he afterwards attempted to suppress his work, we may conclude he had changed his opinion. Mr Madan of the Bodleian, in his recent admirable history of Oxford printing, clings hesitatingly to 1468, “but quaere” as he would himself say. Generally, however it is agreed that the date is a misprint for 1478. The book has printed signatures, which are not known to have been used before 1472, and when the book is placed alongside the two others issued from the same press in 1479 and printed in the same type, it falls naturally into its proper place, taking just the small precedence which its slightly lesser excellence of workmanship warrants.
Having now disposed of Caxton’s only rival, let us turn to Caxton himself. It would, I think, be out of place here to recapitulate however shortly the history of Caxton’s early life, since it has been so fully and excellently done in that standard book Blades’s Life of Caxton. What is more to our purpose is to pass on to the time when, as an influential and prosperous man, he laid the foundations of his career as a printer. By 1463 Caxton had been appointed to the office of governor of the English nation in the Low Countries, a post of considerable importance, and entailing the supervision of trade and traders, and this office he held until about the year 1469. At this latter date he was also in the service of the Duchess of Burgundy, though in what capacity is not stated; but he certainly employed himself at her request in making translations of romances. The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a well-known romance of the period, was translated between the years 1469 and 1471, and presented to the duchess in September of the latter year. In the prologue of the printed edition Caxton explains that after the duchess had received her copy, many other persons desired copies also, but that finding the labour of writing too wearisome for him, and not expeditious enough for his friends, he had “practised and learnt, at his great charge and expense, to ordain the book in print, to the end that every man might have them at once.”
Now in 1471, when Caxton finished his translation of the Recueil, he was living at Cologne, a city remarkable even at that time for the number of its printers, and the first town that Caxton had visited where the art was practised. He had just finished the tedious copying of a large manuscript, so that the advantages of printing would be manifest to him; and we may be tolerably certain that it was about this time and at this town that he took his first lessons in the art and mastered the mechanical processes.
Printing by this time had ceased to be a secret art, nor was there such a demand for books as to make it a very valuable one. The printed books of Germany had at an early date found their way to Bruges, and people’s eyes were accustomed to the sight of the printed page, though the nobles still preferred manuscripts, as being more ornamental and costly. There are copies in the Cambridge University Library and at Lambeth of the Cicero de officiis, printed at Mainz by Schoiffer in 1466, which were bought in 1467 at Bruges by John Russell, afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, when abroad on a diplomatic mission; and a speech of his, delivered at Ghent in 1470, on the occasion of the investiture of the Duke of Burgundy with the order of the Garter, was one of Caxton’s earliest printed productions.
A very strong piece of evidence to my mind that Caxton learnt at Cologne is to be found in the epilogue to the English translation of the De proprietatibus rerum, by Bartholomæus Anglicus, which was printed by W. de Worde, Caxton’s apprentice and successor, in 1496. This epilogue, written by De Worde himself, contains these lines:—