A History of the Cambridge University Press, 1521-1921

by S. C. Roberts

I

JOHN SIBERCH

Excursions into the realm of legend have long served as the traditional method of approach of the academic historian to his subject. True, the story of the foundation of the university of Cambridge by "one Cantaber, a Spaniard, about 370 years before Christ," or, as Fisher described him in 1506, "Cantaber, a king of the East Saxons, who had been educated at Athens," is now definitely rejected as unhistorical; but it was only in 1914 that the name of Sigebert, King of the East Angles, was removed from the list of royal benefactors[1].

University printing, like the university itself, has its Apocrypha. Edmund Carter, writing in 1753, includes a short section on University Printers:

Printing had not been long used in England before it was brought hither, but by whom it is difficult to ascertain, tho' it may be supposed that Caxton, (who is said to be the first that brought this curious art into England, and was a Cambridgeshire Man, born at Caxton in that County, from which he takes his Name) might Erect a Press at Cambridge, as well as at Westminster, under the care of one of his Servants; (for it is Conjectured, he brought several from Germany with him). The first Book we find an Account of, that was Printed here, is a Piece of Rhetoric, by one Gull. de Saona, a Minorite; Printed at Cambridge 1478; given by Archbp. Parker to Bennet College Library. It is in Folio, the Pages not Numbered, and without ketch Word, or Signatures.

Alas for Carter's pious suppositions! Caxton, according to his own testimony, was born in Kent and Cambridge can claim only to be the place of compilation of the Rhetorica; the phrase at the end of the book, Compilata in Universitate Cantabrigiae, no doubt led to the entry being made in the catalogue in the form Rhetorica nova, impressa Cantab, fo. 1478, and the mistake persisted for two centuries.

Nor is Oxford without a controversial prologue to the story of its printing. In the first Oxford book the date appears in the colophon as mcccclxviii and for long it was sought to establish the claim that Oxford printing preceded Caxton. But though it has been contended that the ground for the claim "has not yet entirely slipped away," it is now generally accepted by bibliographers that the printer omitted an x from the date, which should in fact be mcccclxxviii.

"The oldest of all inter-university sports," said Maitland, "was a lying match."