The Marprelate press was afterwards carried on by Samuel Hoskins or Hodgkys, who had as his workmen Valentine Symmes and Arthur Thomlyn. The last of the Marprelate tracts, The Protestacyon of Martin Marprelate, was printed at Haseley, near Warwick, about September 1589.
PRINTING IN SCOTLAND AND IRELAND DURING THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY[10]
On the 15th September 1507, King James IV. of Scotland granted to his faithful subjects, Walter Chepman and Androw Myllar, burgesses of Edinburgh, leave to import a printing-press and letter, and gave them licence to print law books, breviaries, and so forth, more particularly the Breviary of William, Bishop of Aberdeen. Walter Chepman was a general merchant, and probably his chief part in the undertaking at the outset was of a financial character. Andrew Myllar had for some years carried on the business of a bookseller in Edinburgh, and books were printed for him in Rouen by Pierre Violette. There is, moreover, evidence that Myllar himself learnt the art of printing in that city.
The printing-house of the firm in Edinburgh was in the Southgait (now the Cowgate), and they lost no time in setting to work, devoting themselves chiefly to printing some of the popular metrical tales of England and Scotland. A volume containing eleven such pieces, most of them printed in 1508, is preserved in the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh.
Among the pieces found in it are—Sir Eglamoure of Artoys, Maying or desport of Chaucer, Buke of Gude Counsale to the Kyng, Flytting of Dunbar & Kennedy, and Twa Marrit Wemen and the wedo.
Three founts of black letter, somewhat resembling in size and shape those of Wynkyn de Worde, were used in printing these books, and the devices of both men are found in them. That of Chepman was a copy of the device of the Paris printer, Pigouchet, while Myllar adopted the punning device of a windmill with a miller bearing sacks into the mill, with a small shield charged with three fleur-de-lys in each of the upper corners.
Fig. 28.—Device of Andrew Miller.
After printing the above-mentioned works, Myllar disappears, and the famous Breviarium Aberdonense, the work for which the King had mainly granted the license, was finished in 1509-10 by Chepman alone. It is an unpretentious little octavo, printed in double columns, in red and black, as became a breviary, but with no special marks of typographical beauty. Four copies of it are known to exist, but none of these are perfect. Chepman then disappears as mysteriously as his partner. In the Glamis copy of the Bremarium, Dr. David Laing discovered a single sheet of eight leaves of a book with the imprint: Impressū Edinburgi per Johane Story nomine & mandato Karoli Stule. Nothing more, however, is known of this John Story.