William Caxton

by E. Gordon Duff

E. G. D.

Chain Bridge, Berwyn, May, 1902.

CHAPTER I.
CAXTON'S EARLY LIFE.

Amongst those men to whom belongs the honour of having introduced the art of printing into the various countries of Europe, none holds a more marked or a more important position than William Caxton. This is not the place to discuss the vexed questions, when, where, or by whom the art was really discovered; but the general opinion may be accepted, that in Germany, before the year 1450, Gutenberg had thought out the invention of movable type and the use of the printing-press, and that before the end of the year 1454 a dated piece of printing had been issued. From town to town down the waterways of Germany the art spread, and the German printers passed from their own to other countries,—to Italy, to Switzerland, and to France; but in none of these countries did the press in any way reflect the native learning or the popular literature. Germany produced nothing but theology or law,—bibles, psalters, and works of Aquinas and Jerome, Clement or Justinian. Italy, full of zeal for the new revival of letters, would have nothing but classics; and as in Italy so in France, where the press was at work under the shadow of the University.

Fortunately for England, the German printers never reached her shores, nor had the new learning crossed the Channel when Caxton set up his press at Westminster, so that, unique amongst the nations of Europe, England's first printer was one of her own people, and the first products of her press books in her own language. Many writers, such as Gibbon and Isaac Disraeli, have seen fit to disparage the work of Caxton, and have levelled sneers, tinged with their typical inaccuracy, at the printer and his books. Gibbon laments that Caxton "was reduced to comply with the vicious taste of his readers; to gratify the nobles with treatises on heraldry, hawking, and the game of chess [Caxton printed neither of the first two]; and to amuse the popular credulity with romances of fabulous knights and legends of more fabulous saints." "The world," he continues, "is not indebted to England for one first edition of a classic author." Disraeli, following Gibbon, writes: "As a printer without erudition, Caxton would naturally accommodate himself to the tastes of his age, and it was therefore a consequence that no great author appears among the Caxtons." And again: "Caxton, mindful of his commercial interests and the taste of his readers, left the glory of restoring the classical writers of antiquity, which he could not read, to the learned printers of Italy."

It is idle to argue with men of this attitude of mind. Of what use would it have been to us, or profit to our printer, to reprint editions of the classics which were pouring forth from foreign presses, and even there, where most in demand, were becoming unsaleable? Those who wanted classics could easily and did easily obtain them from the foreign stationers. Caxton's work was infinitely more valuable. He printed all the English poetry of any moment then in existence. Chaucer he printed at the commencement of his career, and issued a new edition when a purer text offered itself. Lidgate and Gower soon followed. He printed the available English chronicles, those of Brut and Higden, and the great romances, such as the History of Jason and the Morte d'Arthur. While other printers employed their presses on the dead languages he worked at the living. He gave to the people the classics of their own land, and at a time when the character of our literary tongue was being settled did more than any other man before or since has done to establish the English language.

Caxton's personal history is unfortunately surrounded by considerable obscurity. Apart from the glimpses which we catch here and there in the curious and interesting prefaces which he added to many of the books he printed, we know scarcely anything of him. Thus the story of his life wants that variety of incident which appeals so forcibly to human sympathy and communicates to a biography its chief and deepest interest. The first fact of his life we learn from the preface of the first book he printed. "I was born and lerned myn Englissh in Kente in the Weeld where I doubte not is spoken as brode and rude Englissh as is in ony place of Englond."

This is the only reference to his birthplace, and such as it is, is remarkably vague, for the extent or limits of the Weald of Kent were never clearly defined. William Lambarde, in his Perambulation of Kent, writes thus of it: "For it is manifest by the auncient Saxon chronicles, by Asserus Menevensis, Henrie of Huntingdon, and almost all others of latter time, that beginning at Winchelsea in Sussex it reacheth in length a hundred and twenty miles toward the West and stretched thirty miles in breadth toward the North." The name Caxton, Cauxton, or Causton, as it is variously spelt, was not an uncommon one in England, but there was one family of that name specially connected with that part of the country who owned the manor of Caustons, near Hadlow, in the Weald of Kent. Though the property had passed into other hands before the time of the printer's birth, some families of the name remained in the neighbourhood, and one at least retained the name of the old home, for there is still in existence a will dated 1490 of John Cawston of Hadlow Hall, Essex.