As we have already noted, the aim of the Corporation of the Stationers' Company was not primarily the promotion of good printing or literature. Printers were looked upon by the authorities as dangerous persons whom it was necessary to watch closely. Only six years after coming to the throne, Elizabeth signed a decree passed by the Star Chamber, requiring every printer to enter into substantial recognisances for his good behaviour. No books were to be printed or imported without the sanction of a Special Commission of Ecclesiastical Authorities, under a penalty of three months' imprisonment and the forfeiture of all right to carry on business as a master printer or bookseller in future, while the officers of the Company were instructed to carry out strict search for all prohibited books.
On the other hand, while thus retaining a tight rein on the printing trade, the Queen, no doubt for monetary considerations, granted special patents for the sole printing of certain classes of books to individual master printers, and threatened pains and penalties upon any other member of the craft who should print any such books. In this way all the best-paying work in the trade became the property of some dozen or so of printers. Master Tottell was allowed the sole printing of Law Books, Master Jugge the sole printing of Bibles, James Roberts and Richard Watkins the sole printing of Almanacs; Thomas Vautrollier, a stranger, was allowed to print all Latin books except the Grammars, which were given to Thomas Marsh, and John Day had received the right of printing and selling the A B C and Litell Catechism, a book largely bought for schools, and which Christopher Barker, in his Complaint, declared was once 'the onelye reliefe of the porest sort of that Company.' On every side the best work was seized and monopolised. Nor did the evil cease there. These patents were invariably granted for life with reversion to a successor, and they were bought and sold freely. Hence the poorer members of the Company daily found it harder to live. There was very little light literature, and what there was had few readers. Their appeals for redress of grievances, whether addressed to the State or to the Company, which pretended to look after their welfare, were alike in vain, and at length they rose in open revolt. Half a dozen of them, headed by Roger Ward and John Wolf, boldly printed the books owned by the patentees. Roger Ward seized upon this A B C of Day's, and at a secret press, with type supplied to him by a workman of Thomas Purfoot, printed many thousand copies of the work with Day's mark. Hence the proceedings in the Star Chamber. They did very little good. Ward defied imprisonment; and the agitators would undoubtedly have gained more than they did, and might even have saved the art of printing from falling into the hopeless state it afterwards reached, had it not been for the desertion of John Wolf, who, after declaring that he would work a reformation in the printing trade similar to that which Luther had worked in religion, quietly allowed himself to be bought over, and died in eminent respectability as Printer to the City of London, leaving Ward and others to carry on the war. This they did with such effect, that, forced to find a remedy, the patentees of the Company at length agreed to relax their grasp of some of the books that they had laid their hands upon. Day is said to have been most generous, relinquishing no less than fifty-three, and this number is in itself a commentary on the magnitude of the monopolies.
Fig. 21.—Day's large Device.
John Day died at Walden, in Essex, on the 23rd July 1584, at the age of sixty-two, and was buried at Bradley Parva, where there is a fair tomb and a lengthy poetical epitaph on his virtues and abilities. He was twice married, and is said to have had twenty-six children, of whom one son, Richard, was for a short time a printer, and another, John, took Orders, and became rector of Little Thurlow, in Suffolk.
John Day had three devices. His earliest, and perhaps his best, was a large block of a skeleton lying on an elaborately chased bier, with a tree at the back, and two figures, an old man and a young, standing beside it. This may have been typical of the Resurrection, the sign of the house in which he began business. Then we find the device of the Heart in his later books, and finally there is the block of the Sleeper Awakened, but this almost always formed part of the title-page.