The Fifteen Oes is another of these religious books. Its name is taken from the fact that each of the fifteen prayers of which it is composed begins with O, and it was printed as a supplement to a Sarum Horæ, with later editions of which it was generally incorporated. It contains a beautiful woodcut of the Crucifixion, and is also the only existing book printed by Caxton which had borders round the pages. That a Horae to accompany it was printed is most probable, for the Crucifixion is only one of a set of cuts which was used, together with the borders, in an edition printed about 1494.
Though most of the books at this time can only be arranged conjecturally it is probable that the last book printed by Caxton was the Book of Divers Ghostly Matters. It consists really of three tracts, each separately printed, the Seven Points of True Love, the Twelve Profits of Tribulation, and the Rule of St Benet; but as they are always found bound together, they are classed as one book. There is one cut in the second treatise taken from the Speculum series, but no other illustrations.
Caxton used during his career eight founts of type, of which six only are included in Blades’s enumeration. The late French type which appeared about 1490-91, and is found in a few of the latest books, such as the Ars Moriendi and the Fifteen Oes, Blades considered not to have been used until after Caxton’s death; and the type of the 1489 indulgences was not mentioned at all. Blades’s arrangement, too, of the books under their types, though correct in a certain way, is a very misleading one, for he takes the types in their order, and then arranges all the books under the type in which the body of the book is printed. Now this leads to considerable confusion when different types were in use together. For instance, Caxton started at Westminster with types 2 and 3, and both are used in his first book, but Blades puts the books in type 3 after all those in type 2, and thus the Sarum Ordinale, perhaps the second book printed in England, certainly one of the earliest, comes thirty-sixth on his list. Now, though Blades’s arrangement was not a chronological one, most writers have made the mistake of thinking so, and have followed it as such, as may be seen, for instance, in the list appended to Caxton’s life in the Dictionary of National Biography, which follows Blades’s arrangement without any reference to his system or mention of the types.
Caxton printed in England ninety-six separate books, and, counting in the three printed by him at Bruges, and the Sarum Missal, altogether one hundred, of which ninety-four are mentioned by Blades. It is true that Blades describes ninety-nine books, but he includes two certainly printed at Bruges after Caxton had left, and three printed by De Worde after Caxton’s death. But it is not the mere number of the books he printed that makes Caxton’s career so remarkable, but the fact that he edited almost every book he issued, and translated a large number. He himself says that he had translated twenty-two, and the statement was made at a time previous to his making several others, and when we consider that amongst his translations is to be included such a large book as the Golden Legend, we can only wonder that he printed as much as he did.
Of the exact date of his death we have no evidence, but it evidently must have taken place in 1491. It is unfortunate, too, that no copy of his will has been preserved; for the collection of documents in Westminster Abbey, where it might, with most probability, have been expected to be found, has been searched in vain. The will, besides the interesting personal details which it might supply, would most likely give some information about those engaged with him in business, the assistants who worked his presses, or the stationers who sold his books.
Of his family we know next to nothing. We know that he was married and had a daughter named Elizabeth, who was married to a merchant named Gerard Croppe, from whom she obtained a deed of separation in 1496. Had Caxton had a son he would probably have continued the printing business. As it was the printing materials were inherited by his assistant or apprentice Wynkyn de Worde, who continued to carry on work in his old master’s house at Westminster. In his letters of denization, taken out so late as the 20th April, 1496, he is described as a printer, and a native of the Duchy of Lorraine. His name, De Worde, which some have fallen into the mistake of deriving from the town of Woerden in Holland, is clearly taken from the town of Wörth in Alsace; indeed, the printer sometimes uses the form Worth in place of Worde. Although he inherited Caxton’s business, which was no doubt a flourishing one, he seems to have started on his own account with very little vigour or enterprise. Indeed, so torpid was the press at that time that foreign printers found it worth their while to produce and import reprints of Caxton’s books for sale in this country, books to which I shall refer more fully in a future lecture. We soon see that we have to deal now with a man who was merely a mechanic, and who was quite unable to fill the place of Caxton either as an editor or a translator, one who preferred to issue small popular books of a kind to attract the general public, rather than the class of book which had hitherto been published from Caxton’s house.
For the first two years De Worde contented himself with using Caxton’s old types, of which he appears to have possessed at least five founts, and in that time he printed five books, the Book of Courtesy, the Treatise of Love, the Chastising of God’s Children, the Life of St Katherine, and a third edition of the Golden Legend. Why this book should have been so often printed is rather a mystery, for, while Caxton issued two editions and De Worde another two before 1500, at the end of the century a considerable number of Caxton’s edition still remained for sale at the price of thirteen shillings and fourpence, not a large sum for those days and considering the size of the book.
The Book of Courtesy, which is known only from two leaves in the Douce collection at Oxford, was a reprint from Caxton’s edition, of which the only known copy is in the Cambridge University Library. In the waste leaves in the Bodleian, De Worde’s device is printed upside-down, and for this reason perhaps the sheet was rejected and used to line a binding, and thus preserved for us. The Treatise of Love was printed for the translator, whose name unfortunately does not appear, but the translation is dated 1493, and the printing is clearly of the same year. The Chastising of God’s Children, a deplorably dull book, is interesting typographically as being the first book printed at Westminster with a title-page. Why Caxton never introduced this improvement it is hard to say, for he must have seen many books in which they were used, and a book with one was printed at London before his death.
The imprint of the Golden Legend is curious, for though it is dated 1493 it contains Caxton’s name. De Worde seems to have reprinted from an earlier edition, merely altering the date, or perhaps he meant the words “By me William Caxton” to refer to the translator rather than the printer.
In 1493, very nearly at the close of the year, De Worde’s first type makes its appearance in an edition of the Liber Festivalis, the second or companion part of the book, the Quattuor Sermones, coming out early in 1494. The type has a strong French appearance, though it retains several characteristics and even a few identical letters of Caxton’s founts. It is curious that up to this time De Worde had not put his name to any book, though most of them contain his first device, a copy on a small scale of Caxton’s, and evidently cut in metal.