1895
Oxford
PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
BY HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
PREFACE
The present work was undertaken early in 1889, and is an attempt to describe in detail the products and working of the Oxford Press in its early days. Though eclipsed by the glories of the later University Press, the first period, included in this book, has a natural importance of its own. The Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Century presses[[1]] are necessarily of interest, and when printing became firmly established in 1585 it began to reflect faithfully the current tendencies of thought and study in the University. Theology is predominant, animated on its controversial side with fierce opposition to the Church of Rome, but the quieter fields of classical work are well represented, and side by side is seen an increasing study of English literature. Of lighter books there are few, and of chapbooks perhaps only one (1603, no. 5).
The most important works produced at Oxford between 1585 and 1640 were Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon (1599), Wycliff’s treatises (1608), capt. John Smith’s Map of Virginia (1612), Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621, &c.), Field on the Church (1628, &c.), Sandys’ translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1633), the University Statutes (1634), Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida in English and Latin (1635), Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants (1638), and Bacon’s Advancement and Proficience of Learning, in English (1640: see frontispiece). There are of course many books on logic, philosophy and the like, intended for the University curriculum, and many collections of the rhetorical poems by which the University was expected to condole or rejoice with every change in the royal estate. 180 pages of mechanical grief at Elizabeth’s death in 1603 are at once followed by 200 pages of equally mechanical congratulations to James I: and the metrical tears dropped in turn on the grave of the latter monarch in March 1625, are in May succeeded with indecorous haste by songs of joy on the marriage of his successor. Some volumes of English poems and plays occur, by Skelton, Nicholas Breton, Churchyard, Fitz-Geffrey, Randolph, Cartwright, Fletcher, and others, and a few still lighter pieces, such as a Masque at Richmond, partly in Wiltshire dialect, and “Bushell’s Rock,” both in 1636. There are traces of the study of Spanish, French and Welsh, as well as of Latin and Greek; and an attempt to introduce phonetic writing and spelling was made by Charles Butler in 1633 and 1634. Even theological disputes are lightened by the solemn account of certain Jesuits in the East, who dressed up a carcase as that of a queen recently deceased, obtained much glory from the miracles it wrought, until the real corpse arrived and the priests vacated the vicinity (1633, Gregorius). There is something surprising in Oxford being chosen as the printing-place of a book to persuade mothers to nurse their own children (1622, Clinton); and an episcopal alchemist is not often to be met with in real life (1621, Thornborough). It is less to be wondered at that a college which had leased land to Queen Elizabeth for a quiet five thousand years, should try to be relieved of its agreement within fifty (1623, Oxford).
There is no need of a general history of the University Press at this time, as distinguished from the annals which the Appendixes of this work present. The printers were privileged members of the University, and occasionally printed “cum privilegio,” but there is little to invest their personal proceedings with importance. Though it is true that money was advanced in 1585 by the Earl of Leicester, Chancellor of the University, to set up Joseph Barnes with a new press, and that the charter of privileges in 1632 gave the University direct control of the printing, there are as yet few signs of actual academical patronage or interference, and the failures and successes of the printers and publishers, which can be traced in detail in Appendixes C and F, are the ordinary fluctuations of trade. Nor can the Oxford press at this time claim much connexion with the greater world of the English Court or Church. After it was placed on a permanent footing by the Earl of Leicester, its one great patron and protector within our period was Archbishop Laud, who occupied a similar position to that of Bishop Fell at a later period in the same century.
The year 1640 has been chosen as the inferior limit of this bibliography, partly because both the British Museum Catalogue of early English books and Arber’s Transcript of the Registers of the Stationers’ Company stop at that point, partly because the interest in the products of the press as such was found to be rapidly diminishing, and partly in consequence of the break-up of all quiet progress during the convulsions of the Rebellion, combined with the dismal prospect of that trackless wilderness—the literature of the Civil War.