CHAPTER VII.
CAXTON'S DEATH.
The exact date of Caxton's death has never been settled, but from the position of the entry in the parish accounts relating to his burial, it would appear to have taken place towards the end of the year 1491. All the early writers fixed on 1493 as the date, no doubt because his name appears in the colophon of the edition of the Golden Legend printed in that year.
His will, could this be recovered, would doubtless throw light on this and many another obscure point, but the hope of finding it grows daily less and less. The ordinary repositories have been searched in vain; though it was still considered possible that it might be found amongst the large collection of documents preserved in Westminster Abbey. Mr. Scott, of the British Museum, who is at present engaged in calendaring these documents, and to whom I wrote on the subject, replied: "I believe it to be quite impossible that Caxton's will can be in the Muniment Rooms at the Abbey, because all the wills are together in one bundle, arranged chronologically, and also I have calendared, so far as I can see, all papers and deeds relating to Westminster." There is just the possibility that at some period the will, having been recognized as of supreme interest, has been removed to some place of greater security and its whereabouts forgotten.
In a copy of the Fructus Temporum printed by Julyan Notary in 1515, which belonged at one time to a Mr. Ballard of Cambden, in Gloucestershire, a friend of Joseph Ames, the bibliographer, there was written in a very old hand the following epitaph on Caxton:
"Of your charitee pray for the soul of Mayster Wyllyam Caxton, that in hys time was a man of moche ornate and moche renommed wysdome and connyng, and decessed ful crystenly the yere of our Lord M.CCCC.Lxxxxj.
"Moder of Merci shyld him from thorribul fynd
And bryng hym to lyff eternall that neuyr hath ynd."
There seems great probability that this is a genuine copy of a genuine inscription, for had it been a forgery of the time when it is first mentioned, early in the eighteenth century, the forger would have given the date as 1493, which was then supposed to be the date of Caxton's death, rather than 1491, the genuine date.
Two years later we find in the colophon to Gerard Leeu's reprint of Caxton's Chronicles the same epithets applied to him by his workmen (by one of whom he had been killed during the progress of the work) as are applied to Caxton, "a man of grete wysedom in all maner of kunnying."