When Joseph Ames was desirous of obtaining information about early printing in Ireland he applied to a Dr. Rutty, of Dublin (apparently a Quaker), who could only furnish the name of a single book printed there before 1600, this being an edition of the Book of Common Prayer, which states that it is "Imprinted by Humphrey Powell, printer to the Kynges Maiesti, in his Highnesse realme of Ireland dwellyng in the citie of Dublin in the greate toure by the Crane. c.u.m Privilegio ad imprimendum solum. Anno Domini MDLI." We know from the records of the English Privy Council that Humphrey Powell, an inconspicuous English printer, was granted 20 in July, 1550, "towards his setting up in Ireland," and this Prayer Book was doubtless the first fruits of his press. Powell remained in Dublin for fifteen years, but the only other products of his press still in existence are two proclamations, one issued in 1561 against Shane O"Neill, the other in 1564 against the O"Connors, and _A Brefe Declaration of certein Princ.i.p.all Articles of Religion_, a quarto of eight leaves set out by order of Sir Henry Sidney in 1566.
In 1571 John O"Kearney, Treasurer of St. Patrick"s, was presented with a fount of Irish type by Queen Elizabeth, and a Catechism by him and a broadside poem on the Last Judgment, by Philip, son of Conn Crosach, both in Irish type, are still extant. But there seems to be no trustworthy information as to where they were printed, though it was probably at Dublin.
An Almanac, giving the longitude and lat.i.tude for Dublin, for the year 1587, appears to have been printed at London. But in 1595 William Kearney printed a Proclamation against the Earl of Tyrone and his adherents in Ireland "in the Cathedrall Church of the Blessed Trinitie, Dublin."
We reach continuous firm ground in 1600 when John Francke, or Franckton (as he called himself in 1602 and thenceforward), printed one or more proclamations at Dublin. In 1604 Franckton was appointed King"s Printer for Ireland, and he continued at work till 1618, when he a.s.signed his patent to Felix Kyngston, Matthew Lownes, and Thomas Downes. Some four-and-twenty proclamations and upwards of a dozen books and pamphlets from his press are extant, some of them in Irish type. In 1620 the office of Printer-General for Ireland was granted for a period of twenty-one years to Kingston, Lownes, and Downes, all of them members of the London Stationers" Company, and the usual imprint on the books they issued is that of the Company (1620-33) or Society (1633-42) of Stationers. They seem to have appointed an agent or factor to look after their interests, and the last of these factors, William Bladen, about 1642 took over the business.
The earliest allusion to books printed in what afterwards became the United States of America occurs in the diary of John Winthrop, Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, for March, 1639: "A printing house was begun at Cambridge by one Stephen Daye, at the charge of Mr. Glover, who died on sea hitherward. The first thing which was printed was the freemen"s Oath; the next was an almanac made for New England by Mr. William Pierce, mariner; the next was the Psalms newly turned into metre." The Mr. Glover here mentioned was the Rev. Joseph Glover, rector of Sutton in Surrey from 1628 to 1636, who, after collecting funds for the benefit of Harvard College at Cambridge, Ma.s.s., sailed with his family from England in the summer of 1638, but died on the way. His widow (Elizabeth Glover), shortly after her arrival, married the Rev. Henry Dunster, the first President of Harvard, and thus, as had happened in Paris, the first press in America was set up in a college under clerical auspices.
Stephen Day, the printer whom Glover had brought from England, is naturally supposed to have been a descendant of John Day, the great Elizabethan printer, but of this there is no evidence. He obtained some grants of land in consideration of his services to the colony, but did not greatly thrive, and in 1648, or early in 1649, was superseded by Samuel Green. Of the specimens of his press mentioned by Governor Winthrop the _Oath of a Freeman_ and the _Almanac_ have perished utterly. Of the "Bay Psalter," or the "New England Version of the Psalms," as it was subsequently called, at least eleven copies are known to be extant, of which five are stated to be perfect.[62] It is a small octavo of 148 leaves, disfigured by numerous misprints, but with pa.s.sable presswork. The translation was made by the Ma.s.sachusetts clergy, who prefixed to it "A discourse declaring not only the lawfullnes but also the necessity of the heavenly ordinance of singing Scripture Psalmes in the Churches of G.o.d." Its t.i.tlepage bears the name neither of printer nor of place, but merely "Imprinted 1640." There is no doubt, however, that it was produced by Day at Cambridge, whereas the edition of 1647 appears to have been printed in London.
The Ma.s.sachusetts records make it probable that Day printed several books and doc.u.ments now lost. An imperfect copy of Harvard Theses with the imprint "Cantabrigiae Nov. Ang., Mens. 8 1643" is the next production of his press still extant. After this comes an historical doc.u.ment of some interest: "_A Declaration of former pa.s.sages and proceedings betwixt the English and the Narrowgansets, with their confederates, wherein the grounds and iustice of the ensuing warre are opened and cleared_. Published by order of the Commissioners for the United Colonies. At Boston the 11 of the sixth month 1645." Another broadside of Harvard Theses (for 1647) and a couple of almanacs for 1647 and 1648, the first of which has the imprint "Cambridge Printed by Matthew Daye and to be solde by Hez. Usher at Boston. 1647", are the only other remnants of this stage of the press. Of Matthew Day nothing more is known.
Samuel Green appears to have taken over Day"s business without any previous technical training, so that it is thought that Day may have helped him as a journeyman. The first book ascribed to Green is:
A Platform of Church Discipline gathered out of the word of G.o.d: and agreed upon by the Elders: and Messengers of the Churches a.s.sembled in the Synod at Cambridge in New-England. To be presented to the Churches and Generals Court for their consideration and acceptance in the Lord.
The Eighth Moneth, Anno 1649. Printed by S.G. at Cambridge in New-England and are to be sold at Cambridge and Boston Anno Dom. 1649.
His next extant piece of work is an almanac for 1650, his next the third edition (the second, as noted above, had been printed at London in 1647) of the Bay Psalter, "printed by Samuel Green at Cambridge in New-England, 1651." This was followed in 1652 by Richard Mather"s _The Summe of Certain Sermons upon Genes_. 15. 6, a treatise on Justification by Faith, and then Green seems to have begun to busy himself with work for the Corporation in England for the Propagation of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New England, or Corporation for the Indians, as it is easier to call it. A second press was sent over to enable this work to be undertaken, and a Primer by John Eliot ("the Apostle to the Indians") was printed in 1654, and the Books of Genesis and Matthew the next year, all three in the Indian language, all three now known only from records. The same destruction has befallen an Indian version of some of the Psalms mentioned as having been printed in 1658, but of another Indian book of the same year, Abraham Peirson"s _Some helps for the Indians, shewing them how to improve their natural reason to know the true G.o.d, and the true Christian Religion_, two issues have been preserved, one in the New York Public Library, the other at the British Museum. Another edition, dated the next year, is also at the Museum, though it has escaped the notice of Mr. Evans, the author of the latest "American Bibliography." By this time the Corporation for the Indians had sent over a skilled printer, Marmaduke Johnson, to aid Green in his work. Unfortunately, despite the fact that he had left a wife in England, Johnson flirted with Green"s daughter, and this conduct, reprehensible anywhere, in New England brought down on him fines of 20 and a sentence of deportation, which, however, was not carried out.
Johnson"s initials appears in conjunction with Green"s in _A Brief Catechism containing the doctrine of G.o.dlines_, by John Norton, teacher of the Church at Boston, published in 1660, and the two men"s names in full are in the Indian New Testament of 1661 and the complete Bible of 1663. Of the New Testament it is conjectured that a thousand, or perhaps fifteen hundred copies, were printed, of which five hundred were bound separately, and forty of these sent to England. How many copies were printed of the Old Testament is not known, but of the complete Bible some forty copies are still extant in no fewer than eight variant states produced by the presence or absence of the Indian and English t.i.tlepages, the dedication, etc., while of the New Testament about half as many copies may be known.
During the progress of the Indian Bible Green had continued his English printing on his other press, and had produced among other things _Propositions concerning the subject of Baptism_ collected by the Boston Synod, and bearing the imprint "Printed by S.G. for Hezekiah Vsher at Boston in New England 1662." Printing at Boston itself does not appear to have begun until 1675, when John Foster, a Harvard graduate, was entrusted with the management of a press, and during that and the six following years printed there a number of books by Increase Mather and other ministers, as well as some almanacs. On his death in 1681 the press was entrusted to Samuel Sewall, who, however, abandoned it in 1684. Meanwhile, Samuel Green had continued to print at Cambridge, and his son, Samuel Green junior, is found working by a.s.signment of Sewall and for other Boston booksellers. In 1690 his brother Bartholomew Green succeeded him, and remained the chief printer at Boston till his death in 1732.
At Philadelphia, within three years of its foundation in 1683, a _Kalendarium Pennsilvaniense, or America"s Messinger: being and [sic]
almanack for the year of grace 1686_, by Samuel Atkins, was issued with the imprint, "Printed and sold by William Bradford, sold also by the Author and H. Murrey in Philadelphia and Philip Richards in New York, 1685," and in the same year there was published anonymously Thomas Budd"s _Good Order established in Pennsilvania & New Jersey in America, being a true account of the country; with its produce and commodities there made_. In 1686 Bradford printed _An Epistle from John Burnyeat to Friends in Pensilvania_ and _A General Epistle given forth by the people of the Lord called Quakers_; in 1687 William Penn"s _The excellent privilege of liberty and property being the birthright of the free-born subjects of England_; in 1688 a collection including Bohme"s _The Temple of Wisdom_, Wither"s _Abuses Stript and Whipt_, and Bacon"s _Essays_, edited by Daniel Leeds. In 1689 Bradford began working for George Keith, and three years later he was imprisoned for printing Keith"s _Appeal from the Twenty Eight Judges to the Spirit of Truth and true Judgement in all faithful Friends called Quakers_. In consequence of this persecution Bradford left Philadelphia the next year and set up his press at New York. Reinier Jansen and Jacob Taylor are subsequently mentioned as printers at Philadelphia, and in 1712 Andrew Bradford, son of William, came from New York and worked there until his death in 1742.
From 1723 he had as a compet.i.tor Samuel Keimer, and it was in Keimer"s office that Benjamin Franklin began printing in Philadelphia. His edition of a translation of Cicero"s _Cato Major on Old Age_, by J.
Logan of Philadelphia, is said to have been the first rendering of a cla.s.sic published in America.
Meanwhile, William Bradford had set up his press in New York in 1693, and obtained the appointment of Government Printer. His earliest productions there were a number of official Acts and Proclamations, on which he placed the imprint, "Printed and Sold by William Bradford, Printer to King William and Queen Mary, at the City of New York." In 1700 he was apparently employed to print an anonymous answer to Increase Mather"s _Order of the Gospel_, and a heated controversy arose as to whether the refusal of Bartholomew Green to print it at Boston was due to excessive "awe" of the President of Harvard or to a more praiseworthy objection to anonymous attacks. Bradford remained New York"s only printer until 1726, when Johann Peter Zenger set up a press which became notable for the boldness with which it attacked the provincial government. Such attacks were not regarded with much toleration, nor indeed was the press even under official regulation greatly beloved by authority. In 1671 Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia, in an official doc.u.ment remarked: "I thank G.o.d we have not free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have these hundred years. For learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them and libels against the government. G.o.d keep us from both." Eleven years later (21 February, 1682) there is an entry in the Virginian records: "John Buckner called before the L^d Culpeper and his council for printing the laws of 1680, without his excellency"s license, and he and the printer ordered to enter into bond in 100 not to print anything hereafter, until his majesty"s pleasure shall be known." As a result there was no more printing in Virginia till about 1729, nor are any other towns than those here mentioned known to have possessed presses during the seventeenth century, the period within which American books may claim the dignity of incunabula.
FOOTNOTES:
[55] Mr. Duff is no doubt right in his suggestion that this is _A very declaration of the bond and free wyll of man: the obedyence of the gospell and what the gospell meaneth_, of which a copy, with colophon, "Printed at Saint Albans," is in the Spencer Collection at the John Rylands Library. This increases Hertfort"s total to eight.
[56] Mr. Duff plausibly suggests that Overton"s name in the colophon was merely a device for surmounting the restrictions on the circulation in England of books printed abroad.
[57] Those recorded by Mr. E. G. Duff in his Sandars Lectures on "The English Provincial Printers, Stationers, and Bookbinders to 1557," by my reckoning number 114.
[58] This reckoning was made in 1896, but the proportion has not been substantially altered.
[59] The colophon to the _Chronicles_ which commemorates Leeu has already been quoted (p. 81).
[60] Before the incorporation of the Company brought English printing more easily under supervision, at least a few books had been issued by English printers with spurious foreign imprints, of which the most impudent was "At Rome under the Castle of St. Angelo."
[61] Robert Barker himself was imprisoned for debt in the King"s Bench at London in 1635, and died there in 1646. What is here written applies to his deputy, who may have been his son of the same name.
[62] The a.s.sertion by Mr. Charles Evans (_American Bibliography_, p.
3) that one of these, "the Crowninshield copy, was privately sold by Henry Stevens to the British Museum for 157 10s.," despite its apparent precision, is an exasperating error.
CHAPTER XIV
ENGLISH WOODCUT ILl.u.s.tRATIONS
[Ill.u.s.tration: XXIX. WESTMINSTER, CAXTON, C. 1488
BONAVENTURA. MEDITATIONES. (PART OF SIG. K 5 RECTO)
CHRIST RAISING THE DAUGHTER OF JAIRUS]
A few illuminated ma.n.u.scripts of English workmanship and a few with ill.u.s.trations in outline have come down to us from the fifteenth century, but amid the weary wars with France and the still wearier struggles of Yorkists and Lancastrians, the artistic spirit which had been so prominent in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries seems to have died out altogether. Until the reign of Queen Elizabeth, or perhaps we should rather say until the advent of John Day, few English books were ill.u.s.trated, and of these few quite a large proportion borrowed or copied their pictures from foreign originals.
Nevertheless, English ill.u.s.trated books are rightly sought after by English collectors, and though we may wish that they were better, we must give the best account of them we can.
As we shall see in a later chapter, there is some probability that an engraving on copper was specially prepared for the first book printed by Caxton, _The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye._ For the present, however, we must concern ourselves only with ill.u.s.trations on wood, or on soft metal cut in relief after the manner of wood, a difference of more interest to the technical student than to book-lovers. The first English books thus ill.u.s.trated appear in or about 1481, the year in which Jean Du Pre began the use of cuts in Paris. England was thus fairly well to the front in point of time; it is the quality which is to seek. The first of these ill.u.s.trated books was probably an undated edition of the _Mirrour of the World_, a translation of a French version of a Latin _Speculum_ or _Imago mundi_. Besides some woodcut diagrams copied from drawings found in the French ma.n.u.scripts, this has ten little cuts, seven of the masters of the seven liberal arts, one of the author, and two of the Creation. Two of the cuts ill.u.s.trating the arts were used again almost at once in Caxton"s third edition of the _Parvus et Magnus Cato_, a book of moral instruction for children in a series of Latin distichs. In 1481 also Caxton ornamented the second edition of the didactic treatise, _The Game and Play of the Chess_ (from the Latin of Jacobus de Cessolis), with sixteen woodcuts, representing the characters after which the different pieces and p.a.w.ns were called. The pictures are clumsy and coa.r.s.ely cut, comparing miserably with the charming little woodcuts in the Italian edition printed at Florence, but they ill.u.s.trate the book, and may conceivably have increased its sales. In any case, Caxton seems, in a leisurely way, to have set about producing some more, since by or about 1484 appeared three of his most important ill.u.s.trated books, the _Golden Legend_, the second edition of Chaucer"s _Canterbury Tales_, and an _Aesop_. The _Golden Legend_ is ornamented with eighteen large and thirty-two smaller woodcuts; the _Aesop_ with a full-page frontispiece and one hundred and five smaller cuts; the _Canterbury Tales_ with a large cut of the Pilgrims seated at a round table, and with some twenty smaller pictures of the different story-tellers on their horses, some of these being used more than once. For the _Aesop_, like many other foreign publishers, Caxton sent his ill.u.s.trators to the designs made for the Zainers at Augsburg and Ulm, and quickly imitated all over Germany, and the copies he obtained are merely servile and so clumsy as occasionally to attain to unintended humour. Foreign influence is also evident in some at least of the cuts in the _Golden Legend_; on the other hand, we may be sure that the device of the Earl of Arundel on leaf 3 verso, a horse galloping past a tree, must have been made in England. Original, too, of necessity, were the ill.u.s.trations to the _Canterbury Tales_, for which no foreign models could have been found.
But the succession of pilgrims, each decked with a huge string of praying-beads and mounted on a most ungainly horse, is grotesque in its c.u.mulation of clumsiness, though when we find that the miller really has got a kind of bagpipe, we recognize that the ill.u.s.trator had at least read his text.
Apparently Caxton himself realized that these English-made woodcuts were a failure, for the only two important ill.u.s.trated books which he issued after this, the _Speculum Vitae Christi_, printed about 1488 (see Plate XXIX), and the _Fifteen Oes_ of a year or two later, both seem to be decorated with cuts of Flemish origin. The _Fifteen Oes_ (a collection of fifteen prayers, each beginning with O), though I have called it important, is so mainly as proving that Caxton must have printed a Horae of the same measurements (of which it may, indeed, have formed a part), ill.u.s.trated with a set of very spirited woodcuts, undoubtedly imported from Flanders and subsequently found in the possession of Wynkyn de Worde. That the cuts in the _Speculum Vitae Christi_ are also Flemish is a degree less certain, but only a degree. Some of these were used again in the _Royal Book_, the _Doctrinal of Sapience_, and the _Book of Divers Ghostly Matters_. But the seven books which we have named are the only ones for which Caxton troubled to procure sets of cuts, and of these seven sets, as we have seen, one was certainly and another probably imported, one certainly and another probably copied, and only three are of English origin, and these the rudest and clumsiest.
While our chief native printer made this poor record his contemporaries did no better. Lettou and Machlinia used no woodcuts which have come down to us save a small border, which pa.s.sed into the possession of Pynson; for use at Oxford two sets of cuts were imported from the Low Countries, one which Mr. Gordon Duff thinks was originally designed for a _Legenda Aurea_, the other clearly meant for a Horae. These were used together in the Oxford edition of Mirk"s _Liber Festivalis_, and the cut of the author of the _Legenda Aurea_ (Jacobus de Voragine) is used for Lyndewood in an edition of his _Const.i.tutions_. At St. Albans some poor little cuts were used in the _Chronicles of England_, but from the point of view of ill.u.s.tration the anonymous schoolmaster-printer is chiefly memorable for having printed some cuts of coat-armour in the "Book of St. Albans" (_The Boke of Haukyng, Huntyng and also of Cote-armuris_) in colours.
Wynkyn de Worde inherited Caxton"s stock of woodcuts, and early in his career used some of them again in reprints of the _Golden Legend_ and _Speculum Vitae Christi_, and in his larger Horae used the full set of cuts which, while in Caxton"s hands, is only known from those which appear in the _Fifteen Oes_. About 1492 he purchased some ornamental capitals (Caxton had only used a single rather graceful rustic A) and one or more cuts from Govaert van Os of Gouda. In his 1494 edition of Walter Hylton"s _Scala Perfectionis_ (the first book in which he put his name) he used a woodblock consisting of a picture of Christ suckled by His mother with a long woodcut inscription, part of which reads "Sit dulce nomen domini nostri ihesu christi et nomen genitricis virginis marie benedictum," the whole surrounded by a graceful floral border. In 1495 came Higden"s _Polychronicon_ with a few woodcut musical notes, the "hystorye of the deuoute and right renommed lyues of holy faders lyuynge in deserte" (usually quoted as the _Vitas Patrum_), with one large cut used six times and forty small ones used as 155, and about the same time a handsome edition of Bartholomaeus Anglicus"s _De proprietatibus rerum_, with large cuts (two-thirds of the folio page) prefixed to each of the twenty-two books, apparently copied partly from those in a Dutch edition printed at Haarlem in 1485, partly from the ill.u.s.trations (themselves not original) in a French edition printed at Lyon, of which Caxton, who finished the translation on his death-bed, had made use. In 1496, in reprinting the _Book of St. Albans_ De Worde added a treatise on _Fishing with an angle_, to which he prefixed a cut of a happy angler hauling up a fish which will soon be placed in a well-filled tub which stands beside him on the bank. This is quite good primitive work and was sufficiently appreciated to be used for numerous later editions, but soon after this De Worde employed a cutter who served him very badly, mangling cruelly a set of rather ambitious designs for the _Morte d"Arthur_ of 1498 (several of them used again in the _Recuyell_ of 1503), and also some single cuts used in different books. For the next half-dozen years De Worde relied almost exclusively on old cuts, but at last found a competent craftsman who enabled him to bring out in January, 1505-6, an English version of the _Art de bien vivre et de bien mourir_ with quite neat reductions of the pictures in Verard"s edition of 1492. It was, no doubt, the same workman who copied in 1506 the Verard-Pigouchet cuts in Pierre Gringore"s _Chasteau de Labeur_ as translated by Alexander Barclay, but from the frequent omission of backgrounds it is obvious that in these he was hurried, and they are by no means so good as those in the 1505 edition by Pynson with which De Worde was enviously hastening to compete. The _Calendar of Shepherds_ was another translation from the French, ill.u.s.trated with copies of French cuts, while in the prose _Ship of Fools_, translated by Henry Watson from a French version of the German _Narrenschiff_ of Sebastian Brant, Basel originals were reproduced probably from intermediate copies. But when in 1509 Henry VII died, De Worde for once seems to have let his craftsman do a bit of original work for a t.i.tle-cut to a funeral sermon by Bishop Fisher. In this (see Plate x.x.x) the bishop is shown preaching in a wooden pulpit, immediately below which is the hea.r.s.e covered by a gorgeous pall on which lies an effigy of the dead king, while beyond the hea.r.s.e stands a crowd of courtiers. It is evident that perspective was not the artist"s strong point, as the pavement seems climbing up the wall and the shape of the hea.r.s.e is quite indeterminate, but the general effect of the cut is neat and pleasing. That it is an English cut is certain. A few months later Bishop Fisher preached another funeral sermon, over Henry VII"s aged mother, Margaret d.u.c.h.ess of Richmond, and when De Worde economically wished to use the same woodcut on the t.i.tlepage of his edition of this, there was a craftsman on the spot able to cut out the royal hea.r.s.e from the block and plug in a representation of an ordinary one, and the similarity of touch shows that this was done by the original cutter.
[Ill.u.s.tration: x.x.x. LONDON, WYNKYN de WORDE, 1509
BISHOP FISHER. FUNERAL SERMON ON HENRY VII. (t.i.tLE)]
As we have already noted in Chapter XII, Wynkyn de Worde was singularly unenterprising as a publisher, and although he lived for nearly a quarter of a century after the accession of Henry VIII, during all this time he printed no new book which required copious ill.u.s.tration. On the other hand, he was a man of fixed habits, and one of these habits came to be the decoration of the t.i.tlepage of nearly every small quarto he issued with a woodcut of some kind or other, the t.i.tle itself being sometimes printed on a riband above it. When a new picture was absolutely necessary for this purpose it was forthcoming and generally fairly well cut, but a few stock woodcuts, a schoolmaster holding a birch for grammatical books, a knight on horseback for a romance, etc., were used again and again, and often the block was picked out (we are tempted to say "at random," but that would be an exaggeration) from one of the sets already described, which De Worde had commissioned in more lavish days.
One of Richard Pynson"s earliest books was an edition of Chaucer"s _Canterbury Tales_ with about a score of woodcuts of the pilgrims obviously influenced by those in Caxton"s second edition, but in no way an improvement on them. It is true that not only is the miller again allowed his bagpipe, but a little mill is placed in the corner of the cut to identify him beyond doubt. On the other hand, the knight"s horse is bedecked with the c.u.mbrous skirts used in the tilt-yard, but which would have become sadly draggled ere much progress had been made along the miry road to Canterbury. The clerk, moreover, is made to carry a bow as if, instead of having his mind set on Aristotle, he were of the l.u.s.ty sort that loved to get venison where they should not. Round most of the cuts there is a heavy edge of black, as if from an untrimmed block, which does not improve their appearance. Altogether they are poor work, and it was doubtless his recognition of this that caused Pynson in future to rely so largely on the purchase or imitation of foreign blocks. For his edition of Lydgate"s _Falles of Princes_, a verse rendering of Boccaccio"s _De casibus ill.u.s.trium virorum_, issued in 1494, he procured the woodcuts made for the fine French edition (_De la ruine des n.o.bles hommes_), printed at Paris by Jean Du Pre in 1483.
Before 1500 he brought out an _Aesop_, copying as usual the German cuts.
In 1505 he printed Alexander Barclay"s version of Pierre Gringore"s _Chasteau du Labeur_ with cuts closely and fairly skilfully copied from those in the Pigouchet-Verard editions. In 1506 he went further and procured from Verard the blocks for a new edition of the _Kalendar of Shepherds_, which, however, he caused to be retranslated, with sundry remarks on the extraordinary English of the version published by Verard.
In 1509 he produced in a fine folio Barclay"s free rendering of Brant"s _Narrenschiff_, ill.u.s.trating this English _Ship of Fools_ with 117 cuts copied from the originals. In 1518 he procured from Froben some border-pieces for small quartos, one showing in the footpiece a boy carried on the shoulders of his fellows, another an elephant, a third Mutius Scaevola and Porsenna.
[Ill.u.s.tration: x.x.xI. LONDON, PYNSON, C. 1520
BARCLAY"S VERSION OF SALl.u.s.t"S JUGURTHA. THE TRANSLATOR AND THE DUKE OF NORFOLK. (REDUCED)]
If Pynson had dealt largely in ill.u.s.trated books the borrowings and copyings here recited might seem insignificant. He published, however, very little English work which can be set against them, and even of the cuts which pa.s.s for English the native origin is not always sure. I should be sorry to pledge myself, for instance, as to the provenance of some neat but rather characterless column-cuts in his edition of the _Speculum Vitae Christi_ (fifteenth century). The t.i.tle-cut to the _Traduction and Mariage of the Princesse_ (Katherine), printed in 1501, is almost certainly English in its heaviness and lack of charm, but despite the fact that they must have been produced in London we can hardly say as much of the two far prettier pictures which adorn the _Carmen_ of Petrus Carmelia.n.u.s on the treaty of marriage between the future Charles V and the Princess Mary (1508). In the first of these the amba.s.sadors are being received by Henry VII, in the second by the Princess who is attended by her maids, and the latter is perhaps the first English book-ill.u.s.tration with any touch of grace. Unluckily there is a half Spanish, half Low-Country look about it, which suggests that some member of the amba.s.sadors" suite with an artistic turn may at least have supplied the design, so that one hesitates to claim it too vigorously as English work. We may be more confident about the one good cut (the rest are a scratch lot) in the 1513 edition of Lydgate"s _The hystory sege and dystruccion of Troy_. In this Henry V is shown seated in a large room, with his suite, while Lydgate in his black habit as a Benedictine presents him with his book. There is a general resemblance between this and another good piece of work, the picture in Alexander Barclay"s translation of Sall.u.s.t"s _Jugurtha_ (undated) of this other black monk offering his book to the Duke of Norfolk (see Plate x.x.xI).
Probably both were from the same hand. It may be noted that the cut of Barclay was used again in the _Myrrour of good maners conteyning the iiii. vertues called cardynall compyled in latin by Domynicke Mancyn_, of which he was the industrious translator. In Pynson"s 1516 edition of Fabyan"s _Chronicle_, besides some insignificant column-cuts of kings and some decorative heraldic work, there is an excellent picture of a disembarkation. In other books we find cuts of a schoolmaster with his pupils, of an author, of a woman saint (S. Bridget, though used also for S. Werburga), etc.
Towards the end of his career in the collection of Chaucer"s works (1526) and reprint of Lydgate"s _Falles of Princes_ (1527), Pynson drew on his stock of miscellaneous blocks rather than allow works with which ill.u.s.trations had become a.s.sociated to go forth undecorated.[63] But with his purchase of the border-pieces from Froben in 1518, it would seem that he more or less definitely turned his back on pictorial ill.u.s.tration. Mr. Gordon Duff has shown that a change comes over the character of his books about this time, and has suggested that during the latter years of his life his business was to some extent in the hands of Thomas Berthelet, who succeeded him as King"s Printer.
Berthelet himself in the course of his long and prosperous career eschewed ill.u.s.trations altogether, while he took some trouble to get good capitals and had a few ornamental borders. It is thus hardly too much to say that from 1518 for some forty years, until in 1559 John Day published Cunningham"s _Cosmographicall Gla.s.se_, book-ill.u.s.tration in England can only be found lurking here and there in holes and corners.
In 1526 Peter Treveris issued the _Grete Herbal_ with numerous botanical figures; in 1529 John Rastell printed his own _Pastime of People_ with huge, semi-grotesque cuts of English kings; a few of Robert Copland"s books and a few of Robert Wyer"s have rough cuts of no importance. But when we think of Pynson"s edition of Lord Berners" _Froissart_, of Berthelet"s of Gower"s _Confessio Amantis_, of G.o.dfray"s _Chaucer_, and of Grafton"s edition of Halle"s _Chronicle_, all ill.u.s.tratable books and all unill.u.s.trated, it is evident that educated book-buyers, wearied of rudely hacked blocks, often with no relevance to the book in which they were found, had told the printers that they might save the s.p.a.ce occupied by these decorations, and that the reign of the primitive woodcut in English books, if it can be said ever to have reigned, was at an end.
This emphatic discouragement of book-ill.u.s.trations during so many years in the sixteenth century was perhaps the best thing that could have happened--next to an equally emphatic encouragement of them. There can have been no reason in the nature of things why English book-ill.u.s.trations should continue over a long period of time to be third-rate. A little help and a little guidance would probably have sufficed to reform them altogether. Nevertheless it can hardly be disputed that as a matter of fact they were, with very few exceptions, third-rate, the superiority of Pynson"s to Wynkyn de Worde"s being somewhat less striking than is usually a.s.serted. In the absence of the needed help and guidance it was better to make a sober dignity the ideal of book-production than to continue to deface decently printed books by the use of job lots of column cuts. The borders and other ornaments used by Berthelet, Reyner Wolfe, and Grafton, the three princ.i.p.al firms of this period, are at least moderately good. All three printers indulged in the pleasing heresy of pictorial or heraldic capitals, Wolfe in the _Homiliae duae_ of S. Chrysostom (1543), Grafton in Halle"s Chronicle ent.i.tled _The Union of the Families of Lancaster and York_ (1548), and Berthelet in some of his later proclamations. As regards their devices, Grafton"s punning emblem (a tree grafted on a tun), though in its smallest size it may pa.s.s well enough, was not worthy of the prominence which he sometimes gave it; but Wolfe"s "Charitas" mark, of children throwing sticks at an apple tree, is perhaps the most pleasing of English devices, while Berthelet"s "Lucrece," despite the fact that her draperies have yielded to the Renaissance temptation of fluttering in the wind rather more than a Roman lady would have thought becoming at the moment of death, is of its kind a fine piece of work. As for pictures, from which Berthelet, as far as I remember, was consistent in his abstinence--Wolfe and Grafton were wisely content to make an exception in favour of Holbein, a little medallion cut after his portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt adorning Wolfe"s edition of Leland"s _Naeniae_ (1542), and Grafton owing to him the magnificent t.i.tlepage to the Great Bibles in which Cranmer and Cromwell, with a host of other worthies, are seen distributing Bibles under the superintendence of Henry VIII. After the fall of Cromwell his armorial bearings were cut out of the block, a piece of petty brutality on a level with that which compelled owners of Prayer Books and Golden Legends to deface them by scratching out the word "pope" and as much as they could of the service for the day of that certainly rather questionable saint, Thomas a Becket.