The alien printer, stationer, or binder, when denizened, was in this position. He paid double subsidies and taxes, he could have none but English-born apprentices and only two foreign workmen. He was under the rule of the Warden of the Craft. He could not deal in foreign bound books, nor buy books from foreigners except by engross. The alien not denizened had the further restrictions that unless he had been a householder before February 1528, he could not keep any house or shop in which to exercise any handicraft, nor could he sell any foreign printed books by retail.

Weighed down by these various disabilities the small foreign stationers rapidly disappeared. A certain number who had lived here for some time took out letters of denization and stayed on, but it was only to struggle on.

If you wish to have a practical idea of what foreign work meant to England, just glance at the list of Contents in Mr Sayle’s admirable Catalogue of the Early English books in the University Library. Taking all the persons given in the list, from the earliest printing to 1510 connected with English books, we have the astonishing result of three Englishmen, Caxton, a printer, Hunte, the Oxford stationer, and W. Bretton, merely a patron of printing. The foreigners on the other hand number forty-two. After 1510 the relative numbers rapidly alter, and by 1535 the great majority were English. The hatred of the natives, and the various Acts levelled against him, compelled the foreign workman to disappear, and I am afraid that with his disappearance the necessary competition which produced good printing disappeared also.

The fifty years of freedom from 1484 to 1534 not only brought us the finest specimens of printing we possess, but compelled the native workman, in self-protection, to learn, and when competition was done away with his ambition rapidly died also. Once our English printing was protected, it sank to a level of badness which has lasted, with the exception of a few brilliant experiments, almost down to our own day.

INDEX.

CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A., AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

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