Part 12 (2/2)

On the accession of Edward VI Berthelet ceased to be Royal Printer, the post being given to Grafton. Berthelet died in September, 1555, leaving considerable property. He was buried as an Esquire with pennon and coat armour and four dozen scutcheons, and all the craft of printers, stationers, and booksellers followed him to his grave.

Richard Grafton, who succeeded Berthelet as Royal Printer, had a very chequered career. He was originally a member of the Grocers' Company, and, in conjunction with Edward Whitchurch and Anthony Marler of the Haberdashers' Company, superintended the printing of the English Bible of 1537, probably at Antwerp, and that of 1539 by Francois Regnault at Paris. When Bible-printing was permitted in England Grafton and Whitchurch shared between them the printing of the six editions of the Great Bible during 1540 and 1541. But when Cromwell, Earl of Ess.e.x, the chief promoter of Bible-printing, was beheaded, Grafton was himself imprisoned. In 1544, on the other hand, he and Whitchurch obtained an exclusive patent for printing Primers, and before Henry VIII's death Grafton was appointed printer to the Prince of Wales. Thus when Edward became king Grafton displaced Berthelet as Royal Printer, and henceforth had time for little save official work. Five editions of the Homilies and seven of Injunctions, all dated 31 July, 1547, were issued from his presses; in 1548 he published Halle's _Union of Lancaster and York_ and several editions of the Order of Communion and Statutes; in 1549 came two Bibles and five editions of the first Prayer Book of Edward VI; in 1550 a reprint of Halle and an edition of Marbeck's Book of Common Prayer noted; in 1551 Wilson's _Rule of Reason_; in 1552 six editions of the second Prayer Book of Edward VI, and more Statutes.

Proclamation-work, of course, went on steadily throughout the reign, and on Edward's death Grafton printed the enormously long doc.u.ment by which the adherents of Lady Jane Grey tried to justify her claim to the Crown.

He did his work very handsomely, but on the triumph of Mary, though he impartially printed a proclamation for her nine days after ”Queen Jane's,” he naturally lost his post and might easily have lost his head also. For the rest of his life he was mainly occupied in writing his chronicle. But he printed a Book of Common Prayer in 1559, and (according to Herbert) a Bible in 1566. He died in 1573.

While Grafton was the King's printer for English books, the post of Royal Printer in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew had been conferred in 1547 on Reginald or Reyner Wolfe. Wolfe, who had come to England from Gelderland, was at first a bookseller, and was employed by various distinguished persons as a letter-carrier between England and Germany.

When he set up as a printer in 1542, with type which he seems to have obtained from a relative at Frankfort, he was employed by the great antiquary, John Leland, and by John Cheke, Professor of Greek at Cambridge, for whom he printed in 1543 two Homilies of S. Chrysostom in Greek and Latin, this being the first Greek work printed in England.

During Edward VI's reign he does not seem to have been given much to do in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, but printed Cranmer's _Defence of the Sacrament_ and _Answer unto a Crafty Cavillation_. After keeping quiet during Mary's reign he enjoyed the patronage of Elizabeth and Archbishop Parker, and lived, like Grafton, till 1573.

Though he never worked on a large scale, Wolfe certainly raised the standard of printing in England. In John Day it is pleasant to come to a native Englishman who did equally good work, and that in a larger way of business. Day was a Suffolk man, born in 1522 at Dunwich, a town over which the sea now rolls. He began printing in partners.h.i.+p with William Seres as early as 1546, but, save some fairly good editions of the Bible, produced nothing of importance during this period. His first fine book, published in 1559, is _The Cosmographicall Gla.s.se_, a work on surveying, by William Cunningham. This has a woodcut allegorical border to the t.i.tlepage, a fine portrait of Cunningham, a map of Norwich, and some good heraldic and pictorial capitals. Its text is printed throughout in large italics. The book thus broke away entirely from the old black-letter traditions of English printing, and could compare favourably with the best foreign work. Day printed other folios in this style, and in some of them instead of a device placed a large and striking portrait of himself. In 1563 he printed the first edition of _Acts and Monumentes of these latter and perillous days touching matters of the Church_, better known as _Foxe's Book of Martyrs_. This is a book of over two thousand pages, and is plentifully ill.u.s.trated with woodcuts of varying degrees of merit. Day by this time had attracted the patronage of Archbishop Parker, and in 1566 printed for him a book called _A Testimony of Antiquitie, showing the auncient fayth of the Church of England touching the sacrament of the body and bloude of the Lord here publikely preached and also receaved in the Saxons tyme, above 600 yeares agoe_. For this sermon, attributed to Archbishop Aelfric, some Anglo-Saxon type, the first used in England, was specially cut.

Later on Day printed at Lambeth Palace Parker's _De Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae_. He also printed Ascham's _Scholemaster_ and other important works. He appears, moreover, to have possessed a bookbinding business, or at least to have had binders in his employment who invented a very striking and dignified style of binding. Altogether, Day is a man of whom English bookmen may well be proud. He died in 1584.

Richard Tottell was another printer of some importance. The son of an Exeter man, he began printing about 1553, and early in his career received a patent which gave him a monopoly of the publication of law books. These, to do him justice, he printed very well, and he also published a number of works of literary interest. Chief among these, and always a.s.sociated with his name, is the famous _Songs and Sonnets_ of Wyatt and Surrey and other Tudor poets, edited by Nicholas Grimald, but often quoted, for no very good reason, as _Tottell's Miscellany_. To his credit must also be placed editions of Lydgate's _Falles of Princes_, Hawes's _Pastime of Pleasure_, Tusser's _Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry_, the works of Sir Thomas More in 1458 folio pages, Gerard Legh's _Accedens of Armoury_, numerous editions of Guevara's _Diall of Princes_, as translated by Sir Thomas North, and a version of Cicero's _De Officiis_, by Nicholas Grimald. In 1573 Tottell pet.i.tioned unsuccessfully for a monopoly of paper-making in England for thirty years, in order to encourage him to start a paper-mill. He lived till 1593.

Henry Denham (1564-89), Henry Bynneman (1566-83), and Thomas Vautrollier (1566-88), and the latter's successor, Richard Field, were the best printers of the rest of the century. Denham was an old apprentice of Tottell's, who gave him some important books to print for him. Herbert remarks of him: ”He was an exceeding neat printer, and the first who used the semicolon with propriety.” Among his more notable books were Grafton's _Chronicle_ (for Tottell and Toy, 1569), editions of the Olynthiac orations of Demosthenes in English (1570) and Latin (1571), _An Alvearie or quadruple dictionarie containing foure sundrie tongues, namelie, English, Latine, Greeke, and French_, with a pleasing t.i.tlepage showing the royal arms and a beehive (1580), Thomas Bentley's _The Monument of Matrons: containing seuen seuerall Lamps of Virginitie_, a work in praise of piety and Queen Elizabeth (1582), Hunnis's _Seuen Sobs of a Sorrowfull Soule for Sinne_, a metrical version of the penitential psalms (1585), and the second edition of Holinshed's _Chronicles_ (1587).

Henry Bynneman, though not so high in Archbishop Parker's favour as John Day, was yet recommended by him to Burghley in 1569, and deserved his patronage by much good work. He printed an English version of Epictetus, Dr. Caius's _De Antiquitate Cantabrigiensis Academiae_ (1568), a handsome book with the text in italics, according to the fas.h.i.+on of the day, Van der Noodt's _Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings_ (1569), a Latin text of Virgil believed to be the first printed in England (1570), the _Historia Brevis_ of Thomas Walsingham (1574), a handsome folio, several books by Gascoigne and Turberville, the first edition of Holinshed's _Chronicles_ (1577, published by John Harrison), and a few books in Greek.

Thomas Vautrollier, a French refugee, set up a press at Blackfriars, at which he printed several editions of the Prayer Book in Latin (_Liber Prec.u.m Publicarum in Ecclesia Anglicana_), and of the New Testament in Beza's Latin version, for which latter he was granted a ten years'

privilege in 1574. In 1579 he printed two very notable works, Fenton's translation of the History of Guicciardini and Sir Thomas North's _Plutarch_, the latter being one of the handsomest of Elizabethan books.

In 1580 and again in 1584 he went to Edinburgh, printing several books there in 1584 and 1585. His second visit is said to have been due to trouble which came upon him for printing the _s.p.a.ccio della Bestia Triomphante_ of Giordano Bruno. His press at Blackfriars continued to work during his absence. His daughter Jakin married Richard Field, who succeeded to his house and business in 1588, and continued his excellent traditions.

A company of stationers had existed in London since 1403, and in 1557 this was reconst.i.tuted and granted a Royal Charter. The object of the Crown was to secure greater control over printing, so that no inconvenient criticisms on matters of Church or State might be allowed to appear. The object of the leading printers and booksellers, who formed the court of the company, was to diminish compet.i.tion, both illegitimate and legitimate. Both objects were to a very considerable degree attained. The quarter of a century which followed the grant of a charter witnessed a great improvement in the English standard of book production. Up to this time it seems probable that few English printers, who had not the royal patronage, had found their craft profitable.

Caxton no doubt did very well for himself--as he richly deserved. He enjoyed the favour of successive kings, and received good support from other quarters. We may guess, moreover, that both as translator and publisher he kept his finger on the pulse of well-to-do book-buyers to an extent to which there is no parallel for the next two centuries. No one else in England possessed this skill, and certainly no one else enjoyed Caxton's success. The Act of Richard III permitting unrestricted importation of books quickly killed the presses at Oxford and St.

Albans, which could not compete with the publications of the learned printers of Italy, France, and Switzerland. Until more than half-way through the reign of Elizabeth the united output of books from Oxford and Cambridge amounted to less than a couple of score. For more than twenty years after Caxton's death there was no undoubted Englishman as a master printer. Mr. Gordon Duff has lately published[53] the a.s.sessments of some of the chief stationers and printers from the Lay Subsidy Rolls of 1523-4. By far the highest of them is the 307 at which was a.s.sessed John Taverner, a stationer who is only otherwise known as having bound some books for the Royal Chapel, and who was wise enough not to meddle with printing. Wynkyn de Worde, most commercial of printers, was a.s.sessed at 201 11s. 1d.; a practically unknown stationer named Neale at 100; Pynson, who was Royal Printer and did really good work, at 60; three other stationers, one of whom printed (Henry Pepwell), at 40 apiece; Julyan Notary at 36 6s. 8d.; other printers at 10 (Robert Redman), 6 13s. 4d. (John Rastell), and 4 (Robert Wyer). It is tolerably clear that there was absolutely no inducement to an English stationer to take up printing. In 1534 Henry VIII repealed the Act of 1484, on the plea that native printing was now so good that there was less need to import books from abroad, the King's real reason, no doubt, being to make it easier to check the importation of heretical works. Mr.

Duff has written of the King's action:

”The fifty years of freedom from 1484 to 1534 not only brought us the finest specimens of printing we possess, but compelled the native workman in self-protection to learn, and when compet.i.tion was done away with his ambition rapidly died also. Once our English printing was protected, it sank to a level of badness which has lasted, with the exception of a few brilliant experiments, almost down to our own day.”[54]

As a rule, whatever Mr. Duff writes about English printing is incontrovertible, but this particular p.r.o.nouncement seems curiously unfounded. Whether we consider what they printed or how they printed it, the work of the English presses from 1535-57 is better, not worse, than the work of the corresponding period, 1512-34. There is nothing in the earlier period to compare with the Great Bibles, and the books of Berthelet and Reyner Wolfe are fairly equal to those of Pynson. If we take 1557 as a fresh point of departure, the books issued from then to about 1580 present a still more remarkable advance. While the work of the rest of Europe deteriorated, that of England, in the hands of such men as Day, Denham, and Bynneman, improved, and alike for their typography, their ill.u.s.trations and decorations and their scholars.h.i.+p, they surpa.s.s those of any previous period since the days of Caxton, and deserve far more attention from collectors than they have yet received.

FOOTNOTES:

[46] For English provincial printing after 1500 see Chapter XIII.

[47] A fourth treatise, that on Fis.h.i.+ng with an Angle, is often included in the attribution with even less reason. This was first printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1496, with the following curious explanation of its being tacked on to the _Book of St. Albans_: ”And for by cause this present treatyse sholde not come to the hondys of eche ydle persone whyche wolde desire it yf it were enprynted allone by it self & put in a lytyll paunflet, therfore I haue compyled it in a greter volume of dyuerse bokys concernynge to gentyll & n.o.ble men, to the entent that the forsayd ydle persones whyche sholde haue but lytyll mesure in the sayd dysporte of fyshynge sholde not by this meane utterly destroye it.”

[48] Two points may be noted about Rood: (i) he does not put his name in his earliest books, and as there is a change of type in his signed work, it is possible, though unlikely, that the books in type 1 are from another press; (ii) he is not to be identified, as was once proposed, with a certain Theodoricus of Cologne, lately proved by Dr.

Voullieme to be Theodoricus Molner, a stepson of ther h.o.e.rnen.

[49] The place-name here is an early misreading for ”Eynsham.”

[50] This statement should perhaps be modified to admit of the possibility that Julian Notary was English rather than French, as is generally a.s.sumed.

[51] This and the _Dives and Pauper_ of 1493 (which, until the discovery of the _Doctrinale_, was reckoned Pynson's first dated book) and several other of his earliest editions were published partly at the expense of a merchant named John Rushe, who took six hundred copies of the _Dives_ and the _Boccaccio_ at 4s. apiece. See _Two Lawsuits of Richard Pynson_, by H. R. Plomer, in _The Library_, second series, Vol. X.

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