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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The English
provincial printers, stationers and bookbinders
to 1557
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
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Title: The English provincial printers, stationers and bookbinders to

1557

Author: E. Gordon Duff

Release date: April 29, 2024 [eBook #73493]

Language: English

Original publication: Cambridge: University Press, 1912

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

ENGLISH PROVINCIAL PRINTERS, STATIONERS AND
BOOKBINDERS TO 1557 ***
The Sandars Lectures
1911
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
London: FETTER LANE, E.C.

C. F. CLAY, Manager

Edinburgh: 100 PRINCES STREET

Berlin: A. ASHER AND CO.
Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS
New York: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.

All rights reserved

The English Provincial
Printers, Stationers and
Bookbinders to 1557
by

E. GORDON DUFF, M.A. Oxon.

Sometime Sandars Reader in Bibliography
in the University of Cambridge

Cambridge
at the University Press
1912
 TO

MY FRIEND

ALFRED WILLIAM POLLARD

 PREFACE

T HE work of the provincial printers, stationers and bookbinders

forms a subject of the greatest interest, and one which has
hitherto hardly received adequate attention.
The presses of the two University towns, Oxford and Cambridge,
have been very fully treated, and, in a lesser degree, those of St
Alban’s and York, but with these exceptions the remaining towns
have been curiously neglected, and our knowledge concerning such
important printing centres as Ipswich, Worcester and Canterbury
seems to have advanced but little since Herbert issued the third
volume of his Typographical Antiquities over a hundred and twenty
years ago. The period during which these three cities possessed
printing presses was an eventful one in England owing to religious
and political troubles, and it is probable that among the many
anonymous and secretly printed books issued at that time, a certain
number were produced in the provincial towns.
There is still much to be learned about these provincial presses. The
careers of the printers, their types, their woodcuts, their ornaments
have still to be traced, and a number of books which have
disappeared within recent years remain to be rediscovered.
For the benefit of anyone desiring to follow up the subject more fully
two appendices have been added to the present book. The first
contains a title list of all the provincial books issued during the
period, with an indication of the libraries where they are preserved;
the second, a list of bibliographical works and articles, general and
particular, dealing with the provincial press.
My thanks are due for permission to have facsimiles made from
books in their charge to the Warden and Fellows of New College,
Oxford, the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge,
and to the authorities of the British Museum and the Cambridge
University Library.

E. G. D.
October 1911.
 LIST OF PLATES
1. Title-page of the Antonius Sirectus, printed to face p.
for H. Jacobi 26
From the unique copy in the Library of New College,
Oxford.
2. Colophon and Devices from Whitinton’s
Grammar,
Printed at York by Ursyn Mylner in to face p.
1516 57
From the unique copy in the British Museum.
3. Title-page of Fisher’s Sermon, printed at
Cambridge to face p.
by John Siberch in 1522 82
From the copy in the Library of Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
4. Title-page of the Exhortation to the Sick, to face p.
Printed at Ipswich by John Oswen in 1548 110
From the copy in the Sandars Collection, University
Library, Cambridge.
 LECTURE I.
OXFORD.
In the two series of lectures that I had the pleasure of delivering in
Cambridge as Sandars Reader in 1899 and 1904, I dealt with the
printers, stationers, and bookbinders of Westminster and London
from 1476 to 1535, the period from the introduction of printing into
England by William Caxton to the death of his successor, Wynkyn de
Worde. In the present series I propose to turn to the provincial towns
and trace the history of the printers, stationers, and bookbinders who
worked in them from 1478, when printing was introduced into Oxford,
up to 1557.
I have extended the period to 1557, because in that year a charter
was granted to the re-formed Company of Stationers, and in this
charter was one very important clause, “Moreover we will, grant,
ordain, and constitute for ourselves, and the successors of our
foresaid queen, that no person within this our kingdom of England, or
dominions thereof, either by himself, or by his journeymen, servants,
or by any other person, shall practise or exercise the art or mystery
of printing, or stamping any book, or any thing to be sold, or to be
bargained for within this our kingdom of England, or the dominions
thereof, unless the same person is, or shall be, one of the society of
the foresaid mystery, or art of a stationer of the city aforesaid, at the
time of his foresaid printing or stamping, or has for that purpose
obtained our licence, or the licence of the heirs and successors of
our foresaid queen.”
The effect of this enactment was virtually to put an end to all
provincial printing, and with the exception of a few Dutch books,
printed under a special privilege at Norwich between 1566 and 1579,
and a doubtful York book of 1579, no printing was done outside
London until 1584-5, when the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford
once more started their presses.
Within the period I have chosen, printing was exercised in ten towns,
and the presses fall roughly into three groups. The first contains
Oxford, St Alban’s, and York, the second Oxford’s revived press,
Cambridge, Tavistock, Abingdon, and the second St Alban’s press,
and the last group Ipswich, Worcester, and Canterbury. Besides
these there are one or two towns which, while not having presses of
their own, had books specially printed for sale in them, as for
example Hereford and Exeter, where the resident stationer
commissioned books from foreign printers. And lastly, there must be
noticed the places which have been claimed as possessing a press
on account of false or misleading imprints, such as Winchester and
Greenwich.
The first book issued from the Oxford press, the Expositio in
symbolum apostolorum, a treatise by Tyrannius Rufinus on the
Apostles’ Creed, was finished on the 17th of December 1478. By an
error of the printer an x was omitted from the figures forming the date
in the colophon, and thus the year was printed as m.cccc.lxviii.
[1468] in place of m.cccc.lxxviii. [1478], and round this false date a
wonderful legendary story was woven some two hundred and fifty
years ago.
In 1664 a certain Richard Atkyns published a tract, entitled The
Original and growth of Printing, written to prove that printing was a
prerogative of the Crown. To strengthen his case he quoted this
Oxford book, produced, as he claimed, much earlier than anything
by Caxton, and also told a wonderful story of the introduction of
printing into England, said to have been derived from a manuscript in
the archives at Lambeth Palace.
According to this account, Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of
Canterbury, having heard of the invention of printing at Haarlem,
where John Gutenberg was then at work (a strange fact which might
simplify the researches on early printing!), persuaded Henry VI. to
endeavour to introduce the art into England. For this purpose, Robert
Turner, an officer of the Robes, taking Caxton as an assistant, set
out for Haarlem, where, after infinite trouble and considerable
bribery, a workman named Frederick Corsellis was persuaded to
return with them to England. On his arrival he was sent under a
strong guard to Oxford, and there set up his press, under the
protection of the King.
It is needless to say that the whole story is a fabrication, and a
curiously clumsy one. At the beginning of 1461 Henry VI. was
deposed by Edward, so that these events must have taken place in
or before 1460, and it is strange, with all the materials ready, nothing
should be done for nearly ten years. The information about
Gutenberg, who invented printing at Mainz and was never outside
Germany, being engaged at printing in Haarlem, is preposterous.
Lastly, no trace of the documents has ever been found. It is strange
how Atkyns should have fixed on the name Corsellis for his mythical
printer, for this uncommon name was that of a family of wealthy
Dutch merchants settled in London at the time. Just ten years after
the publication of Atkyns’ book, a Nicholas Corsellis, lord of the
manor of Lower Marney, Essex, was buried in the church there, and
on his tomb are some verses beginning,

“Artem typographi miratam Belgicus Anglis

Corsellis docuit.”

Are we to infer from this that the family was a party to the fraud?
The story, however, was revived about the middle of the eighteenth
century, when Osborne, the bookseller, in his catalogue of June
1756 offered for sale an edition of Pliny’s Letters, printed by Corsellis
at Oxford in 1469. In his note he added that the printer had produced
other works in 1470, and that fragments of a Lystrius of this date
were known. Herbert continues the story as follows: “This raised the
curiosity of the book collectors, who considered this article as a
confirmation of what R. Atkins had asserted about printing at Oxford.
They all flocked to Osborne’s shop, who instead of the book,
produced a letter from a man of Amsterdam filled with frivolous
excuses for not sending them to him. They were disappointed, and
looked on the whole as a Hum; however, the Plinii Epistolæ and G.
Lystrii Oratio afterwards appeared at an auction at Amsterdam and
were bought for the late Dr Ant. Askew, and were sold again at an
auction of his books by Baker and Leigh in Feb. 1775.”
These two books passed apparently to Denis Daly, then to Stanesby
Alchorne, afterwards to Lord Spencer, and are now in the Rylands
Library. The forgeries were made by a certain George Smith, much
given to that class of work, and passed on to Van Damme, a
bookseller of Amsterdam, who sold the Pliny to Askew for fifteen
guineas. The inscriptions in the books are the clumsiest forgeries,
which could not deceive anyone, while the books themselves were
apparently printed at Deventer, early in the sixteenth century, by a
well-known printer, Richard Paffroet. Listen now to the remarks of
the erudite Dr Dibdin in the Bibliotheca Spenceriana. “Meerman has
a long and amusing note concerning Van Damme and George
Smith, from which it would appear that the latter had imposed upon
the bookseller, Van Damme, in the annexed subscription to the
volume, and that Van Damme acknowledged the imposition to one
Richard Paffraet of Deventer. If this be true, the Dutch bibliopole
acted a very dishonest part in selling the volume to Dr Askew for
fifteen guineas!” If instead of long arguments about the types of the
books or the probabilities of the dates, they had considered the
books themselves, it might surely have occurred to them that it was
at least unlikely that the physician, Gerard Lystrius, a friend and
contemporary of Erasmus, should have published a work in 1470,
while the next work issued by him did not appear until 1516. Besides
the forged imprint, the Lystrius has at the end a long spurious note in
Dutch purporting to be written by J. Korsellis in 1471, stating that the
book had been sent him by his brother, Frederic Corsellis, from
England. In order to kill two birds with one stone, the writer drags
into the note the mythical inventor of printing, Laurens Janszoon
Coster.
Oxford’s claim to having introduced printing into England was first
disputed by the Cambridge University librarian, Dr Conyers
Middleton, in his Dissertation on the Origin of Printing, published in
1735. He originated the theory that a numeral x had fallen out of the
date or been accidentally omitted, and, after citing several early
examples of such a mistake, continued: “But whilst I am now writing,
an unexpected Instance is fallen into my hands, to the support of my
Opinion; an Inauguration Speech of the Woodwardian Professor, Mr
Mason, just fresh from our Press, with its Date given ten years
earlier than it should have been, by the omission of an x, viz.
mdccxxiv., and the very blunder exemplified in the last piece printed
at Cambridge, which I suppose to have happen’d in the first from
Oxford.” Middleton also brought forward what has remained the
strongest argument against the authenticity of the date, the
occurrence in the book of ordinary printed signatures, which are
found in no other book until several years later. Finally, he pointed
out the very great improbability of the interval of eleven years
between the book of 1468 and the two books of 1479. The last
person to cling to the 1468 date, doubtless from a sense of duty, is
Mr Madan of the Bodleian. In his exhaustive work on the early
Oxford press, after having fully put forward the arguments for and
against, he sums up the situation as follows: “The ground has been
slowly and surely giving way beneath the defenders of the Oxford
date, in proportion to the advance of our knowledge of early printing,
and all that can be said is that it has not yet entirely slipped away. It
is still allowable to assert that the destructive arguments, even if we
admit their cumulative cogency, do not at the present time amount to
proof.”
Another earlier writer on this question ought to be mentioned,
Samuel Weller Singer, since he wrote a small book entirely confined
to the question of the authenticity of the date. It was entitled “Some
account of the book printed at Oxford in 1468. In which is examined
its claim to be considered the first book printed in England.” A small
number of copies were privately printed; and the author came to the
conclusion that, in his own words, “The book stands firm as a
monument of the exercise of printing in Oxford, six years older than
any book of Caxton’s with date.” Singer is said to have changed his
views on the subject later on, and to have called in and destroyed as
many copies as possible. His book may be classed as a curiosity for
another reason. The original issue was said to consist of fifty copies
privately printed, and as many copies as possible were afterwards
destroyed by the author, yet it is a book of the commonest
occurrence in secondhand catalogues.
The researches of later years, carried out more scientifically, have
produced some definite information. In the first place, the source of
the type in which the book is printed has been ascertained. It was
used in 1477 and 1478 at Cologne by a printer named Gerard ten
Raem, who printed five books with it; a Vocabularius Ex quo issued
in October 1477, two issues of a Modus Confitendi published in
January and October 1478 and a Donatus and Æsopus moralizatus,
both without date. These books are very rare; the only one in the
British Museum or Bodleian being the Donatus. The Rylands Library
contains the Modus Confitendi with the October date. The University
Library possesses the Modus of January and the unique copy of the
Æsop.
Now not only are the types of the Oxford and Cologne printers
identical, but both men made similar mistakes in the use of certain
capitals, and we find both in the Modus Confitendi and in the
Expositio a capital H frequently used in place of a capital P. This
must be regarded as more than a mere coincidence and strong
evidence of a connexion between the two presses. The Oxford
printer also printed his capital Q sideways in his earliest book.
The printing of the Cologne Modus Confitendi was finished “in
profesto undecim millium virginum,” that is on October 20; that of the
Oxford Expositio on December 17. This gives an interval of eight
weeks between the issue of the two books, a time much too short to
allow of the same printer having produced both books, even if there
were not other reasons against it. Who then was the printer from
Cologne who introduced printing into Oxford? I think we are quite
justified in believing that he was the Theodoric Rood de Colonia,
whose name is first found in an Oxford book of 1481. Mr Madan
considers it would be unsafe to assume that Rood was the printer of
the first three books, no doubt because the type in which they are
printed disappeared absolutely and was never used again. But
analogous cases are not unknown. For his first book the St Alban’s
printer used a beautiful type which, except as signatures in two other
books, never appeared again.
It is extremely unfortunate that a source from which we might no
doubt have learnt something about the introduction of printing into
Oxford, and some details about the first printer, seems irrevocably
lost. This is the volume of the registers of the Chancellor’s court
covering the period between 1470 and 1497. In the volumes that
remain, which contain records of all proceedings brought before the
court, there are numerous references to stationers, and it may be
taken as another piece of evidence against the 1468 date that there
is no reference whatever to printing or printers between the years
1468 and 1470.
The two books which followed the Expositio are a Latin translation of
the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle by Leonardus Brunus Aretinus,
and a treatise on original sin by Ægidius de Columna. The first, a
quarto of one hundred and seventy-four leaves, is dated 1479, but
no month is mentioned. By this date the printer had discovered
which way up a capital Q should stand, and we find it always
correctly printed, though some minor mistakes of the Expositio are
continued, such as using a broken lower-case h sometimes for a b
and sometimes, upside down, for a q. The general printing of the
book was however improved, and the lines more evenly spaced out
to the right-hand edge.
The second book, the treatise of Ægidius, De peccato originali, is
dated March 14, 1479, but this date may be taken as 1479-80. In this
book we find red printing introduced for the first and last time in an
Oxford book. It is by far the rarest of the early Oxford books, perhaps
on account of its small size, for it contains only twenty-four leaves,
and the three copies known were all bound up in volumes with other
tracts. The Bodleian copy belonged to Robert Burton and came to
the library with his books; that in Oriel College Library was in a
volume with the Expositio and some foreign printed quartos, which,
though kept together, was rebound in the eighteenth century. The
third copy, now in the Rylands Library at Manchester, was, until
about thirty years ago, in a volume with the Expositio and three
foreign printed tracts, including an edition of Michael de Hungaria’s
Tredecim sermones, a book which has at the end a curious sermon
containing a notice of the ceremony of incepting in theology at
Oxford and Cambridge, with a few sentences in English. The volume
had belonged to a certain A. Hylton in the fifteenth century, and was
in its original stamped binding, a very fine specimen of contemporary
Oxford work. The volume was sold in an auction about 1883, and the
purchaser ruthlessly split up the volume and disposed of the
contents. The two Oxford books found their way into Mr Quaritch’s
hands, who sold the Expositio to an American collector, while the
Ægidius was bought by Lord Spencer to add to the fine series of
Oxford books at Althorp.
These first three Oxford books form a perfectly distinct group. In
them but one fount of type is used, and they are without any kind of
ornament. It is, however, quite impossible to suppose that an interval
of eleven years separated the printing of the first and second books.
The press-work of the second shows a slight improvement on the
first, but only what the experience gained in printing a first book
would enable the printer to carry out on a second attempt.
The next group of books, four in number, centring round the dates
1481 and 1482, are the Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima by
Alexander of Hales, dated October 1481, the Commentary on the
Lamentations of Jeremiah by John Lathbury, a Franciscan and D.D.,
of Oxford, dated July 31, 1482, and two books known only from
fragments, an edition of Cicero Pro Milone, and a grammar in
English and Latin.
These books are mostly printed in a new type, a peculiarly narrow
gothic, of the Cologne school, and curiously resembling some used a
little later by another Theodoricus at Cologne.
The Alexander of Hales is a folio of two hundred and forty leaves
printed in double columns, and some copies have a woodcut border
round the first page of text. This was probably an afterthought of the
printer, for he has made no allowance for it in the size of the page,
and the border extends out over two inches beyond the text, with the
inevitable result that no copy, even in the original binding, has
escaped being cut down. This is the first occurrence of a border in
an English book. The design consists of elaborate spirals of flowers
and foliage, amid which are a number of birds; it is a very well-
designed piece of work, but it was probably obtained from abroad. At
least sixteen copies of this book are known, and one, in the library of
Brasenose College, is printed upon vellum, but is unfortunately
imperfect. A copy purchased for Magdalen College, Oxford, at the
time of its issue, cost thirty-three shillings and fourpence.
The Lathbury, like the Alexander, contains the printed border only in
certain copies. Altogether about twenty copies are known, of which
four are in Cambridge. Those in Westminster Abbey and All Souls
College, Oxford, are printed upon vellum, and the latter is a
particularly fine copy in the original stamped binding. A curious point
about it is that four names occur, signed at the bottom of the leaves
in various parts of the volume. It was considered at one time that
these might be the names of press correcters, but from comparison
with similar sets of markings in other books, Mr Madan came to the
conclusion that they were those of the persons who supplied the
vellum. It is clear that more copies on vellum than are known must
have been printed, since a number of fragments have been found in
bindings.
The Alexander contains a full colophon stating that it was printed in
the University of Oxford by Theodoric Rood of Cologne on the 11th
of October 1481. The Lathbury has nothing but the date, the last day
of July 1482.
The Cicero Pro Milone is known only from two sets of fragments
rescued from the bindings of books. Four leaves were presented to
the Bodleian in 1872, and four other leaves were found later in the
library of Merton College, where perhaps more may still be
discovered. The book was a quarto and was made up in gatherings
of six leaves and probably consisted of about thirty leaves. A page
contains only nineteen lines which are widely leaded. Though not
found in other Oxford books, this spacing was not uncommon in
editions of texts without notes printed abroad, and was intended to
afford space to the student to write glosses over the words.
This edition of the Pro Milone is further interesting as being the first
classic printed in England, the next being an edition of Terence
issued in separate plays by Pynson between the years 1495 and
1497, followed after a considerable interval by an edition of Virgil
from the same press. The English printers no doubt saw that it was