Corsellis docuit, Regis prece munere victus.
Hic fuit extremis mercator cognitus Indis:
Incola jam cælis, virtus sua famaque vivent.
Johannes Corsellis ejus Executor & Consanguineus hoc monumentum posuit.” The Corsellis family came from Flanders in the 17th century. There is no question that this clumsy forgery of Atkyns has had its effect in befogging the subject to which it relates, and has predisposed critics to suspect the date of the first Oxford book.
II. The disputed date, “1468.”
The first who threw doubt on the recorded date of the Jerome was Conyers Middleton in his Dissertation on the origin of Printing published in 1735, and since then the opinion that 1468 is an error for 1478 (an X having dropped out of “MCCCCLXXVIII”) has steadily gained ground with the advance of critical methods, until authorities like Bradshaw and Blades and Duff have come to regard the question as settled. The only two separate and formal defences of the date (not counting incidental passages in books) are a MS. in the Guildhall Library in London, in a volume of Stukeley’s Palæographia Britannica marked B. 2. 1, perhaps written in about 1770, and S. W. Singer’s Some Account of the book printed at Oxford in MCCCCLXVIII (London, 1812, 50 copies for private distribution), a work which the author subsequently called in as far as he was able. In the former the arguments are of a general character, such as that if, as Middleton asserted, the King had not leisure to attend to such matters during Civil War, the archbishop had, and that Caxton’s silence counts for nothing in the general obscurity which surrounds the earliest printing presses. The Corsellis story is accepted. Singer is more scientific, as befits the later date, and adduces several of the technical arguments which may still be used.
It is now time to state the present aspect of the dispute, and to ascertain how far the date “1468” is not only dubious but untenable. The arguments against the date may be stated in presumed order of their cogency, with the remarks on the other side which they severally suggest.
1. The presence of Signatures.
The Jerome presents to our eyes the ordinary signatures to which we are accustomed in fifteenth-century books, that is to say the marks a j, a ij, a iij, a iiij on the recto of each of the four leaves which form the first half of the sections of eight leaves (sixteen pages) of which the book is generally composed. These are placed just below the last letters of the printed page, close under them. Now the earliest known book with a date in which signatures elsewhere occur in this developed form is an Expositio Decalogi, by Johannes Nider, printed at Cologne by Koelhoff in 1472, the next being a Cologne book by F. de Platea in 1474. The argument is that it is extremely unlikely that an isolated printer in a provincial town in England should make such a discovery and advance, and that the next similar book should be a German one four years later[[9]].
What may be called the common ground of the discussion on this point is well explained in Blades’s Books in Chains (Lond. 1892), pp. 85–122, in a paper on Signatures. He shows that the idea of signatures in manuscripts is as old as books themselves, but that in manuscripts the marks, being in writing and intended for the binder’s eye alone, were naturally, as a rule, at the foot or corner of the page, and often cut off in the process of binding. When printing came in, the obvious difficulty was to print marks so far from the rest of the printed page as to be cut off in binding. This difficulty was met in two ways: either the signatures were written in at the extreme foot (from 1462?), or the signatures were stamped on by hand with single types (from 1473?). Some printers, however, did manage by care to print signatures far from the text (1474 on?). Ultimately in a single case in 1472 and with increasing frequency from 1474 printers found that the essential ugliness of printed signatures close to the page was counterbalanced by the utility and convenience of the change, and our modern system was begun.