CHAPTER VI
PROVINCIAL PRESSES OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY[8]
n the first half of the sixteenth century, before the incorporation of the Stationers' Company and the subsequent restriction of printing to London and the Universities, there were ten places in England where the art was carried on. Taking them chronologically, the earliest was the city of York. Mr. Davies, in his Memoirs of the York Press, claims that Frederick Freez, a book-printer, was at work there in 1497; but Mr. Allnutt has clearly shown that there is no evidence in support of this, no specimen of his printing being in existence. The first printer in the city of York who can be traced with certainty was Hugo Goez, said to have been the son of Matthias van der Goez, an Antwerp printer. Two school-books, a Donatus Minor and an Accidence, as well as the Directorium Sacerdotum, dated in the colophon February 18th, 1509, were printed by him, and it is believed that he was for a time in partnership in London with a bookseller named Henry Watson (E. G. Duff, Early Printed Books). Ames, in his Typographical Antiquities, mentions a broadside 'containing a wooden cut of a man on horseback with a spear in his right hand, and a shield of the arms of France in his left. "Emprynted at Beverley in the Hyegate by me Hewe Goes," with his mark, or rebus, of a great H and a goose.' But this cannot now be traced.
Another printer in York, of whom it is possible to speak with certainty, was Ursyn Milner, who printed a Festum visitationis Beate Marie Virginis, without date, and a Latin syntax by Robert Whitinton, entitled Editio de concinnitate grammatices et constructione noviter impressa, with the date December 20th, 1516, and a woodcut that had belonged to Wynkyn de Worde.
The second Oxford press began about 1517. In that year there appeared, Tractatus expositorius super libros posteriorum Aristotelis, by Walter Burley, bearing the date December 4th, 1517, without printer's name, but ascribed from the appearance of the types to the press of John Scolar, whose name is found in some of the similar tracts that appeared the following year. These included Questiones moralissime super libros ethicorum, by John Dedicus, dated May 15, 1518. On June 5th was issued Compendium questionum de luce et lumine, on June 7th Walter Burley's Tractatus perbrevis de materia et forma, on June 27th Whitinton's De Heteroclitis nominibus. The latest book, dated 5th February 1519, Compotus manualis ad usum Oxoniensium, bore the name of Charles Kyrfoth, but nothing further is known of any such printer.
No more is heard of a press at Oxford until nearly the close of the sixteenth century, a gap of nearly seventy years, and a strange and unaccountable interval. At any rate, the next Oxford printed book, so far as is at present known, was John Case's Speculum Moralium quaestionum in universam ethicen Aristotelis, with the colophon, 'Oxoniæ ex officina typographica Josephi Barnesii Celeberrimae Academiae Oxoniensis Typographi. Anno 1585.'
Joseph Barnes, the printer, had been admitted a bookseller in 1573, and on August 15th, 1584, the University lent him £100 with which to start a press. During the time that he remained printer to the University, his press was actively employed, no less than three hundred books, many of them in Greek and Latin, being traced to it. In 1595 appeared the first Welsh book printed at the University, a translation into Welsh by Hugh Lewis of O. Wermueller's Spiritual and Most Precious Pearl, and in 1596 two founts of Hebrew letter were used by Barnes, but the stock of this letter was small.