The name of the schoolmaster-printer is quite unknown. No notice of him is found in the records of the Abbey, nor does he appear in any contemporary document. Yet here, as in Mistress Barnes’s case, imagination has come to the rescue and a legendary name has been provided.
Finding that the Prologue to the Book of Hawking began with the words, “Insomuch as gentle men and honest persons have great delight in Hawking;” finding also that the St. Alban’s Chronicle from the same press began thus: “Insomuch as it is necessary;” and bearing in mind that certain old authors had veiled their names in the first words of their works, Dr. Chauncy arrived at the sagacious conclusion that the St. Albans printer wished to veil his name, which really was “Insomuch.” The joke, for it almost seems like one, does not bear even the scrutiny which itself invites, for although the schoolmaster uses the words in two other places, in neither case are they at the beginning of a chapter.[[4]] It should be added that in this the worthy historian of Hertfordshire only followed the lead of both Bale and Pits.
[4]. On sig. a j recto of “Cote Armour” is “Insomuch as all gentleness comes of God;” and upon sig. b iij verso is “Insomuch that in the fifth quadrat,” &c. The use of the word in these cases could have no veiled meaning, and it was probably only a peculiarity of diction which had become a habit with the schoolmaster.
Was he connected with the Abbey? I think not. There is not a word to suggest such a connection, although we may take it for granted that the Abbot and his fraternity could not have frowned upon the printer, or he would never have established himself. His imprints all mention the town of St. Albans, but never the Abbey, and his position was probably similar to that of Caxton, who was simply a tenant of the Abbot of Westminster, but, so far as is known, nothing more.
Was he connected with Caxton and the Westminster press? Without a shadow of doubt I say, No! Mr. E. Scott, of the MS. department in the British Museum, has indeed strung together a number of surmises to show that the Schoolmaster was employed by Caxton, and that all the books without date or place hitherto attributed to Westminster were really printed at St. Albans. But internal evidence is against any such gratuitous assumption. There is nothing in common between the two printers in any of their habits or customs except the possession of Caxton’s No. 3 type. This is the only one of Caxton’s types used outside his own office (for W. de Worde, his successor in house and business, must not be regarded as a separate printer). Caxton employed it from his arrival in England in 1477 till 1484, when it makes its last appearance in the headings of “Æsop,” the “Order of Chivalry,” and “The Golden Legend.” In 1485 Caxton obtained a new fount, similar in shape and character, and from that time the old No. 3 disappears to make way for the new and smaller type No. 5. This being more suited to the taste of the day, we find the larger and worn fount passing over to the country press of St. Albans, where the Schoolmaster first uses it in 1486, being the identical year in which its successor appears in Caxton’s “Royal Book.” We may here observe that after the stoppage of the St. Albans’ Press the same fount finds its way back again and is seen in W. de Worde’s reprint, in 1496–97, of the two English St. Albans books. But the discovery of a copy of Caxton’s Boethius in the old Grammar School at St. Albans, and the numerous fragments of old books extracted from its covers, are quoted as confirming the idea. Yet the book itself and all these fragments were from Westminster, not a single one being from a known St. Albans book, and they included the Caxton “Chronicles,” 1480, the “Dictes,” 1477, and the still earlier “Life of Jason;” so that we had better at once remove the whole Westminster press, dated and undated, to St. Albans, if such an argument is to have any force. These fragments, indeed, can only point to the fact that the copy of Boethius was bound in the printing office, as was commonly the case with the books from Caxton’s press.
Again, Mr. Scott draws attention to the fact that a page of the St. Albans’ Book, 1486, has been copied by a contemporary writer on to the blank leaves of one of Caxton’s earliest books. ’Tis true; but this copying of part of one book into another, printed ten years before, has no typographical bearing whatever. Lastly, the name Causton appears in an old St. Albans’ Register of the early part of the fifteenth century. But this, again, means positively nothing. Caxton’s name was not at all uncommon; there were Caustons or Caxtons in nearly every English county, and I have quite a long list of them.
It is highly probable that Caxton, while at Westminster, in the van of all the literature of his day, would have communications of some sort with the important town of St. Albans; but that the two printers assisted one another in the production of books, is, so far as any evidence goes, a pure fiction.
Let us now glance at the bibliographical aspect of the book.
The work itself has no title. It is difficult in our time, accustomed as we are to “teeming millions” of books, each with its own title-page, to conceive a period when the press sent out works without even the shadow of a title-page. Before the invention of printing, the author simply headed his first page with the name of the work, as “Here begins the Confessio Amantis,” or “Hic incipit Parvus Catho,” and, without preface or more ado, the text commenced. Sometimes even this little notification was omitted, and, as in Caxton’s “Jason,” “The Chess Book,” “Tulle,” and many other fifteenth-century books, the subject of the work had to be learned by reading the text. So it is with the book now under review; it comprises four distinct works, but to one only is there any heading, and that has the bare line “Incipit liber armorum.” The first, “The Book of Hawking,” starts straight off—“This is the manner to keep Hawks,” and occupies three signatures, a, b, and c, of eight leaves each, and sig. d, which has but four leaves, on purpose that this portion might be complete alone, if so desired. The same idea controlled the arrangement of “The Book of Hunting,” which, beginning on sig. e j, ends with Dame Juliana’s “Explicit” on the recto of sig. f iiij. This left the last seven pages of the quaternion to be filled up. Now it was a common practice, both with the scribes and with the early printers, when they got to the end of their text and found that a page or two of blank paper was left, to occupy the blank pages with such common household aphorisms or popular rhymes as came easily to the memory, or were at hand in some other book. So here the schoolmaster-printer fills up his vacant pages with a number of odd sentences and rhymes, most of which occur over and over again in numerous manuscripts of early poetry. Among others we notice the well-known:—
“Arise erly,