book five

copies are known, and of the four I have examined, the copy in the University Library is the only perfect one. About the fifth, belonging to the Duke of Sutherland, I have no information.

I. H. it is clear had left the firm, and though the printers use the same device as before, the initials I. H. have been cut out of it.

In 1499 Jean Barbier also disappeared, for in the edition of the _Liber Festivalis_ and _Quattuor Sermones_ which appeared in that year the printer’s mark has again been altered. All initials have been cut out and the name Julianus Notarii inserted in type. This form of the name suggests that he was not a notary as is generally stated, but the son of one. I have never been able to see a perfect copy of this book though Herbert describes one which he said was in the Inner Temple Library, but my inquiries there met with no success. Hain in his _Repertorium Bibliographicum_ mentions a copy which seems not to be the one noticed by Herbert.

In April, 1500, Notary printed a most minute edition of the _Horae ad usum Sarum_, it is in 64s as regards folding, and a printed page measures an inch and a quarter by an inch. Only a fragment of it is known, a quarter sheet containing sixteen leaves, but that luckily contains the colophon. It was very likely copied from another edition of the same size, which was printed at Paris the year before, but this point cannot be determined, as the only copy of the latter which existed was burnt with the greater part of the Offor collection. All we know now of it is the meagre note in the auctioneer’s catalogue, “imperfect, but has end with imprint”--and he has not given the imprint!

The colophon of Notary’s _Horae_ tells us that it was printed in King Street, Westminster. King Street is the short street at the bottom of Whitehall in a straight line between Westminster Abbey and the Foreign Office, though in Notary’s time it appears to have extended from Westminster to Charing Cross. Lewis, in his life of Caxton, says that Caxton’s printing-office was in King Street, but I do not know of any reason for his assertion.

The last of Notary’s books printed at Westminster is an edition of Chaucer’s _Love and complaintes between Mars and Venus_, with some other pieces. This rare little book, having passed through the collections of Farmer, the Duke of Roxburghe, Sir Mark Masterman Sykes and Heber, is now at Britwell. The colophon runs: “Thys inpryntyde in westmoster in kyng strete. For me Julianus Notarii.” In spite of the word For, I think the book was printed by Julian Notary himself. It contains two cuts, reversed copies of two of Caxton’s.

At what time Notary left Westminster cannot at present be settled, but probably almost immediately after W. de Worde. When his next dated book was issued in 1503 he had moved to London, and with his departure from King Street to Pynson’s old house near Temple Bar printing ceased altogether in Westminster.

LECTURE II.

THE PRINTERS AT LONDON.

The art of printing was introduced into London in 1480, three years after Westminster, two years after Oxford, and probably one year after St Alban’s, by a printer called Joannes Lettou. The name evidently denotes that he came originally from Lithuania, of which the word Lettou is an old form. One thing is at once apparent when we come to examine his work, and that is that he was a skilled and practised printer, producing books entirely unlike Caxton’s, and bearing every appearance of being the work of a foreign press. Where he learned to print it is impossible to find out, but whence his type was obtained no one can have the least doubt: it was certainly brought from Rome.

The type is identical with that used by a printer at Rome in 1478 and 1479, who really ought to have some connexion with English printing as his name was John Bulle. In his Roman books he describes himself as from Bremen. If it were possible to arrive at any explanation how a man from Bremen could be described as a Lithuanian, I should at once assume John Lettou and John Bulle to be identical, since the one apparently begins where the other leaves off. However, until some reasonable explanation is forthcoming it will be best to consider them as different people.

Lettou seems to have been assisted during the first two years of his career by a certain William Wilcock, but who this man may have been I have not been able to discover, unless he was a certain William Wilcock who is mentioned in the State Papers as having been presented to the living of Llandussell in 1487. The two books printed by Lettou were the _Questiones Antonii Andreae super duodecim libros metaphisice_ and the _Expositiones super Psalterium_ of Thomas Wallensis. Both these books are printed in a neat small Italian gothic, with two columns to the page and forty-nine or fifty lines in a column. The first of the two books, the _Antonius Andreae_, is a small folio of 106 leaves, and almost all the six known copies are imperfect. The book is very probably reprinted from the edition printed at Vicenza in 1477, the only earlier edition than the present, which, like it, is edited by Thomas Penketh. Penketh was a friar of the Augustinian house at Warrington, but went later as teacher of theology to Padua. He returned to Oxford in 1477, where he also taught theology, and was probably living there when his book was being printed at London.

The second of these two books is printed in exactly the same style and form as the first, with the exception of having fifty lines to the column in place of forty-nine. In the imprint the book is ascribed to the “Reverendissimus dominus Valencius,” that is Jacobus Perez de Valentia, who was, however, not the author of this work, though he did write a commentary on the Psalms. The real author was a certain Thomas Wallensis or de Walleis. Henry Bradshaw, who discovered the mistake, gives the following explanation of it: “This edition is printed from an incomplete copy, and from the words of the colophon ‘Reverendissimi domini Valencii,’ the final s having been misread as an i, the work has been confounded with the commentary of Jacobus Perez de Valencia, which was printed at that place in 1484 and 1493. The v for w and the absence of the Christian name would also serve to create the confusion, or at any rate to perpetuate it.”

Three editions of the indulgence of John Kendale were printed by Lettou in 1480. The first two have been preserved in a very curious manner. It was a common custom of the early binders to paste a thin strip of vellum down the centre of each quire of paper in order to prevent the thread which ran down the centre of the quire and stitched it to the bands of the binding from cutting through the paper. A copy of a foreign printed Bible, which appears to have been bound in England, perhaps by Lettou himself, and which is now in the library of Jesus College, Cambridge, has the centre of each quire throughout the book lined with a strip of vellum, part of cut up copies of these two indulgences. Indulgences having their year printed upon them soon went out of date, and as they were of vellum and printed only on one side were very much used by bookbinders for lining bindings. These two indulgences were issued early in the year and have the date 1480, but no mention is made of the pontifical year of the pope. The third indulgence, of which a copy is in the British Museum, also dated 1480, has besides, the date of the pontifical year, “the year of our pontificate the tenth,” and as the popes dated like the kings, from the exact date of their accession or coronation, this copy must have been printed after August 7, 1480, on which date the tenth year of Sixtus IV began.

After the printing of his two books and editions of the indulgence, Lettou entered into partnership with a printer called Wilhelmus de Machlinia, a native, as his name shows, of Mechlin in Belgium. Together they printed five books, the _Tenores Novelli_ of Littelton, the _Abridgement of the Statutes_, and the _Year-books_ of the thirty-third, thirty-fifth, and thirty-sixth years of Henry VI.

For these books the printers used a small very cramped black letter, abounding in abbreviations, and often difficult to read. It appears to have been designed after the law hand of the period. The edition of the _Tenures_ is the only one of these books with an imprint, and it contains the names of both printers, and the statement that the book was printed in the city of London, “juxta ecclesiam omnium sanctorum.” There were, however, several churches in London at this time dedicated to All Saints, and it is not possible now to settle which particular one was meant. Complete sets of these five books are in the British Museum and the Cambridge University Library.

The entire change in the character of the books produced after Machlinia had joined Lettou shows that his strong point was legal printing, and during his continuance in business he seems to have printed all the law-books issued in England. But perhaps the most marked peculiarity of his partnership is the extraordinary deterioration in the books produced. The work of Lettou was marked by excellence of typography and the many improvements introduced by an evidently practised printer. As soon as Machlinia joined him the work became slovenly. It might be supposed that Mr William Wilcock, who had defrayed the expense of Lettou’s work, had either tried it as a speculation and found it a poor one, or had only wished the two books to be specially printed for his own use and had then left the printer to shift for himself. It is curious, too, that Lettou’s neat type should have entirely disappeared. The real reason for this probably was that though it was very neat it had none of the abbreviations necessary in a type used for printing law-books.

While Lettou remained in the firm the work, though much deteriorated, retained a certain amount of regularity. All the books had signatures and were regular in size, though their appearance was not good. After the issue of these five books Lettou seems to have ceased printing, but the type was used for one more book, which it will be well to notice here, _The History of the Siege of Rhodes_. This was written in Latin by Gulielmus Caorsin, vice-chancellor of the Knights of Malta, and was translated into English by John Kay, who styles himself poet-laureate to Edward IV. It gives an account of the great victory of the Rhodians against the Turks and the death of Mahomet.

It is the only early English printed book which we cannot definitely ascribe to any particular printer. By most early writers it was classed as a production of Caxton, and Dibdin places it under Caxton in his _Typographical Antiquities_, though he there expresses a doubt as to its being his work. “The typography,” he says, “is so rude as to induce me to suppose that the book was not printed by Caxton. The oblique dash for the comma is very coarse; and the adoption of the colon and the period, as well as the comparatively wide distances between the lines, are circumstances which, as they are not to be found in Caxton’s acknowledged publications, strongly confirm this supposition.” Five years later, writing in the _Bibliotheca Spenceriana_, he seems to have settled more accurately. “I have very little doubt,” he writes there, “of its having been executed by Lettou and Machlinia, or by the former of these printers, rather than by Caxton. The letters, however, great and small, especially the larger ones, and some of the compound smaller ones, bear a strong resemblance to the smallest types of our first printer; but on a comparison with those of the _Tenures_ of Lyttelton and the _Ancient Abridgement of the Statutes_, printed by Lettou and Machlinia, the resemblance is quite complete.” The type is certainly that used by Lettou and Machlinia, and the considerable difference in appearance from the other five books is caused by the text being in English, which makes more difference than would be imagined, and also that there are very few of the abbreviations which crowd the other books. Then again the lines of type are spaced out, giving the page a much lighter appearance.

Though the dedication is to Edward IV, it does not necessarily follow that the book was printed before his death, for the early printers in reprinting a manuscript would keep to the preface as there written. It might, however, have been printed as early as 1483, and immediately the law books had been completed. Who the printer was I do not think can ever be settled. When it was printed Machlinia had probably started by himself with his new types, and I do not think it can have been printed by Lettou, as it has not the signatures to the pages which he invariably used.

We may, I think, date the break up of the partnership of John Lettou and William de Machlinia about 1482-83, and from that date onwards Machlinia worked alone. He seems to have made a fresh start with new type, for he has at least three founts which had not been used before. The difficulties in the way of making any arrangement or arriving at any definite conclusions about his books are very great. We know that he printed at least twenty-two books, and not one single one is dated. Signatures, directors, headlines, seem to be present or absent without rule or reason. There is hardly any method of arranging the books in groups, every book stands alone in splendid isolation.

The only division possible is according to the type used in the books, and in this way we can separate them into two groups. Those of the first group are printed in two founts of a square gothic type, and as in colophons of the two books in this series which possess them the printer speaks of himself as living near the “Flete-bridge,” we call these books the ones printed in the Fleet-bridge type. The other group are in a regular English type, similar in general appearance to some of Caxton’s or that used by the printer of St Alban’s, and in the imprint to one of these books Machlinia speaks of himself as printing in Holborn, so that we speak of this series of books as printed in the Holborn type. As Flete-bridge was at the east end of Fleet Street and a considerable distance from Holborn it is impossible that these two addresses could apply to one office.

It is probable that the Fleet-bridge group is the earlier, so we will take it first. In it there are altogether eight books. Three folios, the _Tenures of Lyttelton_, the _Nova Statuta_, and the _Promise of Matrimony_, four quartos, the _Vulgaria Terentii_, the _Revelation of St Nicholas to a Monk of Evesham_, and two books by Albertus Magnus, the _Liber Aggregationis seu de secretis naturae_, and the _Secreta mulierum_, and one small book, probably a 16º, an edition of the _Horae ad usum Sarum_.

The two books of Albertus Magnus are certainly the most neatly printed, the press work being tidy and regular, which was not generally the case with this printer’s productions.

The copy of the _Secreta mulierum_ in the University Library is an interesting one, though, unfortunately, imperfect. On the first leaf which is blank there is a certain amount of writing, amongst other things the following sentence: “Annus domini nunc est 1485 in anno Ricardi tercii 3º.” This note, supposing it to have been written at the time to which it refers, and there is no reason to doubt it, must have been written between June 26 and August 22, 1485, showing that at any rate the book was printed before that date. The other book of Albertus Magnus, the _Liber aggregationis_, has a colophon stating that it was printed by “William de Machlinia in the most wealthy city of London, near the bridge vulgarly called the Flete-bridge.” The wealth of London seems to have impressed the alien printer, for he always applies the word “_opulentissima_” to that city.

The small _Horae_ we have little information about, for we know of its existence only from nineteen leaves scattered about the country. There are eight in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, seven in the British Museum, four in Lincoln Minster, and two in the University Library, Cambridge. These have all been extracted from bindings, and in the cases where we know the particular bindings from which they came these bindings were the work of the same man, whose initials were W. G. From the way in which the leaves were printed, and the way in which they were afterwards folded, a point too technical and difficult of description to touch on here, we may pretty safely say that the _Horae_ was a 16º and not an 8º. It may be worth while remarking that the early printers used only the simple folding, which with each successive folding exactly halves the size of the previous one. The sheet folded into two leaves produced folio size, this folded again once made 4to, folded again 8º, again 16º, again 32º, and again 64º. The duodecimo or 12º, which depends on more complicated folding, was quite unknown.

The _Horae_, so far as we can see from what remains, contained no illustrations, but it had an engraved border which was used round the pages beginning certain portions of the book. This engraved border we afterwards find in Pynson’s hands, and it is the only definite link connecting him with this press. Bradshaw, in his paper on the “Image of Pity,” suggests that Ames, who quoted this book in his _Typographical Antiquities_, had seen a complete copy, but as he describes it merely as “a book of devotions on vellum” and adds no particulars I think that he simply described it from the few leaves in his own possession, which are now in the British Museum in the great so-called Bagford volumes of despoiled title-pages.

The _Revelation of St Nicholas to a Monk of Evesham_ is one of the most remarkable volumes of the fifteenth century, very well worth reading, for it is full of early English stories and allusions. (I may say in passing that Mr Arber has issued a cheap reprint of it.) The story tells of a man who was taken through purgatory and was shown various people whom he had known or heard of and listened to their stories. It seems to me very curious that no other editions of the book were issued in early times: it seems exactly the kind of book which must have been popular. Typographically, the book is interesting as showing an excellent example of wrong imposition, that is that when the one side of the sheet had been printed, the other side was put down upon its form of type the wrong way round, and consequently the pages come all in their wrong order, page 1 being printed on the first side of the first leaf, page 14 follows it on the other side, then page 16, then page 4, and so on. Now, most printers who had done this stupid thing, and it was not an uncommon accident, would have destroyed the sheet and reprinted it. Not so Machlinia. He printed off some more copies of the wrong sheet and, cutting it up, pasted the four pages in their proper places. In one of the two known copies this has had unfortunate results, for some curious inquirer, noticing the pages pasted together, has tried to separate them to find out what was underneath, and they have suffered severely in the process.

The _Vulgaria Terentii_ is the last of the quartos in this group. It is a book that was often printed, but of the present edition the copy in the University Library is the only one remaining, and it, unfortunately, is slightly imperfect.

Of the folios, the _Nova Statuta_ is the most important, and also by far the commonest, for I have examined over a dozen copies myself, and I know of a good many more. The book must have been printed after April, 1483, as the subject-matter runs up to that date, while an action in Chancery relating to it was tried between 1483 and 1485. The _Promise of Matrimony_, another folio in this type, consisting only of four leaves, relates to the agreement made in 1475 between Edward IV and Louis XI for the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth of York and Prince Charles, afterwards Charles VIII, King of France.

I have noticed that in nearly all the copies of the law-books printed by Lettou and Machlinia, or Machlinia alone, that I have examined, the initial letters, which were filled in by hand in colour, appear to have been done by the same person; the letter roughly in red, and a twirl or two by way of ornament in pale green or blue. I suppose the subject of the books was so severely practical that unless this had been done before the book left the office it would never have been done at all. However, in English printing generally, though the spaces were left for fine initials, I can remember very few books with them filled in in any but the plainest way, a contrast to the beautiful work so often found in Italian books.

The last group of books, which number fourteen, are called the Holbom type books, because, in the imprint of one of the two books that contain them we find the words, “Enprente per moy william Maclyn en Holborn.” The general type used for the text of these books is very remarkably like that used by Veldener at Utrecht and by John Brito at Bruges, and may, perhaps, have been obtained by Machlinia from abroad, though it is of the same school of type as several used in England.

The most important book issued in this series is an edition of the _Chronicles of England_. It is a very rare book, but there is an imperfect copy in Cambridge in the Barham collection in Pembroke College. The space for the initial letters, as is usually the case with early books, has been left blank to be filled in by the rubricator, but in one copy that I have seen, the initials have been filled in in gold, not gold leaf, but gold paint, and this is the only example of its use that I have found in an early English book. Another curious point about the book is that though it is a folio, a folio of 238 leaves, yet in all copies leaves 59 and 66, the first and last leaves of a quire, are printed on quarto paper. I thought once that perhaps for some reason these leaves had been cancelled and reprinted, but it seems more probable that the printer had for the moment run out of his supply of ordinary-sized paper, and had to use some of a much larger size cut in half. A similar case of mixed papers is found in the _Nova Rhetorica_ printed at St Albans in 1480, which is partly quarto and partly octavo.

Three editions were published by Machlinia of the curious _Treatise of the Pestilence_ by Canutus or Kamitus, Bishop of Westeraes in Sweden, and of each edition only one copy is known, one in the British Museum, one in the University Library, and one sold lately in the sale of the Ashbumham Library and now at Manchester. I must warn anyone who uses Dibdin’s _Typographical Antiquities_, that the facsimile page of the book which he gives is made up from the upper part of the first leaf of the Cambridge copy and the lower part of the same leaf of the Manchester copy, which he must have seen when it was in the possession of Triphook, the bookseller, so that the resulting facsimile is rather puzzling. The fact that one of these editions, that in the British Museum, has a title-page, makes us inclined to put it to rather a late date, but at any rate it is the earliest title-page in an English printed book.

Another book in this group, by far the commonest and best known, is the _Speculum Christiani_, ascribed to a writer named John Watton, a curious medley of theological matter interspersed with pieces of English poetry. The colophon states that the book was printed for and at the expense of a merchant named Henry Vrankenbergh. About this merchant I could find out nothing until, curiously enough, on my last visit to Cambridge a fortnight ago, my attention was drawn by a friend to a note in the Descriptive Catalogue of ancient deeds in the Record Office, where is a note of a “Demise to Henry Frankenbergk and Barnard van Stondo, merchants of printed books, of an alley in St Clement’s Lane, called St Mark’s Alley, 10th May, 1482.”

This is, I believe, the earliest note relating to foreign stationers or merchants of printed books in England, but I hope from the same source we may expect to obtain many more as soon as the endless series of documents in the Record Office are calendared.

An edition of the _Vulgaria Terentii_ was also printed in this type. An almost perfect copy was added to the British Museum Library some years ago, and a considerable portion of another copy is in the library of Caius College.

Machlinia also printed two of the _Nova Festa_, the _Festum visitationis beate Marie virginis_ and the _Festum transfigurationis Jesu Christi_. The first of these is only known from two leaves which had been used to line the boards of the binding of Pynson’s _Dives and Pauper_. Of the second a beautiful and perfect copy is in the library of the Marquis of Bath. It is curious to notice that it contains not only the feast according to the Sarum use, but also according to the Roman use.

The last three of Machlinia’s books to be noticed are the three which, though undated themselves, contain certain evidences of date. The first of these contains the statutes made in the first year of Richard III, and, as this first year ran from June 26, 1483, to June 25, 1484, the book cannot be earlier than the second half of the latter year.

The second book is one about which I am very much inclined to doubt whether it was printed by Machlinia at all, but rather by Veldener, who used apparently identical type; and though I have had for several years under my charge at Manchester the only copy of the book known I cannot make up my mind about it. It is an edition of the _Regulae et ordinationes_ of Innocent VIII, and could not at any rate have been printed before the very end of 1484. The type seems newer in appearance than any of Machlinia’s, though to all appearance identical. Dibdin, with his usual readiness, helps us by remarking, “It presents us with the same character or general appearance of type as that which Caxton and Machlinia occasionally used. It is not much unlike the St Alban’s type.”

The last production is a Bull of Innocent VIII confirming the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. It was reissued in 1494 by Alexander VI, and there the date is given as 27th March, 1486.

Two copies of this Bull are known, one in the library of the Society of Antiquaries and one in the Rylands Library, Manchester. Both are in poor condition, and show signs of having been used at one time to line the boards of a binding.

Richard Pynson was by birth a native of Normandy, but practically nothing is known of his personal history. It is probable that he was educated at the University of Paris, for we find in a list of students in 1464 the name “Ricardus Pynson Normannus,” and this may very well be the printer. It was, however, in Normandy that he learned to print, probably from Guillaume le Talleur, a noted printer of Rouen, as may be seen by certain small habits connected with printing which he fell into, and which are very typical of Rouen work. Although we have only circumstantial evidence, evidence depending on a number of almost trifling details to back up the statement, it seems now almost certain that Pynson succeeded Machlinia. My own impression is that he succeeded immediately on the death or retirement of the latter, with hardly any interval. A very strong reason for this impression is that had any long time elapsed between the cessation of Machlinia’s press and the commencement of Pynson’s, England would have been left without a printer who could set up law French. Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde were presumably unable to do it, at any rate they printed no books of the kind except some statutes of Henry VII, and it must be remembered that in Henry VII’s reign for the first time the statutes were written in English. I do not mean to suggest that Pynson ever worked with Machlinia, but only that when the latter ceased to work Pynson came over and started in his place, perhaps taking over some of his printing material or even starting work in his old office. The engraved border which Machlinia had used in his Sarum _Horae_, the only piece of ornament he seems to have possessed, we find used afterwards by Pynson, and it is a very common thing to find Pynson’s earliest bindings lined with waste leaves of Machlinia’s printing. Had Pynson worked with Machlinia we should have expected the latter’s founts of type to have passed into his hands, as Caxton’s were inherited by Wynkyn de Worde, but they did not. Indeed they totally disappeared, and what we do find of Machlinia’s in Pynson’s hands is merely the refuse that we might expect a printer to find in an office just vacated by another. Had Pynson not been ready to take over the place this waste stuff would have been destroyed. The question is, then, when did Machlinia cease or Pynson begin? I should say that Machlinia ceased much later than is supposed and Pynson began much earlier, and that the two events happened between 1488 and 1490. At first when Pynson arrived he was without material, so he commissioned Le Talleur at Rouen to print for him the two law-books most in demand, _Littelton’s Tenures_ and _Statham’s Abridgement of Cases to the end of Henry VI_.

[Illustration]

Probably in 1490-1491 he began printing on his own account. His first dated book was issued in November, 1492, but five books, if not more, can be placed earlier; these are an edition of Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_, a _Latin Grammar_, a poetical book, and two or more _Year-books_. The _Chaucer_ is a particularly fine book, printed in two sizes of type, a larger for the poetry, and a smaller for the prose, which is printed in two columns. It is also illustrated with a set of woodcuts illustrating the different pilgrims. It is interesting to notice that these cuts were altered in some cases while the book was passing through the press in order to serve as the portrait of another pilgrim. The serjeaunt with a little alteration becomes the doctor of physick, the squire becomes the manciple. There has been a good deal of controversy as to the date of the printing of this book and whether it could have appeared before Caxton’s death in the latter part of the year 1491. Pynson in his prologue, which is rather confused and difficult to understand, says, speaking of Chaucer: “Of whom I among alle other of his bokes, the boke of the tales of Canterburie, in whiche ben many a noble historie of wisdome policie mirth and gentilnes. And also of vertue and holynes whiche boke diligently ovirsen and duely examined by the pollitike reason and ouirsight of my worshipful master William Caxton accordinge to the entent and effecte of the seide Geffrey Chaucer and by a copy of the seid master Caxton purpos to imprent, by ye grace, ayde, and supporte of almighty god.” I think had Caxton been dead Pynson would have alluded to it in some way, speaking of him, perhaps, as “my late worshipful master” or “my worshipful master late dead.” The term worshipful master does not imply that Pynson had been an apprentice or assistant to Caxton, but was merely a courteous way of referring to the printer and editor whose work he was about to reprint. Blades in his life of Caxton, speaks of Pynson’s having used Caxton’s device, but this mistake has arisen through a made-up book in the British Museum, a copy of Bonaventure’s _Speculum vite Christi_. The copy wanted the end, and some former owner, in order to make the book look more complete, has added a leaf with Caxton’s device printed on it.

The _Latin Grammar_ is known only from three leaves, one in the Bodleian and two in the British Museum. The leaf in the Bodleian appears from an inscription upon it to have been used to line a binding as early as 1494. The book was printed entirely in the large black type of the _Chaucer_, the first of Pynson’s types, and which he does not appear to have used after 1492.

Another book printed about this time was a book of poetry of a quarto size. All that is at present known of this book are two little strips making part of a leaf, and each containing six lines of verse, three on each side. I found these fragments a year or two ago amongst a bundle of uncatalogued leaves in the Bodleian, but was not able at the time to determine from what book they came. The story is apparently of someone who having been in purgatory is allowed to revisit the world in order to warn others of what he had seen there. This was a common story, and the occurrence of part of a line “But y the goste of guido” makes it certain that the fragments belong to some version of a work called _Spiritus Guidonis_.

The two other books in this series are two year-books, for the first and ninth years of Edward IV. All these early books, with the exception, of course, of the poetry fragments, contain Pynson’s first device, which consists of his monogram in white upon a black background, not at all unlike in style that used by Le Talleur at Rouen, with whom he had been associated. When the device was used in November, 1492, a small alteration had been made in it, so that from the state of the device as well as by the type used we are able to settle which books belong to this earliest group.

In 1492 Pynson’s first dated book appeared, an edition of the _Doctrinal_ of Alexander Grammaticus, editions of which had already been printed abroad in considerable numbers. Pynson’s was not copied from any of these, having a different commentary, but who this commentary is by I have not yet been able to ascertain.

This book was only discovered quite lately, and I came upon it by a fortunate accident. The owner, or rather guardian, of it happened to have read in some book that the earliest dated book of Pynson’s was issued in 1493. Knowing that he had an earlier one he wrote to the British Museum about it, and I heard casually that the book had been sent to them to examine. I went up to London immediately to see if I could see the book, but was told it had been returned, nor could I obtain any information as to where it was to be found. Luckily, the owner was so far interested as to write a note to one of the papers mentioning the existence of the book, and also the place where it was preserved--the Grammar School at Appleby. The following Saturday I set off to Appleby, and had the pleasure of examining it at my leisure. It is a beautiful copy, quite perfect, in its original binding, and, as one would have hoped, with end leaves taken from Machlinia’s _Chronicle_. It has a perfectly clear Latin imprint which runs: “And thus ends the commentary of the Doctrinale of Alexander, printed by me Richard Pynson of the parish of St Clement Danes outside the bar of the new Temple at London the 13th day of the month of November in the year of the incarnation of our Lord 1492.” From this colophon it is clear that if Pynson did commence work in Machlinia’s old office, which was in Holborn, he had by this time removed to other premises. The commentary in the book is printed in a very small, neat type which Pynson had probably had made for him abroad, as it contained no w. I am sorry that the discovery of this book has thrown out of order the list of Pynson’s types which I gave in the introduction to my _Facsimiles of Early English Printing_. In 1903 this volume was sold by the school trustees, and is now in the British Museum.

In 1493 appeared Henry Parker’s _Dialogue of Dives and Pauper_, which was always considered, before the discovery of the _Doctrinale_, Pynson’s first dated book. It is printed in a new and handsome type, and this is the only dated book in which it is used, though there are four undated quartos in the same type, which may be put down to the same year. These are the _Festum nominis Jesu_, one of the _Nova Festa_ printed as supplements to the Sarum _Breviary_, the _Life of St Margaret_, Lidgate’s _Churl and Birde_, and an edition apparently of some statutes or a similar work known from two leaves in the library at Lambeth. Of the _Festum nominis Jesu_ one copy is known, bound up in a volume with several other tracts, among them being Caxton’s _Festum transfigurationis Jesu Christi_. It was for a while in the Congregational Library in London but was eventually sold to the British Museum. Three printed leaves from the beginning of the poem amongst the fragments in the Bodleian are all that remain of the _Life of St Margaret_. The Lidgate’s _Churl and Birde_ after passing through the sales of Willett, the Marquis of Blandford, Sir F. Freeling and B. H. Bright, passed with the Grenville Library into the British Museum.

Two editions of Mirk’s _Liber Festivalis_, each known from a single copy, one in the Pepysian Library, the other in the University Library, belong probably to this time. The various changes in the book are interesting to trace. In the earliest editions there are no references to, or additional chapters for, the new feasts which were then coming into use; then come editions with the extra feasts printed together at the end as a kind of supplement to the book, and finally we get the editions with these extra feasts put into their proper places in the body of the book. The edition in the Pepysian Library is without these extra feasts, while that in the University Library has them as a supplement of ten leaves at the end. In the next edition, which was printed about the end of 1493 by W. de Worde, the feasts have been incorporated into their proper places.

In 1494 Pynson reverted to his earlier types and issued a translation by Lidgate from Boccaccio called the _Falle of Princes_, remarkable for its charming woodcuts. In this book, for the first time, Pynson used his second device, a large woodcut containing his initials on a black shield with a helmet above on which is perched a small bird. This I imagine is meant for a finch, a punning allusion to his name, since pynson is the Norman name for a finch. Round the whole is a border of flowering branches, in which are birds and grotesque beasts. This device supplies us later with a most useful date test, for the edge split in 1496 and the piece broke off entirely towards the end of 1497. After 1498 the use of this device was discontinued but it was not destroyed, and it made a solitary reappearance, in a sadly mutilated state in an edition of a grammar of Whitinton in 1515. Probably in this year (1494) Pynson issued his edition of the _Speculum vitae Christi_, of which an almost perfect copy is in King’s library. It is illustrated with a large number of neat woodcuts, which are copied more or less from Caxton’s illustrations to the same book, though they are by no means identical with them, as has been often stated. As a general rule Pynson’s cuts are of very much better execution and design than either Caxton’s or De Worde’s, and though not in all cases good, as for instance in the _Canterbury Tales_, yet they never sink to the very bad drawing and engraving so often found in the works of the other two printers.

An edition of the _Hecyra_ of Terence bears the date January 20, 1495, but no other dated book of this year is known, and 1496 was hardly better, having only the two grammars, the _Liber Synonymorum_ and _Liber Equivocorum_, the latter usually wrongly attributed to Joannes de Garlandia; but many undated books of very considerable interest appeared about this time. Two of these, the _Epitaph of Jasper_, _Duke of Bedford_, and the _Foundation of Our Lady’s Chapel at Walsingham_ are to be found in the Pepysian Library. Jasper Tudor, Duke of Bedford, and half-brother of Henry VI, died on December 21, 1495, and the book must have been printed early in 1496. It is ostensibly written by one Smarte, the keeper of the hawks to the Duke, and begins as follows:--

Rydynge al alone with sorrowe sore encombred In a frosty fornone, faste by Severnes syde The wordil beholdynge, whereat much I wondred To se the see and sonne to kepe both tyme and tyde. The ayre ouer my hede so wonderfully to glyde And how Saturne by circumference borne is aboute Whiche thynges to beholde, clerely me notyfyde One verray god to be, therin to haue no dowte.

The end runs:--

Kynges prynces moste souerayne of renoune Remembre oure maister that gone is byfore This worlde is casual, nowe up nowe downe Wherfore do for your silfe, I can say no more Honor tibi Deus, gloria et laus Qd’ Smerte maister de ses ouzeaus.

This poem has been attributed to Skelton, though I do not know for what reason. On the title-page is a special cut, not used elsewhere, of Smarte kneeling, with his hawk on his wrist, and presenting with his other hand a book to a person standing. The _Foundation of Our Lady’s Chapel at Walsingham_ is a small tract relating to the priory of the Augustinian canons of St Mary, once one of the most important places of pilgrimage in England, and which was described by Erasmus. The first leaf, which would have contained the title, is wanting, but the text begins on the second:--

Of this chapell se here the fundacyon Bylded the yere of crystes incarnacyon A thousande complete, sixty and one The tyme of Sent Edward kyng of this region.

About this time appeared the first English edition of _Mandeviles Travels_, the only edition, I think, issued without illustrations, and a little reprint of Caxton’s _Art and Craft to Know Well to Die_, of which the only known copy, formerly Ratcliffe’s, is in the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow.

Another poetical tract is the _Life of Petronylla_, beginning:--

The parfite lyfe to put in remembraunce Of a virgyn moost gracious and entere Which in all vertu had souereyn suffysaunce Called Petronylla petyrs doughter dere.

This little tract consists of four leaves, and though only three copies are known at present it is probable that more are in existence, for the book seems to occur in all the sales of large libraries which have occurred within the last hundred years.

About 1496 Henry Quentell, a Cologne printer, had issued the first edition of the _Expositio Hymnorum et Sequentiarum_, according to the use of Sarum, but it was found that several hymns and sequences were omitted, so Pynson issued two supplements, one of sixteen leaves to the hymns, another of six to the sequences.

Another rather quaint book issued about this time is a kind of vocabulary or phrase book in English and French. “Here is a good book to lerne to speak french, Vecy ung bon liure a apprendre a parler fraunchoys.” The book contains also specimens of letters in French relating to trade, in fact it was evidently intended as a manual for people who had business relations with France.

Two more editions of the _Nova Festa_, the _Festum transfigurationis_ and the _Festum nominis Jesu_ were issued about this time. The only copies known of these two books are in a private library in Somerset, and I have not yet had an opportunity of examining them.

In 1497, or perhaps slightly earlier, Pynson began to use his third device, made probably to take the place of the second which had split, and taking warning from it he had the new one cut in metal. The device consists of the shield and monogram supported by a man and a woman, with the helmet and bird above. The border, which is cut on a separate piece, contains birds and foliage, with the Virgin and Child and a saint in the bottom corners. In the lowest part of the frame a piece in the form of a ribbon has been cut out for the insertion of type. In consequence of the weakness of that particular place the small piece of border below the ribbon began to be pushed inwards, and by 1499 there was a distinct indentation in the border. This got deeper and deeper year by year, until the piece broke off entirely in 1513. The first dated book in which it occurs is the 1497 edition of Alcock’s _Mons perfectionis_, but it occurs in several of the undated books that can be placed about 1496.

Between 1495 and the end of 1497 Pynson issued the plays of Terence, the first classic (with the exception of an Oxford edition of the _Pro Milone_, which is known from a few leaves) that had been printed in England. The six plays were evidently issued separately and not as a volume, for they differ considerably typographically. There is some difficulty, too, in determining in what order they were issued.

In 1498 there are seven dated books, one of them being the sermon of Bishop Alcock called _Gallicantus_, and he is so pleased with jesting on his name that he prefaces the text of his sermon with a little black picture of a cockerel, which he also used as a device. Another edition of the _Doctrinale_ of Alexander the Grammarian was issued this year, but I have not yet seen the book, as the only copy known belongs to Lord Beauchamp.

In 1499 a very interesting book was printed by Pynson. This was the _Promptorius Puerorum_, a Latin-English dictionary ascribed to a monk of Lynn. The imprint tells us that the book was printed for Frederick Egmondt and Peter post pascha. Frederick Egmondt was an important stationer, and no doubt Peter post pascha was a stationer also, though what name in the vernacular can be represented by post pascha remains an unsolved riddle. Mr Albert Way, in his edition of the _Promptorium parvulorum_, applies a curious amount of misplaced ingenuity to the question of the identity of these two stationers. “We find about the time in question,” he says, speaking of the name Egmondt, “a distinguished person of that family, possibly the patron of Pynson, Frederic, son of William IV, Count of Egmond. In 1472 he received from his uncle, the Duke of Gueldres, the lordship of Buren; he was named governor of Utrecht by the Archduke Maximilian in 1492; two years later Buren was raised to a count in reward of his services. There was a Peter, an illegitimate brother of his father, who might have been living at that time; what was his surname does not appear.” Another book printed about this year was the _Elegantiarum viginti praecepta_, a book which I am fond of for a peculiar reason. I found once a leaf of it in the Signet Library, Edinburgh, and, not knowing that any copy was in existence, set to work to reconstruct the book from the leaf. I counted the lines, and comparing with foreign editions, conjectured the size and structure of the book, and knowing how Pynson would make a title-page with a woodcut, and the woodcut he would probably use, I made up a description of the book, taking the title from an early bibliography. At last I heard of a perfect copy in a private library which the owner was kind enough to allow me to examine. When the book arrived I found I had not only got the collation right, but by a lucky inspiration had selected the correct woodcut for the title-page. As it happens I might have spared myself the trouble, for I found afterwards a fairly accurate collation of the book in an authority I had not consulted.

A curious prognostication for 1499 is in the Bodleian. It is addressed to Henry VII, and was drawn out by a William Parron, who lived at Piacenza and called himself doctor of medicine and professor of astrology. Another prognostication for 1502, by the same author, was printed by Pynson, and some fragments are in the library of Westminster Abbey. He also wrote an astrological work on Henry, Duke of York, afterwards Henry VIII, in 1502, of which there are manuscripts in the British Museum and Bibliothèque Nationale, but it does not seem ever to have been printed.

The _Missal_ which Pynson printed in 1500 is perhaps the finest book printed in the fifteenth century in England. It was produced at the expense of Cardinal Morton, whose arms appear at the beginning, and Pynson has introduced into the borders and initials a rebus on the name consisting of the letters Mor surmounting a barrel or tun. Five copies of this book are known, three being on vellum. One of the latter copies, slightly imperfect, is in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. In the copy at Manchester all the references to St Thomas and his service, which had been scraped out and erased according to the command of Henry VIII, have been entirely filled in by some pious seventeenth century owner in gold.

In the imprint, after setting forth that the book was printed at the command of Cardinal Morton, Pynson adds the date, January 10, 1500. Now, as Cardinal Morton died on September 15, 1500, I think we have here a strong piece of evidence that Pynson, like De Worde, began his year on January 1. For if he had begun it on March 25, then January 10, 1500, would be after the Cardinal was dead, and Pynson would surely have spoken of him as lately dead, or in some way alluded to the loss of his patron.

The _Book of Cookery_, belonging to the Marquis of Bath, was also printed this year. It begins: “Here beginneth a noble boke of festes royalle and cokery, a boke for a pryncis housholde or any other estates, and the makynge therof accordynge as ye shall fynde more playnly within this boke.” Then follows an account of certain great banquets, the feast at the coronation of Henry V; “the earle of Warwick’s feast to the king, the feast of my lorde chancellor archbishop of York at his stallacion in York,” and so on. After the account of the feasts comes the more practical Calendar of Cookery.

Two editions of the _Informatio Puerorum_, a small grammatical work founded upon the _Donatus_, were issued about this time. In the colophon of one it is stated that the book was printed for George Chasteleyn and John Bars. I have found no reference anywhere to John Bars, but George Chasteleyn was an Oxford bookseller, carrying on business at the Sign of St John the evangelist in that city. It was for him also that in 1506 Pynson printed an edition of the _Principia_ of Peregrinus de Lugo. About this time there was no press in Oxford, so that books for use in the schools had to be printed in London.

In a scrap-book in the British Museum are some leaves of an edition of the romance of _Guy of Warwick_ which may be ascribed to Pynson, and they are printed in a curious mixture of his early types. These leaves were discovered in 1860 in the binding of a copy of Maydeston’s _Directorium Sacerdotum_, printed by Pynson in 1501, and an account of them was sent by their discoverer, who signs himself E. F. B., to _Notes and Queries_. Now, of this edition of the _Directorium_, only two copies are known, one in the British Museum and one in Ripon Cathedral, and I should very much like to know from which copy these leaves were obtained.

During all the period from 1490 to 1500 Pynson was busy issuing editions of law-books, more than a quarter of his productions being of this class, and it is probable that a considerable number more printed in the fifteenth century may yet be discovered. They are not of a nature to attract much interest, and are generally very badly catalogued, or catalogued in collections and not separately, and in one great English library at least they have no more detailed press mark than Law Room, so it is needless to say I have not yet examined such books as they may have in that library.

Though he did not print so many books as De Worde in the fifteenth century, nevertheless Pynson was evidently a more enterprising and careful printer. He had seven distinct founts of type, all of which were made for him and not inherited from other printers, and the works he produced were of a much more scholarly nature, though this becomes more apparent in his work during the sixteenth century. His patrons were often learned and distinguished men, for whom he produced such splendid work as the _Morton Missal_, and he became later the recognised king’s printer. In the fifteenth century he printed altogether eighty-eight books known to us.

Pynson, like De Worde, very considerately moved to a new address at the end of the century; previous to 1501 he was in St Clement’s parish, outside Temple Bar, which was the limit, I think, of the parish, but afterwards moved inside Temple Bar, where he carried on business at the Sign of the George. The colophon to the _Book of Cookery_, printed in 1500, says, “Imprinted without Temple Bar”; the colophon to the _Directorium Sacerdotum_ of 1501 says, “intra barram novi templi,” so that the date is pretty accurately fixed.

LECTURE III.

THE STATIONERS.

In speaking of the history of the printed book in the fifteenth century I have so far dealt only with the printers of London and Westminster; to-day I propose to touch on the books printed abroad for the English market and the stationers who sold them. In the early days the different businesses of a publisher, a bookseller, and a bookbinder were often carried on by one man, who was called a stationer. He bought books wholesale, sometimes having whole editions specially printed for him, he bound them, and then sold them like an ordinary bookseller. He also probably in England, as was certainly done on the Continent, sent round vans full of books to the various provincial towns, timing his arrival as far as possible to coincide with the local fairs.

A considerable number of the books printed abroad for sale in England have no connexion with any particular stationer, but were probably brought over by an agent of the printer and sold in lots to different stationers.

The earliest book printed abroad definitely for sale in England is the edition of the Sarum _Breviary_ printed at Cologne about 1475. Of this book nothing is left but a few leaves, and the imprint, if it possessed one, is not known. Only one other book is known printed in the same type, an edition of the _Homilies_, but it, unfortunately, has no imprint, so that we have no clue as to who may have been the printer. I cannot help thinking that perhaps Caxton may have had something to do with having this book printed, commissioning it either on his own account or for some friend in England, for it is unlikely that a printer in so distant a town would have issued such a book on his own account, and the probable date of its printing coincides more or less with Caxton’s departure for England.

In 1483 a book was printed at Venice for sale in England, curiously enough another edition of the Sarum _Breviary_. The copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the only one known, is a very beautiful book, printed on vellum and quite perfect. There is a rather painful history attached to it. In 1715 this unique book came to the University Library, Cambridge, as part of the library of Bishop Moore which was presented to the University by George I. In the latter half of the eighteenth century it appears to have been purloined along with a great many other rarities by a certain Dr Combe. It then found its way into the collection of Count Justin MacCarthy, who formed the largest library of books printed on vellum ever brought together by a private collector (he had over 600 of such books), and at his sale in 1815 it was purchased for the Paris Library for fifty-one francs. The printer of the book, Reginaldus de Novimagio, does not appear to have had any connexion with England, nor does the imprint mention for whom the book was produced. It is curious that he should have been chosen as the printer of this _Breviary_, for it seems to have been the only liturgical work he issued, and nothing among his other productions has any connexion with England. Of course English people passed through Venice in large quantities as it was the starting-point for pilgrims to the Holy Land, and many ecclesiastics of high position went on this journey, so that perhaps one of these travellers, seeing the beautiful work done at Venice, and knowing that no printer at home was equal to the task of producing such a book in a fitting manner, commissioned the printing of the _Breviary_. It is sad to think that so beautiful a book has been lost to England through the dishonesty of a reader in the Library. We can only regret that the negotiations between the Duke of Devonshire and the representatives of Count MacCarthy for the purchase of the library _en bloc_ fell through, and that the Duke and Lord Spencer, who both bought considerably at the sale, did not secure it, for then at any rate it might have been in England, though not in its proper place.

[Illustration]

In the year 1484 some important Acts were passed relating to the trading of foreigners in this country. The ninth chapter ends: “Provided always that this act or any parcel thereof, or any other act made, or to be made in this said parliament, shall not extend, or be in prejudice, disturbance, damage, or impediment, to any artificer, or merchant stranger, of what nation or country he be, or shall be of, for bringing into this realm, or selling by retail, or otherwise, any books written or printed, or for inhabiting within this said realm for the same intent, or any scrivener, alluminor, binder or printer of such books, which he hath, or shall have to sell by way of merchandise, or for their dwelling within this said realm, for the exercise of the said occupations; this act or any part thereof notwithstanding.”

This Act it will be seen, which was not repealed until 1534, gave absolute liberty to foreign printers and stationers to trade and reside in England. That it succeeded in its object of encouraging the immigration of stationers and craftsmen and the importation of books, is clear from the words of the Act of 1534: “Whereas by the provision of a Statute made in the firste yere of the reygne of Kynge Richarde the thirde, it was provided in the same acte that all strangers repayryng into this realme might lawfully bring into the saide realme printed and written bokes to sell at their libertie and pleasure. By force of which provision there hath comen into this realme sithen the makynge of the same, a marvellous number of printed bookes and dayly doth. And the cause of the making of the same provision semeth to be, for that there were but few bookes and fewe printers within this realme at that time, whiche could well exercise and occupie the said science and crafte of printynge. Nevertheless, sithen the making of the saide provision, many of this realme being the Kinges naturall subjectes, have given them so diligently to lerne and exercise the saide craft of printing that at this day there be within this realme a great number of connyng and experte in the said science or crafte of printing, as able to exercise the saide crafte in all pointes as any stranger in any other realme or country.”

Though the preamble of this Act speaks only of printing, it was mainly directed against the foreign bookbinders and stationers. By it it was forbidden to import any foreign printed books ready bound, and no one was to buy from any foreigner residing in England any books except “by engrosse,” that is, wholesale. This you will see completely stopped the trade of the foreign binder in the English market, and absolutely did away with the foreign stationer in England. One effect of the Act is apparent in the extraordinary number of letters of denisation taken out at that date. In 1582 Christopher Barker wrote: “In the time of King Henry VIII there were but few printers and those of good credit and competent wealth, at whiche time and before there was another sort of men, that were writers, lymners of bookes and dyverse thinges for the Churche and other uses called stacioners; which have and partly to this day do use to buy their bookes in grosse of the said printers, to bynde them up and sell them in their shops, whereby they well mayntayned their families.”

The fifty years then between 1484 and 1534 are the really interesting years in the history of the English book trade, when it was free and unprotected, but though we have a fair amount of information about the latter half of this time, the earlier half is almost destitute of any kind of records. The books of the original company of stationers in London have all disappeared, and we are dependent mostly on incidental references in deeds, in wills, or other legal documents.

Two years before the Act was passed, namely in 1482, we know of two foreign booksellers who had come to London, Henry Frankenberg and Bernard van Stondo, who rented an alley in St Clement’s Lane called St Mark’s Alley. From their names they would appear to have come from the Low Countries, but we know nothing about them or their business beyond the fact that Frankenberg commissioned his fellow-countryman, William de Machlinia, who was printing in London, to print for him an edition of the _Speculum Christiani_, about which I spoke in my last lecture. Their names in the deed and Frankenberg’s name in a colophon are the only clues we have to the existence of two probably important booksellers. So also in the very year of the Act we find foreign dealers in books trading in Oxford with the resident university stationer. In 1485 Peter Actors, a native of Savoy trading in London, was appointed by Henry VII, Stationer to the King.

About 1486 at Louvain, Egidius vander Heerstraten printed an edition of the _Regulae Grammaticales_ of Nicolas Perott, which contains a great number of passages in English. These are very curious, and seem to have been translated by one not very conversant with the language. Here is a passage which refers to the fifteenth century substitute for compulsory football: “who someuer of my discipulis goyeth awey fyrst from the gammyng wt owt my licence i shal smyte his hande wyt a rode. And yf he do the samyn thyng twyss i shall also beet hym wyt a leyshe.” In another place, having translated the Latin phrase, “Quintilianus est eloquens sed nihil ad Ciceronem,” “Quintilian is a wel spoken man but nothyng to Tully,” he adds another and more personal example: “Helia Perott is fayr but nothing to Penelope.”

I am not sure whether we ought to consider this book as one printed for the purpose of exportation to England, or whether it was not rather intended for the use of English students at the foreign universities. This is made more probable from the fact that in a few cases we have words translated into Dutch prefaced by “as we say.” I have seen it stated that a similar edition was printed by the same printer with explanations in French, but I have not been able to verify the existence of any copy.

About 1486, too, was issued the first edition of the Sarum _Missal_, printed, it is supposed, at Basle by Wenssler, though some doubts have been raised as to whether it was really printed at Basle on account of the appearance of the music type. It is a very handsome folio volume of 278 leaves, printed in a large Gothic type in red and black. The printer has not attempted to print the English portions of the wedding service, but has left blank spaces where they occur, so that they might be written in by hand. The first few editions of the Sarum _Missal_ are all similar in this respect, but it is curious that Caxton, who had an edition specially printed for him, should not have supplied the printer with correct copies for these small portions of the service.

In the next few years a few grammatical books were issued, printed as a rule in the Low Countries. In 1486 Gerard Leeu printed the _Vulgaria Terentii_, a series of Latin sentences with translations into English, an edition reprinted from the Oxford one of a year or two earlier. This book is sometimes found printed as a supplement to the _Grammar_ by John Anwykyll, and of this _Grammar_ there are two foreign editions, one printed by Paffroed at Deventer in 1489, and another rather later by Henry Quentell at Cologne. The _Grammar_ does not contain an author’s name, but in the prefatory verses written by Petrus Carmelianus he is referred to as Joannes. There are also verses written to William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, and founder of Magdalen College, Oxford, congratulating him on having persuaded this Joannes to edit the _Grammar_. The book is supposed to have been intended for the use of the Magdalen College School, in which the two grammarians John Anwykyll and John Stanbridge were masters, and is supposed to have been the work of Anwykyll. The two earliest editions were printed at Oxford, but by 1486 the Oxford Press had stopped work and the two succeeding editions were printed abroad.

The _Liber Equivocorum_ and _Liber Synonymorum_, the former wrongly attributed to Joannes de Garlandia were also printed in the Low Countries, the first at Deventer by Paffroed, the second at Antwerp by Thierry Martens in 1493. The _Liber Synonymorum_ has the commentary of Galfridus Anglicus. A copy of this book sold in the Ratcliffe sale in the last century was described as having been printed at Antwerp in 1492, but this must have been, I suppose, a misprint for 1493.

Three more books printed in the Low Countries I ought to mention before turning to France. One is an edition of Clement Maydeston’s _Directorium Sacerdotum_, printed by Gerard Leeu in 1488, of which there is a copy in the Cambridge University Library.

Another is an edition of the Sarum _Horae_, also printed by Leeu, which I am afraid has to be spoken of at present as a lost book. The only fragment known, an unused half sheet containing eight leaves, had been used to line the binding of a copy of the _Scriptores rei rusticae_ printed at Reggio in 1496, in Brasenose College library; Bradshaw saw the fragment and took down a description of it, but on its return to Oxford it was mislaid and is not to be found.

The third book is another edition of the Sarum _Breviary_, printed at Louvain in 1499 by Thierry Martens. The only copy known is in the Musée Plantin at Antwerp. Leaving the Low Countries for a time we will turn to France.

The _Missal_ printed for Caxton in 1487 I have already described in an earlier lecture, so I can pass on to the edition which succeeded it, that printed by Martin Morin, the celebrated printer of Rouen in 1492. This Morin was by far the most important of the Norman stationers and printers, and he appears to have excelled in the printing of service books, for he was employed by printers and publishers from all parts to print the service books for the special uses of the towns where they resided.

For England he printed altogether six service books in the fifteenth century. Three _Missals_, two _Breviaries_, and a _Liber Festivalis_, and of these the _Missal_ of 1492 is the earliest. The two copies known of this book, both slightly imperfect, are in the British Museum and the Bodleian. It contains, like the earlier edition printed for Caxton, two full-page engravings before the Canon of the Mass, not one only, as is more generally the case.

The two later _Missals_ which he issued, one without date but about 1495 and another dated 1497, appear to have been mixed up by all writers. The undated edition appears the rarest, for the only copy which I have noted is in the British Museum. Of the dated edition I have notes of five; one at Windsor in the Royal library, one in St Catharine’s College, one at Chatsworth, one in the Aberdeen University Library, and the fifth at Kinnaird Castle. I owe my knowledge of the existence of this last copy to almost the last book in which one would seek for bibliographical information, that handy work of reference _Who’s Who_. Both editions are very handsome books, remarkable for their fine titles and initial letters.

Of the two _Breviaries_ which Morin printed the earliest is dated 1496, and the only copy known is in the University Library at Edinburgh, to which it was bequeathed in 1577 by Clement Litill, who left a number of valuable books to that library, of which he was practically the founder. It is a magnificent folio volume of 437 leaves, and contains a fairly full imprint, which after a deal of very grandiloquent language tells us that the book was printed at the cost of Jean Richard, “by the industry of that man skilled in printing, Mr Martin Morin, a not unworthy citizen of that great city Rouen.” Morin’s colophons I may note rarely err on the side of modesty. The Jean Richard mentioned was a stationer of Rouen, and one who appears to have had considerable dealings with England. I do not think he was a printer, as is often stated, and he describes himself as a dealer in books, not a printer, using sometimes the word merchant of books and sometimes the word stationer.

It was for him that Morin printed in 1499 an edition of Mirk’s _Liber Festivalis_ and _Quattuor Sermones_, a copy of which is in the Sandars collection in the University Library. For him also, in 1500, a Sarum _Manual_ was printed by Petrus Olivier and Joannes de Lorraine, of which there is a copy in the Bodleian, and during the early years of the sixteenth century a considerable number of service books for the English market were printed at his expense.

The names of a number of early stationers who probably traded between Rouen and England are to be found in the imprints of the early Sarum _Missals_, for as the printing of them entailed a good deal of expense a number of booksellers would combine to pay for the edition. Rouen seems to have been, amongst all the towns of France, the most connected with England as regards the book trade. It was there many of our printers, as well as the first Scottish printers, learned their art or obtained their materials, while stationers from that town crossed over and sold their books in this country.

We know that Ingelbert Haghe, the publisher of the Hereford _Breviary_ of 1505, came over himself and sold books at Hereford and in the country round. On the fly-leaf of a Bible formerly in the library of Gloucester Cathedral is a Latin inscription which runs: “I gave to the Hereford bookseller called Ingelbert for this and the six other volumes of the Bible 43 shillings and fourpence, which I bought at Ludlow the year of our Lord’s incarnation 1510, about the day of the Lichfield fair.” Whether the Bible is still in the Gloucester Cathedral library I do not know, but the fly-leaves which once belonged to it are in a bundle of scraps in the Bodleian.

Another Rouen printer issued in 1495 an edition of the _Liber Festivalis_. His name was James Ravynell, and this is the only book that he is known to have printed. It is an exact copy of the edition printed by W. de Worde in 1493 and ’94, and the type used in it has a very clean and new appearance. At the end is a device with the initials P. R., which looks as though it might have been made for another member of the family, though we know of no other printer of the name. The fact that he uses the English form of the Christian name in the imprint, “By me, James Ravynell,” looks as if he was an Englishman who had migrated to Rouen.

The device consists of the initials P. R. on a shield suspended by a belt from a tree and supported by two muzzled bears. Below the shield two birds hold up a wreath. Round the whole runs the text: “Junior fui etenim senui et non vidi justum derelictum nec semen ejus querens panem.” The name Ravynell is a curious one, and may be a corrupted spelling of a commoner name, though it is still borne by some families of Huguenot descent.

Another mysterious book, which from its type may very well have been printed at Rouen, is an edition of the little grammar called _Parvula_. It consists only of four leaves, and the only copy known is at Manchester. The book ends: “Here endeth a treatise called parvula, for the instruction of children. Emprentyd by me Nicole Marcant.” In the exasperating way common to some printers both the date and place of printing are omitted. As to the date I am inclined to put it before 1500, but the place is more difficult to settle. Nicole Marcant is an unknown printer, but may very well be a member of one of the numerous families of Marchand or Mercator, for there were several printers of that name, though none so far as I know named Nicholas.

If we except the _Missal_ printed for Caxton in 1487 it was not until 1494 that the Paris printers began to work for the English market, and the books they produced were almost all liturgical. The only exceptions are three editions of grammatical works, two of the _Liber Equivocorum_ wrongly ascribed to Joannes de Garlandia, and one of the _Liber Synonymorum_, the first two printed by Baligault and the last by Hopyl.

The first liturgical book was an edition of the Sarum _Breviary_, printed in 1494 by Pierre Levet. For a long time only one copy was known, that in the library at Trinity College, Dublin, but not long ago the University Library was fortunate enough to secure a second example, a very beautiful copy in its old binding.

In one thing the Paris printers excelled all others, and that was in the production of books of Hours. These were turned out in the last few years of the century by hundreds of thousands, and though they are now of very common occurrence and very often of little interest, they are still much sought after by certain classes of collectors, especially those who like what they call pretty books. Of course, when these books were printed for the use of out of the way places they have often great liturgical interest, and being printed no doubt in small quantities are very rare. The English service books having been relentlessly destroyed at the Reformation are very rare indeed. Altogether in the fifteenth century twenty-seven editions of the Sarum _Horae_ were printed, fifteen in England, one at Antwerp, one at Venice, and ten in Paris. Nine English editions were printed before one was issued at Paris, but these latter when once they got a footing in England easily defied competition. The changes in the text of these books during the last ten years of the century are very curious and interesting. The _Horae_ was not a service book proper, but a manual of private devotion, and so long as it contained certain fixed and definite parts additional prayers could be added at will. Consequently the editions vary greatly, and each publisher seems to have aimed at inserting new and popular prayers, and by 1500 the book had increased to almost double the bulk of its forerunner of ten years earlier.

In speaking of these books there is one point on which a word of warning may be said. And that is about dating editions which have no date in the imprint. All such are usually put down to 1488, which is the first date printed in the calendar of moveable feasts. As this calendar was made out for a nineteen year cycle running on to 1508 it was naturally not reprinted for many years, and therefore is no test for dating the printing of the book. The ten editions printed at Paris are the work of about five printers, of whom the most important was Felix Baligault.

The study of these French books of Hours is not an easy one, as there is so much confusion between printers and publishers. In some cases I am afraid the publishers used the words “printed by” in a quite unwarrantable manner, and claimed to have produced books which they had done nothing more than pay for. Then again quite half the editions produced for sale in England are without any imprint, so that we are left to conjecture who was the printer from the type or cuts used in the books. To further bewilder us, sets of cuts passed from printer to printer, and are very untrustworthy guides in assigning books. If one printer issued a _Horae_ with a fine set of cuts they were promptly copied by his rivals, who in their turn sold their old sets to less wealthy printers, in fact some sets of cuts change hands almost every year.

These books are all got up in the same style, the text surrounded on every page by deep borders containing figures of saints and martyrs or pictures from the Dance of Death.

One unique edition, printed by Jean Poitevin about 1498, was picked up lately in Ireland and bought by the librarian of Trinity College, Dublin, for a small sum.

A service book of great interest is the first edition of the Sarum _Manual_, of which the only known copy is in the library at Caius College. It bears on its first leaf a Latin inscription stating that it was given to the College of the Annunciation of the Blessed Mary at Cambridge by Humphrey de la Poole, son of the Duke of Suffolk, for the use of the college, in September, 1498. The book is a folio of 164 leaves, beautifully printed in red and black by Berthold Rembolt of Paris. It has no date, but the Greek in the printer’s device reads ΧΕΡΕΘΗΚΙ, and must therefore be after 1496, when it read ΧΕΡΕΘΙΚΗ, and as the book was presented in 1498 we may fairly safely fix the date of printing about the beginning of 1498. Unfortunately the last leaf is missing, which may have contained an imprint giving the exact date and stating for whom the book was printed.

The last service book to be noticed is a Sarum _Missal_ printed by Jean du Pré at Paris in 1500. Unfortunately all the copies of this book are imperfect, though from the three copies known an exact collation can be made. Another _Missal_ was printed at Paris in the same year by Higman and Hopyl for two unknown persons, I.B. and G.H.

All these service books though most interesting liturgically are almost the most uninteresting class of book to the bibliographer. They were issued by well-known printers, and are hardly different from the great mass of foreign service books. From them early in the sixteenth century, however, we derive a good deal of information about the stationers, especially as regards the provincial presses; for in the case of a town like York hardly anything seems to have been printed beyond liturgical books.

So far the books we have been speaking of have been for the most part in Latin, with some sentences here and there in English, printed, of course, for the English market, but not of much interest from the point of view of literature. But we now come to another small group of English books, printed entirely in English, of very much greater interest.

In 1492 and 1493, when, just after the death of Caxton, the English press was almost at a standstill, Gerard Leeu of Antwerp printed four English books of considerable interest. Three of them were reprints of books already printed by Caxton, Lefevre’s _History of Jason_, the _History of Paris and Vienne_, and the _Chronicles of England_. The fourth book was _The Dialogue or Communyng between the Wise King Solomon and Marcolphus_. Of this there does not seem to have been any other English edition, though many Latin ones were printed in the fifteenth century, and it is possible, though hardly probable, that Caxton might have printed an edition which has entirely disappeared.

Lefevre’s _History of Jason_ is a small folio of ninety-eight leaves, illustrated with a number of half-page cuts clearly made to illustrate the book in which they first appear. They were used in several editions of the _Jason_ in different languages, the earliest in Dutch having been printed by Bellaert at Haarlem about 1485. There are copies of the English edition at Trinity College, Dublin, and in the library at Chatsworth, and a third copy, slightly imperfect, is in the University Library.

The _History of Paris and Vienne_, which was printed exactly three weeks after the _History of Jason_, is a still rarer book, only one copy being known, which is in the library at Trinity College, Dublin. It, like the _Jason_, is illustrated with a series of half-page wood engravings, which Mr Conway, in his _History of the Woodcutters of the Netherlands_, conjectures to have been originally used in an edition printed by Bellaert at Haarlem, which has now entirely disappeared, and then to have passed from his possession into the hands of Gerard Leeu. It is a small folio of forty leaves, and the copy at Dublin is bound up with the _Jason_ and the _Chronicles_.

The next book to be noticed, the _Dialogue or Communyng between the Wise King Solomon and Marcolphus_, is very interesting, being the only English edition of this version of a widespread and popular story. It tells how Solomon, seated on his throne, is confronted by Marcolphus, a misshapen rustic who answers with a certain coarse wit the questions put to him by the king. Later on the king visits Marcolphus, who in his turn comes to reside at court, but his behaviour there is so insolent that the king can hardly put up with it. After a series of escapades Marcolphus is banished from the court, and finally sentenced to be hanged. He is allowed as a favour to choose his own tree, and consequently he wanders with his guards through the Vale of Josaphath to Jericho, over Jordan, through Arabia and the wilderness to the Red Sea, but “never more could Marcolf find a tree that he wold choose to hang on.” The curious result of this is that he went home and lived happily ever afterwards.

The book itself has only one illustration, which is used twice, on the recto and verso of the title-page, representing Marcolphus and his wife Polycana standing before Solomon, who is seated upon his throne. This cut found its way over to England, and was used by several successive printers for editions of _Howleglas_.

The only copy known of _Solomon and Marcolphus_ is in the Bodleian, and was in a volume of tracts bequeathed with his library by Thomas Tanner, Bishop of St Asaph. The volume contained originally five separate pieces. Two by Wynkyn de Worde, the _Three Kings of Coleyne_ and the _Meditations of St Bernard_, two by Caxton, the _Governayle of Health_ and the _Ars moriendi_, and the _Solomon and Marcolphus_. I am sorry to say that the two Caxtons have been cut out of the volume and bound separately.

The last of the four books to be noticed is the edition of the _Chronicles of England_. While the _Chronicles_ were being printed Gerard Leeu died, or perhaps it would be more correct to say was murdered. One of his workmen named Henric van Symmen, who was also a type engraver, struck work and determined to set up in business on his own account. This led to a quarrel, and blows succeeded words. The workman, it appears, in the course of the quarrel struck Leeu a blow on the head, and this proved so serious that he lay very ill for three days and then died. The workman was promptly secured and brought up for trial for the killing of his master, but it was probably considered that he had received a certain amount of provocation, and his punishment took the form of a fine. He was sentenced to pay into the Duke of Burgundy’s exchequer the sum of forty guelden. Gerard Leeu seems to have been a good master and a kindly man if we may judge from the colophon put to the _Chronicles_: “Enprentyd In the Duchye of Braband in the towne of Andewarpe In the yere of our lord M.cccc.xciii. By maister Gerard de Leew a man of grete wysedom in all maner of kunnyng: whych nowe is come from lyfe unto the deth, which is grete harme for many a poure man. On whos sowle god almyghty for hys hygh grace haue mercy. Amen.”

The book contains no illustrations beyond a woodcut of the arms of England on the title-page.

Leeu seems to have intended to print more English books, for the type in which all but the _Chronicles_ are printed was a special fount cut in imitation of English type, with a curious lower-case d for use when that letter occurred at the end of a word. His death, so soon after the cutting of the type, put an end to all such plans. The custom, however, of printing English books at Antwerp revived at the very beginning of the sixteenth century, for Adrian van Berghen printed an edition of Holt’s _Lac Puerorum_, and John of Doesborch issued a whole series of English popular books, some of them remarkably curious.

Among the stationers who came to England from abroad the most important was certainly Frederick Egmont. He was probably a Frenchman, but his printing was mainly done in Venice, and he seems to have been the agent of the Venetian printer Johannes Hertzog de Landoia. From this Venetian press came a large number of service books for English use, editions of the _Breviary_ and _Missal_. The Sarum _Horae_ on the other hand is only represented by one edition, issued about 1494, of which only a few leaves are known.

Egmont during his earliest years as a stationer was connected with no press except that of Hertzog, and we do not know of any books by this printer produced for any other English stationer, so that as regards liturgical books for English use known to us only from fragments we are justified, I think, in attributing to Egmont as stationer such as we can determine from their type to have been printed by Hertzog.

The first book in which his name occurs is an edition of the _Breviary_ according to the use of York, of which the only known copy is in the Bodleian, having been originally in the great liturgical collection of Richard Gough. It is a small thick octavo of 462 leaves, and was issued in May, 1493. Two if not three editions of the Sarum _Breviary_ in octavo were printed about this same time, but we know of their existence only from fragments discovered in bindings. Fragments of one edition are in a binding in the library of St John’s College, Cambridge, of another in a binding at Lambeth, while some leaves of probably a third edition are in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

In 1494 Egmont had commissioned Hertzog to print for him two editions of the Sarum _Missal_, one in folio, the other in octavo. The folio edition is of great rarity, but there is a beautiful though slightly imperfect copy in the Sandars collection in the University Library. The title-page is wanting and also the leaf containing the engraving of the Crucifixion which should precede the Canon of the Mass. In the imprint we are told that the book was finished on the 1st of September, 1494, by John Hertzog de Landoia for Fredericus de Egmont and Gerardus Barrevelt. This Gerardus Barrevelt was clearly a partner of Egmont’s as their initials occur together in the device on the title-page. This device is remarkable for the delicacy of its execution. It consists of a circle divided by a perpendicular line produced beyond the top of the circle, the projection being crossed by two bars. In the left-hand half of the circle are the initials and mark of Egmont, in the right those of Barrevelt. The whole is enclosed in a square frame, and the background contains sprays of leaves. It so resembles in style and appearance the mark used by the printer John Hertzog that we may be pretty certain it was cut under his supervision at Venice.

The octavo _Missal_ of 1494, a much commoner book than the last, was issued in December. On the last leaf is Hertzog’s mark and the words, “Fredericus egmont me fieri fecit.” There is no mention of Barrevelt, and the double device does not occur in the book, which makes it appear as though this edition was printed for Egmont alone. Both these editions of the _Missal_ contain exquisitely designed woodcut initials, the most graceful to be found in any early book.

In the Bodleian there is a copy of the “Pars estivalis” of the Sarum _Breviary_ printed at Venice in 1495, which contains again the device of Egmont and Barrevelt, though the imprint mentions Egmont’s name only. After 1495 we hear nothing more of Egmont until 1499, when he seems to have got rid of his former partner Barrevelt and joined with a man named Peter post pascha, and these two commissioned Pynson to print them an edition of the _Promptorium Puerorum_. After 1499 Egmont disappeared for a long time; we know of him working as a bookbinder, and it is probable that he stayed on for some time in England, for he is mentioned as a witness in a law-suit in London in 1502. When he does reappear it is in Paris, where he had some books printed for him about 1517-1520.

It is very disappointing that we have practically no information about Frederick Egmont, for it is clear from the number of books that he had printed for him in Venice that he must have been a stationer of very considerable importance. The colophons of his books give, beyond his mere name, no information whatever about him: we do not even know in what part of London or under what sign he lived. The stationers seem always to have settled in St Paul’s Churchyard, and I cannot help thinking that part of that district may have been “in the liberties,” as it was called, of some church. Though the Act of Richard allowed foreigners to come over and trade, yet I do not suppose his Act could override the rights of the trade guilds. It certainly did not in York, for there a stationer must be a freeman by right or by purchase before he could carry on certain businesses, that of a stationer amongst the number, within the city. There were, however, certain liberties where an alien could live and trade; and we find at York that their earliest stationer, Gerard Wanseford, does not appear in the city register. Having taken up his abode within the liberty of St Peter, he was privileged to carry on business there without being a freeman of the city.

In the same way in London, I suppose, the various trades had their rights and could prevent foreigners from competing, except they resided within the liberties. Of course there was a Stationers’ Company in London in the fifteenth century, though unfortunately most of the records relating to it have disappeared, and it would protect its own members. We see in the early bindings how ostentatiously the binders who were freemen decorated their bindings with the arms of London, and there is no doubt that as far as trading in the City was concerned the foreigner was considerably handicapped in comparison with the freeman.

We know from the few early documents remaining that the London Company of Stationers was a powerful and important body, and the members of it must certainly have enjoyed certain privileges.

Nicholas Lecomte was another stationer who appears to have been settled in England by 1494, in which year, so far as I know, his first dated book appears. M. Madden, a French writer on early printing, in the fifth volume of his _Lettres d’une Bibliographe_, speaks of Hopyl having printed a book for Lecomte in 1493. Several times in writing to him I asked for some information about this book, its whereabouts or its name even, but though he sent always voluminous replies to my letters, he never would touch on this particular point. I think, therefore, we may consider that this 1493 book never existed, and take the 1494 book as the first. This was an edition of the _Liber Synonymorum_, printed by Hopyl, of which there are copies in the University Library, the British Museum, and the Bodleian.

In the imprint Lecomte is described as living in London by St Paul’s Churchyard at the sign of St Nicholas. His device depicts St Nicholas restoring to life the three children who had been killed and pickled, a favourite subject of the early bookbinders.

I think it is worth noting here, that so far as I can discover the sign of a house was not in any way permanent, but could apparently be changed at will. I noticed this in reading through a catalogue or _précis_ of some thousands of deeds relating to property in London at this time and a little earlier. We find endless notices of houses with changed signs, “the tenement now called the Rose, formerly the Lion,” the “house called the Bull, formerly called the Rose,” and so on. Naturally if a house got celebrated for any reason it would be politic to keep the sign, but there seems to have been no compulsion to do so.

In 1495 an edition of Mirk’s _Liber Festivalis_ and _Quattuor Sermones_ was printed by Hopyl for Lecomte. This contains Lecomte’s device at the end of the _Liber Festivalis_ and a curious device at the end of the _Quattuor Sermones_, used sometimes by Hopyl, but which does not bear on its face any appearance of having been made for him.

At the time when this book was printed Hopyl had in his office as press corrector an Edinburgh man called David Lauxius, the earliest Scotchman we know of employed in a printing-office. He afterwards became a schoolmaster at Arras, and appears to have been a man of considerable ability, and a friend of the celebrated Parisian printer and editor, Badius Ascensius, who addresses to him some of the prefatory letters in his grammars. What Scotch name is represented by the Latin Lauxius no one has yet been able to determine.

The last book printed for Lecomte was printed at Paris by Jean Jehannot, and is an edition of the Sarum _Horae_. It is a book of very great rarity, but there are two copies in Cambridge, one in Trinity College, and the other in the Sandars collection in the University Library, the latter containing a small supplement not found in the other copies, and which was not originally intended to form part of the book, since the prayers in it are not referred to in the list of contents. The imprint is curious; it states that the edition has been revised and corrected in the celebrated University of Paris, and printed for Nicolas Lecomte of that University, settled for the time being in England as a merchant of books. I do not know whether this means merely that he was educated at the University or whether he was one of the privileged stationers attached to it, though in the latter case he would hardly have come to settle in England. Like Frederick Egmont, Lecomte was also a bookbinder.

Before the end of the century another stationer was settled in England whose name we know, John Boudins. We know of only one book printed for him, an edition of the _Expositio Hymnorum et Sequentiarum_ of Salisbury use, which was printed at the beginning of 1502 by Bocard of Paris. Boudins was probably then an old man, for his will is dated the 11th of October, 1501, and it was proved on the 30th of March, 1503. He lived in the parish of St Clement’s, Eastcheap, and was apparently a naturalised Fleming, and an immigrant from Antwerp.

A great difficulty in the way of tracing these stationers, especially those from the Low Countries, is the very sparing use they made of their proper surnames. In legal documents such as wills or letters of denization the formal name would be given, whereas in ordinary parlance and in the imprints of books they would be spoken of by a kind of nickname taken from the town from which they came, like William de Machlinia, Wynkyn de Worde, and so on. So that we should probably find, if we had more information on the subject, that in many cases two men who are treated as different may turn out to be only one man under two names. The number of stationers that existed at this time in England was probably very large, and it is sad to think that our information on the subject is so meagre. Of course unless the stationer was wealthy enough or in a good way of business he would not be able to commission whole editions of books from a foreign printer, and therefore he would not have his name in the imprint. Then again the greater part of a stationer’s stock would consist of foreign books which were not necessarily printed for England. For information of this class we can only look to manuscript sources, accounts kept by the bookseller, lists of imported books, and so on.

There exists, for instance, a list of books for sale at Oxford in 1483 by Thomas Hunte, which has been edited by Mr Madan for the Oxford Historical Society. At the head of the list is the following sentence in Latin: “Here follows the inventory of the books which I, Thomas Hunte, stationer of the University of Oxford, have received from Master Peter Actors and John of Aix-la-Chapelle to sell, with the price of each book, and I promise faithfully to return the books or the money according to the price written below as it appears in the following list.” The two men mentioned were travelling stationers from London, supplying so much stock to the bookseller on a system of sale or return.

A document such as the _Day-book of John Dorne_, the journal or account-book of an Oxford bookseller in 1520, which was edited by Mr Madan for the Oxford Historical Society, and about which Henry Bradshaw wrote his _Half-century of Notes_, the last piece of work which he finished, is a find of the utmost importance in our subject, and it is perhaps not too much to expect that more documents of this kind may be forthcoming. In the account-book we notice that after the 21st of May up to the 3rd of August there is an entire blank, and Dorne begins his account-book again “post recessum meum de ultra mare.” I think we should be safe in concluding that these months were spent abroad on business and in the purchase of books.

Sometimes such information is found amongst the waste leaves used to make boards for bindings. The University Librarian read a note before the Antiquarian Society here giving an account of a letter on business matters written from a foreign printer to John Siberch, the first printer in Cambridge, which was found among other waste matter used to make the boards of a binding now in Westminster Abbey Library, and letters of bookbinders have been found in the same way.

We have not, unfortunately, any book however meagre on this subject which might serve as a basis on which to build up information. Isolated facts turn up occasionally here or there, but there being no regular place for us to put them they drop out of sight again. And it is only when we have collected a number of these facts and begin to find the links that piece them together that we can arrive at any definite knowledge of the subject.

I do not suppose we may expect to find much new information from books themselves, but from manuscript sources a good deal may yet be discovered. Within the last year or two many documents relating to stationers and printers of the early sixteenth century have been found at the Record Office, and there must be many more still to be found there; besides, the documents in the Record Office are only a part of our great collections.

However, as I said before, what we most want is an account as full as possible of the booksellers and stationers up to 1535, giving us all the information that has yet been discovered, to serve as a groundwork for what may be found in the future.

LECTURE IV.

THE BOOKBINDERS.

From the very earliest times the bookbindings produced in England were remarkable for their beauty and richness. The finest were of gold, ornamented with gems, but their value has led to their destruction, and I do not think that there is any early binding of this class now in existence. Leather was very soon recognised as a suitable material for book-covers, being easily worked and capable of receiving a considerable amount of ornament. The earliest leather binding known is on a beautiful little manuscript of St John’s Gospel, taken from the tomb of St Cuthbert, and now preserved in the library of Stonyhurst College. It is of red leather, and the centre of the side is ornamented with a raised ornament of Celtic design, while above and below are small panels filled with interlaced lines, executed apparently with a pointed tool and coloured yellow. This binding is generally considered to be of the tenth century, though there are some reasons for thinking that it may have been executed later, but if this is so the present binding must have been copied from an earlier one.

Excellent as the early work had been, that of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is unsurpassed. The leather bindings executed at Durham for Bishop Pudsey between 1153 and 1195 are marvellous both for their detail and for their general effect. It was the custom of binders of this period to build up a bold and effective pattern covering the whole side of the book by means of a large number of dies, beautifully engraved with different designs. On the four volumes of Bishop Pudsey’s Bible, now in the Cathedral library at Durham, no less than fifty-one different dies are used, and when we remember that Bishop Pudsey was one of the great builders of the cathedral, it is not surprising that the ornamentation on the dies used in these bindings should resemble the carved work in the cathedral. There are in the Cathedral library seven of these early bindings, and, unfortunately, they have suffered a considerable amount of mutilation at a not very remote date, for visitors on payment of a small gratuity to the person who looked after the library were allowed to cut out with a penknife one of the stamps to keep as a curiosity. A few more Durham bindings, easily recognised by the dies, are scattered in different libraries in London and in France.

At Winchester, also, and London very beautiful work of the same class was produced, the circular form of decoration being very much made use of. Perhaps the finest piece of Winchester work now in existence is the binding of the _Winchester Domesday Book_ in the library of the Society of Antiquaries, of which a facsimile was published in the illustrated catalogue of the exhibition of bookbindings at the Burlington Fine Arts Club. Some very fine work, too, probably executed at Winchester, is to be found on some manuscripts in the library of the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier executed before 1146 for Henry, son of Louis VII of France.

The metal dies with which these bindings were stamped were practically indestructible, but it is curious to notice that they hardly ever appear to have been used after the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In Westminster Abbey library is a copy of the _Epistolae_ of Ficinus, printed in 1495, which has its covers ornamented with early Winchester stamps, and another binding worked with twelfth century dies is on a fifteenth century printed book in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

In all these early bindings one is especially struck with the extraordinary taste and balance in the decoration. The dies themselves are beautiful, and the pattern in which they are built up is also beautiful, and yet neither are unduly emphasised. In later bindings the die became smaller and less finely cut. It was not intended to be decorative in itself, but only to help to build up patterns, and the bindings in consequence lose much of their interest.

Oxford, I believe, is generally credited with clinging somewhat strongly to old traditions, and certainly its bookbinders did so in the fifteenth century. From the earliest times bookbinding had been considerably practised there and continued without a break, and no doubt that is why the old styles lingered for so long. The bindings produced there towards the end of the century form the connecting link between the old styles and the new. They represent the last survival of the early English school of work, that very distinctive English style which depended so much on the disposal of dies into large circles, or parallelograms one inside the other, such as we find in the Winchester and Durham bindings of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. That this circular work was not the haphazard freak of a single binder we can see from the fact that several of the dies are wider at the top than at the bottom, so that when placed together side by side they would naturally work round to a circular form, like the stones forming the arch of a bridge. These dies are in many cases foreign in design and may have been introduced by Rood, the first printer, but the style of binding is essentially English. Some bindings of a rather similar appearance, though never with any circular ornament, were produced in the Low Countries. On nearly all Oxford bindings will be found little groups of three small circles, so small that they might have been done with the end of a watch-key, and arranged in a triangle. This ornament I have never seen on any but Oxford work. One habit connects the Oxford binders with those of the Low Countries, and that is their habit of always, when possible, lining the boards of the binding with leaves of vellum rather than paper. All the other English binders used paper generally for this purpose. It is owing to this custom of using vellum that many copies of _Indulgences_ issued by the early printers have been preserved, for, as they were only printed on one side, the binder could paste them down with the printed side next the boards and the clean side outwards. An Oxford binding with an inscription stating that it was bound in “Catte Strete” in 1467 was formerly in the British Museum: the manuscript which it covered has been rebound and the old binding has disappeared.

Caxton, as one would naturally expect, followed the style of binding which he had become used to during his residence at Bruges, though it is interesting to notice that one at least of his dies was directly copied from early London work and applied in the same manner. His general method of covering the side of his binding was to make a large centre panel contained by a framework of dies or lines running about an inch from the edge of the side and intersecting each other at the corners as in the frame known as an Oxford frame. The large panel thus produced on the side was divided into lozenge-shaped compartments by diagonal lines running both ways from the frame, and in each of these compartments a die was stamped. The die most commonly found on his bindings is a square one with some fabulous winged monster engraved upon it, and this very die we find later in the hands of a stationer in London named Jacobi. The broad frame was often made up by repetitions of a triangular stamp, pointing alternately right and left, and containing the figure of a dragon. This stamp is interesting, not only because the use of a triangular stamp was very uncommon, but because it was an exact copy of one used by a London binder about the end of the twelfth century. Very few of Caxton’s own books in their original binding have come down to our time, but there is a copy of the second edition of the _Liber Festivalis_ in the British Museum which was clearly bound by him, and the _Boethius_ which was found in the Grammar School at St Alban’s was also in its original cover. The _Royal Book_ formerly in the Bedfordshire General Library, and now in the collection of Mr J. Pierpont Morgan, is in an absolutely similar binding to the _Liber Festivalis_ in the British Museum, ornamented with the same die, while the boards were lined with two waste copies of an _Indulgence_. Caxton’s bindings were invariably of leather; he never used vellum as many writers have stated. Blades, who was amongst the number, refers to a vellum-bound Caxton in the Bodleian, and states that it is the original binding; but had he examined the book more carefully he would have found that it was made up from two copies, and that the binding therefore could not well be original. Indeed the particular binding was put on in the seventeenth century while the book belonged to Selden. Selden’s bindings had good need to be flexible, for one of his customs did not tend to improve bindings. He used to buy his spectacles, like the youth in the _Vicar of Wakefield_, by the gross, and whenever he stopped reading a book he put in the pair he happened to be using to mark the place. It was quite a common thing, soon after his library came to the Bodleian, for spectacles to drop out of the books as they were taken incautiously from the shelves.

Of course the number of bindings which can with certainty be ascribed to Caxton is necessarily small, we can in the first place take only those on books printed by him, and which contain distinct evidence from the fragments used in the binding that they came from his workshop. By means of the stamps used on these we can identify others which have no other materials for identification. Caxton used sometimes wooden boards in his bindings and sometimes waste leaves of printed matter pasted together. These pads of old printing frequently yield most valuable prizes. The copy of Caxton’s _Boethius_, found by Blades in the library of the St Alban’s Grammar-school, had its boards made of printed matter, which, when carefully taken to pieces, were found to be made of fifty-six half-sheets of paper, forming portions of thirteen books printed by Caxton, three of which were quite unknown.

Caxton’s binding stamps passed with his printing material to his successor, Wynkyn de Worde. I found in a college library at Oxford a book with these stamps, evidently bound by De Worde, and the boards were lined with waste leaves of three books printed by him, one being unknown, and one by Caxton. De Worde’s bindings are the least easily identified of any in the fifteenth century, for beyond these few dies of Caxton’s there are none that can definitely be ascribed to him, and even the various bindings that might be ascribed to him from the fragments found in them vary so much in style and decoration that it seems impossible that they could have all come from one shop. Perhaps he had really no binding establishment of his own, but got such work as he required done by others.

Wynkyn de Worde, as we learn from his will, employed several binders. He left bequests to Alard, bookbinder, his servant, and to Nowel, the bookbinder in Shoe Lane. James Gaver, who was one of his executors, was one of the large family of Gavere, binders in the Low Countries, and though, when he took out letters of denization on his own account in 1535 he is described as a stationer, no doubt he was also a bookbinder. The square stamp with a dragon, which had belonged to Caxton and which must have passed to De Worde, found its way early in the sixteenth century with other dies of Caxton’s into the hands of another stationer, Henry Jacobi.

The bindings which were produced by Lettou and Machlinia, so far as we are able to identify them, are very plain. The sides are divided by diagonal lines into diamond-shaped compartments, and in each is stamped a small and uninteresting die. The Latin Bible in the library of Jesus College, Cambridge, which has every quire lined with slips of vellum, portions of two cut-up copies of Lettou’s _Indulgence_, and presumably bound by him, has its binding ornamented with diagonal lines within a frame formed of square dies containing the figure of a fabulous animal. In the diamond-shaped compartments formed by the diagonal lines is a small impressed cinquefoil. Another Lettou binding, on the copy of the _Wallensis_ printed by him in 1481 in the Bodleian, is ornamented simply with diagonal lines, but has no small stamps.

There is another English binder of this time whose name we do not know, who produced some very good work. Bradshaw, I think, considered that he worked at Norwich. There are a number of his books in Cambridge libraries, and he used very often a red-coloured leather, which is common in Cambridge bindings. His dies are Low Country in type, and very much resemble those used at Oxford, but his work can be recognised by two peculiarities. He always ruled two perpendicular lines down the backs of his books, and always ornamented the ends of the bands, the bands being those ridges on the back where the leather covers the string or cord on which the quires are stitched. Where these bands ended on the sides he printed a kind of ornament of leaves. He also, like the Oxford binders, almost always lined his boards with vellum. His dies, about eighteen in number, are well engraved, one in especial representing two cocks fighting, being very finely executed.

Pynson’s earliest bindings are as a rule very plain. Like the other binders of the time he ruled diagonal lines across the sides of his books, and put a small die in each division. Sometimes he did not even use a die, but contented himself with plain lines, as, for instance, on the copy of his first dated book of 1492 in the British Museum. His bindings, like Machlinia’s, are very plain, and the dies used are small and poor.

Another binder, perhaps at St Alban’s, produced bindings not unlike Pynson’s, but he is identified by a small circular die which he used, which has on it the figure of a bird.

Another binder whose initials were W. G., but whose name we do not know, produced a large number of bindings in the fifteenth century. It is from his bindings that all the fragments of Machlinia’s _Horae ad usum Sarum_ have been recovered, for he seems to have used up a copy for lining his boards, and luckily several books bound about that time have been preserved. Bradshaw found a curious case of the preservation of two volumes bound in the same workshop about the same time. In the library of St John’s College, Cambridge, is a copy of a book printed at Nuremberg in 1505, which has in its cover some leaves of early Oxford printing. In the library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is an exactly similar binding on a book printed at Lyons in 1511, which also contains some early Oxford leaves. Now it is clear that the same man must have bound these books about the same time, because we find in both, along with the refuse Oxford leaves, some leaves from one and the same vellum manuscript.

There is one English binder, who worked before the end of the fifteenth century, who is distinctly worthy of special mention on account of the striking originality of his method of decoration and designs. His name, unfortunately, we do not know, but as one of his most frequently used dies represents a balance or pair of scales it has been conjectured that this may be a rebus on his name, such as many binders used, and that he was called “Scales.” Two volumes executed by this binder are known, which were done for a certain William Langton, and the centre panel is ornamented with a rebus on the name Langton, the letters Lang over a barrel or tun, while the rest of the side is filled up with little stamps. This Langton may perhaps be identified with the William Langton who was a prebendary of Lincoln and afterwards of York at the end of the fifteenth century. Another even more curious binding by this same man is in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He has disposed his dies so as to form a large heraldic shield, covering the whole side of a folio volume, a style of adornment quite unique so far as I am aware, and as an ornament extremely effective, though I am afraid the heraldry is hardly sufficiently accurate to enable us to determine for whom the volume was bound.

The bindings that I have spoken of so far were all produced in a slow and laborious manner, as each die had to be impressed separately. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, however, when the printers in England began to issue books of a small size, a new system of binding was introduced, by which the labour of the binder was very considerably lessened, while the amount of decoration applied was increased.

The invention and use of the panel stamp, that is of a large stamp which should ornament the side of the book with one picture, was a great step forward. It was a great advantage commercially as it saved much time, and in some ways it was an advance artistically. By its means the whole side of the book was ornamented at once, instead of by a series of dies impressed one after the other. And as the working out of a binding had ceased to be its main point and the beauty of the die itself was more emphasised, this invention did away with the building up of a pattern altogether, and depended entirely on the excellence in design and workmanship of the stamp. Mr Weale assigns the date 1367 to the earliest panel stamp known to him, produced by a certain Lambertus de Insula at Louvain, but this is only because the manuscript on which it occurs bears that date. Without some further evidence I should be inclined to think this date rather too early, and would not date any panel stamp before the fifteenth century.

There is no doubt that the binders of the Low Countries were the earliest to introduce this style of binding, and they produced very excellent work; and the earliest panel stamps we find in use in England are Netherlandish in execution, either used in this country by foreign workmen, who had come over and settled, or obtained by native binders from abroad. The earliest stamps were no doubt for the most part of metal, and therefore practically indestructible, and we know that they often passed out of the hands of their proper owner and were used by other binders, even though the name of their original owner was engraved upon them. As an example I may mention a book-cover in the Douce collection in the Bodleian, on which two stamps are impressed side by side. One has the name John Guilibert, the other the inscription, “Omnes sancti angeli et archangeli dei, orate pro nobis. Ioris de Gavere me ligavit in Gandavo.” A still more marvellous example, and one almost certainly bound in England, is in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. It has on the two covers, besides innumerable dies, no less than nine panels, two signed Woter Vanduffle, three signed Martinus de Predio, and four signed Jacobus, illuminator. The binding almost looks like a sample put out to show a specimen of every stamp and die in the establishment. The Woter Vanduffle stamp seems very early. I have in my own collection an English heraldic manuscript of about the middle of the fifteenth century or slightly earlier in its original binding impressed with the two panels of that binder.

In these earliest panels the inscription nearly always runs perpendicularly, either in the centre of the panel, cutting it in two, or at the side of the picture. One peculiarly distinctive feature of the earliest panels is the presence of four indentations, more or less deep and clearly defined at each corner. These were made most probably by the heads of the nails by which the metal plate was affixed to a block before used for stamping. These four marks never seem to occur in later panels, which, if they have any, have only two, considerably larger in size, one at the top and one at the bottom. It has long been a vexed question as to whether these stamps were made of metal or of wood, but it is probable that both materials were used, and that the majority of English stamps were of wood. As no heat was applied and the leather treated when it was damp and soft, a wooden stamp would be sufficiently strong, and I have found by experiment that soft leather takes an excellent impression from a wooden block. I have, however, in my own collection a binding struck from a broken plate, and the appearance of the break shows clearly that the stamp must have been of metal.

The earliest definitely English panel stamp is on a loose binding in Westminster Abbey library. It has on it the arms of Edward IV, with two small supporting angels. The rest of the binding is covered with small dies, one in the shape of a heart, the other a _fleur de lys_. It is a great pity that the book which was in this binding has been lost, as it might have contained some clue to information about the binding.

Wynkyn de Worde, in spite of his enormous business, does not seem to have ever used a panel with his name or device, at least so far not one has been found, but with other printers and stationers the case is different. Pynson used two panels. One is a copy of one of his devices, having his initials on a shield with the helmet and crest above, while around all is a floral border. The other has in the centre a large Tudor rose, surrounded by intertwined branches of vine leaves and grapes. This latter panel was a popular one, and several variations of it are to be found, all of which are probably of the fifteenth century.

The only copy at present known of the Pynson panel with his mark was acquired not long ago by the British Museum. I had known of the existence of the copy for some time, as it had belonged to a Manchester bookseller who had described it to me. He had sold the book, but had no record of the purchaser, and knew nothing of him further than that he lived in London. One day while I was working in the Museum a visitor came in with this identical book and offered it for sale. The book itself was a copy of the _Abridgement of the Statutes of_ 1499. Herbert, in his _Typographical Antiquities_, describes a copy of the _Imitation of Christ_, printed by Pynson, which was in a similar binding, and perhaps that may still be in existence; but I am sorry to say that the collectors at the beginning of the present century ruthlessly destroyed all old bindings, and would not have anything on their shelves except bound in morocco or russia by Roger Payne or Charles Lewis. There is not one single old leather binding in the whole of the Spencer library, though we know that many of the books when bought were in their original covers.

[Illustration: BINDING OF FREDERICK EGMONT.]

Frederick Egmont, the stationer about whom I spoke in my last lecture, had several panels. The first has as its central ornament the Tudor rose, and round it are vine leaves and grapes. Round the whole is an arabesque floral border containing the initials and mark of Egmont. This design was common at the time, there being several other panels almost identical, one of which was used by Pynson. Another more important panel is an almost exact copy of the device of Philippe Pigouchet, the Paris printer. A wild man and woman, standing on either side of a tree covered with some kind of fruit, bear in one hand flowering boughs while with the other they assist in supporting a shield suspended by a belt from the branches above them. Upon the shield are Egmont’s mark and initials. The device of the wild man and woman was for some reason very popular at this time and for a short period afterwards. It was used by Bumgart at Cologne, and at Edinburgh by Walter Chepman and Thomas Davidson. It was used by Pigouchet and other Parisian printers, and by Peter Treveris, who printed in Southwark at the sign of the “Wodows,” and the references to it in colophons are very numerous. This panel of Egmont’s not only bears his mark and initials, but is inscribed on the lower margin, “Fredericus Egmondt me f[ecit].” Three copies only of this binding are known, a very fine copy at Caius, a poor copy at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and one in my own collection. Books which are stamped on the front with this panel generally have on the back a plainer panel containing three rows of arabesques of foliage surrounded by a border, having ribbons in the upper and lower portion inscribed with the names of the four Evangelists. This panel not infrequently occurs alone, without Egmont’s signed panel, and may have been left by him in England when he returned to France.

Nicholas Lecomte, the other foreign stationer settled in England in the fifteenth century, and of whom I spoke in my last lecture, also used panels with his initials and mark. He had not a pictorial panel, but a formal one of rather Low Country type. The centre of the panel is divided into two parts, each containing four spirals of foliage encircling the figures of beasts and birds, while around all is a border of grapes and vine leaves. At the bottom of the border are the initials N.C., with a mark which almost exactly corresponds with the initials and mark found in his device in the books printed for him. A very fine specimen of this binding is in the University Library.

The majority of the early panels are pictorial, and in some cases they are very elaborate and ornamental. The pair used by a binder whose initials were A. R. are especially fine. On one side is the salutation of Elisabeth with the Almighty and the Holy Ghost above, in the top corners are the Tudor emblems, the rose and portcullis. Round the whole is a diaper border with a shield in each corner, one the arms of St George, another of the City of London, a third with two cross swords, and a fourth with two cross keys. The panel on the other side has in the centre St John standing preaching to some people who sit in the foreground. On the left is St James, on the right King David, while the lower part is taken up with a picture of David and Bathsheba. This binding is very rare, and I know of only two examples, one in my own collection and one in the University Library. This binder had several other panels; there is one in the University Library with a figure of St Roche, and there are two on a book at Aberdeen with the Baptism of Christ, and the Annunciation.

It is curious that the subjects of these panels should have been invariably religious, scenes from the Bible or pictures of saints, and that we never find subjects from popular stories. The most frequent subject of all was, I think, the Annunciation, and then single figures of saints, St Barbara being one of the most popular. The binder very often used a panel with a figure of the saint after whom he was named. Nicolas Spering, who worked at Cambridge, has a panel with the picture of St Nicholas restoring to life the three children who had been killed and pickled by the innkeeper. Another binding which is probably English, though it might be French, has on one side St Barbara with her palm branch and three-windowed tower, and on the other the Mass of St Gregory. In the border there occurs a delightful little figure of a mermaid with a comb in one hand and a looking-glass in the other.

About 1500 a particular pair of panels came into great vogue amongst the bookbinders. One had upon it the arms of England, supported by the dragon and greyhound, the other the Tudor rose supported by angels. Round the rose runs a ribbon with the motto:--

Haec rosa virtutis de celo missa sereno Eternum florens regia sceptra feret.

In the top corners we generally find shields with the arms of St George and of London, while in the base below the rose or shield occur the initials and marks of the binders. This general use of the royal arms together with the use of the arms of London points, I think, to some trade guild to which these binders belonged. Foreigners, though they might still use the royal arms, do not use the City arms, putting something else in the place, sometimes the French shield, sometimes merely an unmeaning ornament. It is a very popular but erroneous opinion held by a great many people that these bindings with the royal arms were produced for the king, Henry VII or Henry VIII as the case may be. It would be just as reasonable to imagine that all the shops with the royal arms over the door were private residences of the king. Of course, the fiction is kept up in order to increase the price of the books; “from the library of Henry VIII” looks well in catalogues. Even in the sumptuous work recently issued on the historic bookbindings in the Royal Library at Windsor this mistake has been repeated.

A very large number of these bindings exist, all very similar; but unfortunately, although in many cases they bear the binder’s initials and mark, we cannot discover his name; on the other hand again we know the names of many binders, but we cannot identify their work; the mere fact that the initials on a binding agree with the initials of a binder’s name does not of necessity determine that the particular binding was produced by that binder; a good deal more proof is necessary.

A certain number of these bindings have been settled as the work of a certain man in another way. When the binder was a printer, or a stationer of sufficient importance to have books printed for him, then we can identify the mark on his bindings by means of the mark used in the books.

For instance, to take an early example. We have bindings by Julian Notary, the printer, which bear his initials and mark, and the mark, of course, is the same as the one he uses in his books, while in them his name is in full. So again the work of Henry Jacobi, an important London stationer of the early sixteenth century, was traced by the mark which he uses in some of his books.

We know the names of a considerable number of early binders from the registers of the grant of letters of denization and other manuscript sources, but unfortunately we have no link between them and the bindings. In this country it was not necessary, as it was in some parts of the Low Countries, to register the design of a binding, and though many of the Low Country bindings look the same, you will find on examination that the detail varies and each design was protected.

The binder who is best known in connexion with these stamped bindings is John Reynes, whose work is by far the most commonly met with, and who is almost the only producer of stamped bindings mentioned by any early bibliographer. His best-known panel is called “Redemptoris mundi arma,” and consists of all the emblems of the Passion arranged in a heraldic manner upon a shield. Reynes was certainly employed as a binder by Henry VIII, as we know from early accounts, and so far as I have seen all the copies of the king’s _Assertio septem sacramentorum_, which remain in their original binding, were bound by him. It is fortunate that Reynes put his mark and name in one printed book, otherwise we should not have been able to identify him as the binder. He had also two very well-executed panels, one depicting the fight of St George and the dragon, and the other the Baptism of Christ.

The period during which these panel stamps were produced in England was roughly the forty years from 1493 to 1534. The passing of the Act against foreign workmen in the latter year had no doubt a good deal to do with the falling off of the work, but the invention of a binding tool called a roll seems to have finally put an end to the use of the panel. The roll was a tool made in the form of a wheel, which saved a very great deal of time in ornamenting the sides of a book, and which was used very widely in England during the sixteenth century. At first when the roll was broad and well cut, as the earliest examples almost always were, it produced a very satisfactory appearance, but it soon became narrower and more finely cut, and therefore showing to much less advantage on the side of a large book, and finally about the end of the century its use was almost entirely given up.

Almost the earliest and the finest of the roll bindings were those produced by the Cambridge stationers. Nicholas Spering beside his panel had several fine rolls which contain his initials and mark.

Naturally the foreign booksellers who sent books over to England found it to their advantage to put them into popular bindings, such as would attract purchasers, and many of these bindings have a distinctly English character. The exploits of St George and St Michael are favourite subjects, and are often treated in a most decorative manner. There is one specially fine example dating from about 1500, and probably Rouen work, which has St George on one side and St Michael on the other. The binder has not put his initials, but his device, which occurs on one side, is a head on a crowned shield. It is worth noticing that the material of which these foreign bindings are made is often sheepskin rather than calf, which is nearly always used in English work. One binder, whose initials were A. H. and who used the Tudor rose, though without the arms of London, produced very good work, but almost always on this sheepskin, which was not a suitable leather for giving a clear impression.

It is very interesting to watch how in the later panel bindings the lettering gradually deteriorated and became simply part of the ornament. I have three panels, all copied one from the other, and in the first the legend running round the panel is quite clear and correct. In the second the letters are confused, though the general appearance of each separate word is preserved and they can be read. In the last example letters and words are all run together, and the general result is wholly unreadable.

So, too, the old style of work with the pictures of saints or Biblical scenes was given up about 1530 for bad Renaissance patterns of pillars and classical heads, which are so uninteresting, not to say ugly, that we can hardly regret the speedy disuse of the panel stamp.

Now it must always be remembered that in England at any rate very few of these early bindings are signed, and that therefore to assign particular bindings to particular men is not often possible, but comparison may enable us to attribute them to particular districts, and even to particular places. What is wanted is that every small point about these bindings should be studied carefully and compared in different examples, because it is mainly by circumstantial evidence that we can arrive at any knowledge about them. We must class our bindings by a system similar to that lately adopted for identifying criminals. The presence or absence of one particular point merely divides a number of bindings into two divisions. This point, taken in conjunction with a second point, narrows the field immensely, and we can soon put the bindings into groups more or less accurately.

Anyone who works at all amongst old bindings will soon begin to note points which are common to certain bindings, and which most probably mean a certain thing. For instance, anyone working at the subject would soon perceive that as a rule octavo or quarto books in an English binding have three bands to the back, that is three projecting ridges on which the leaves are stitched, while foreign bindings have four or more. Of course this is not an absolute rule but it will be found correct in nine cases out of ten. To take another local instance. A very great number of early Cambridge bindings, and some that may have been produced at places not far distant, are remarkable for the curious red colour of the leather used. The binding has the appearance of having been painted over with red, and then the red almost all rubbed off again. This is probably caused by some peculiarity in the process of tanning or dressing. Whenever I see this curious red colour I promptly put down the binding as a Cambridge one, and a more careful examination generally proves it to be correct.

If the boards of the binding have a groove running down the edge you may be fairly certain that the book inside is printed in Greek. If a binding has four clasps, one at the top and bottom as well as two in their usual place, you may be sure that the binding is Italian. Most of these old bindings had clasps or ties of ribbon to keep them shut, but in nearly all cases these have disappeared, and the reason is this. In the early times books were always put on the shelves back first and with the fore edge to the front, on which was written the title of the book. Naturally, when readers wanted to take down a book they pulled at it by the clasp or ribbon till that came off, just as now-a-days when books are placed backs outwards the ordinary reader pulls them out by the top of the back, till that comes off. In many cases the ribbons were of alternate colours, a white opposite a green and a green opposite a white. Of course as soon as books were put in the shelves with the backs outwards the use of ribbons was discontinued, for it was awkward to push into its place a book with two large bows of ribbon in front. The use of ribbons you will notice has been lately revived by some faddists who have no sense of the fitness of things.

These bindings that we have been considering were of course what we should call trade bindings or publishers’ bindings. Very few people seem to have had books especially bound for them, and those kind of bindings had generally gilded ornaments upon them, which are not found on early stamped work. The custom of impressing coats of arms on books did not begin until about 1535, when it was started by some Scottish collectors, the earliest known armorial stamp having been used by William Stewart, Bishop of Aberdeen.

The books specially bound for Henry VIII were ornamented in what was called the Venetian manner, that is with tools obtained perhaps from Venice, but clearly cut in imitation of those used by Aldus for his bindings; the binder of these books was the well-known stationer, Thomas Berthelet.

While these bindings and their designs afford valuable bibliographical information, the materials employed in making the bindings are also often of great importance. The boards were often made of refuse printed leaves pasted together, and were always lined, after the binding was completed, with leaves of paper or vellum, printed or manuscript. To show you how important these fragments may be, I may mention that of the books printed in England or for England in the fifteenth century no less than fifty-three are known only from fragments obtained from bindings. The great find of Caxton fragments made by Blades at St Alban’s I have mentioned before. Not long ago I took to pieces the boards of a primer of Edward VI and obtained the title and some other leaves of Constable’s _Epigrams_, printed by Pynson in 1520, and of which but one perfect copy is known, four leaves of a Whitinton’s _Grammar_ printed by W. de Worde, eight leaves of an early _Abridgement of the Statutes_, probably printed by Middleton, a perfect copy of an unknown edition of the _Ordynaunce made in the time of ye reygne of kynge Henry VI to be observed in the Kynge’s Eschequier by the offycers_ _and clerkes of the same for takyng of fees of ye kynges accomptis in the same courts_, printed by Middleton, and last an unknown broadside ballad relating to the burning of Robert Barnes in 1540, printed for Richard Bankes by that little-known printer, John Redman, who put his name only to one or at the most two known books.

From a binding in Westminster Abbey some years ago came two leaves of an unknown early Cambridge book, Lily’s _De octo orationis partium constructione_, edited by Erasmus, and lately at Oxford Mr Proctor found in a binding in New College some fragments of a _Donatus Melior_ on vellum, printed by Caxton, a hitherto unknown book. As Bradshaw said over twenty years ago: “It cannot be any matter of wonder that the fragments used for lining the boards of old books should have an interest for those who make a study of the methods and habits of our early printers with a view to the solution of some of many difficulties still remaining unsettled in the history of printing. I have for many years tried to draw the attention of librarians and others to the evidence which may be gleaned from a careful study of these fragments; and if done systematically and intelligently it ceases to be mere antiquarian pottering or aimless waste of time.”

Of course the majority of fragments found in bindings are of no value, and should not be moved; indeed, fragments should never be taken out of bindings unless it is absolutely necessary, for by doing so the binding is almost certain to suffer some injury.

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To study effectively the early English book a certain knowledge about these early bindings is required, for the printer, as we have seen, was probably his own binder. What I said about the stationers applies also to the binders, their history is an almost unworked subject, new details are found from time to time, but we have no work on the subject to which we can add them, and our knowledge at present consists mostly of isolated facts. Bradshaw, writing twenty years ago, spoke of the subject as still in its infancy, and I am afraid that English bibliographers cannot boast of much progress. This is not, perhaps, to be much wondered at when we consider how few are willing to work on in the steady, quiet way which he practised and taught. We can do no better than follow in the path that he pointed out, add fact to fact, and detail to detail, avoiding vain theories and idle speculations, so that whatever advance we make in our knowledge of the subject, whether it be much or little, it may at any rate be accurate, and serve as a secure foundation for the work of the future.