The English Provincial Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders to 1557

The English Provincial Printers, Stationers and

E. Gordon Duff surveys printing, bookselling, and bookbinding in English provincial towns from the Oxford press of 1478 to the Stationers’ Charter of 1557, which restricted printing to members of the London Company of Stationers or licensed persons and virtually ended provincial printing. He distinguishes actual provincial presses from towns whose stationers commissioned books abroad, and rejects claims founded on misleading imprints, notably Winchester and Greenwich. Oxford receives the fullest treatment. Its first book, Rufinus’s Expositio in symbolum apostolorum, was completed in 1478, despite a dropped x in its colophon that printed 1468 and produced a long-lived legend that Oxford preceded Caxton. Duff exposes Richard Atkyns’s tale of Frederick Corsellis as fabrication and recounts later forged “Corsellis” books. Type evidence connects the early Oxford press with Cologne and supports Theodoric Rood as its likely first printer. Rood’s press produced theological, philosophical, grammatical, legal, and English works, later in partnership with stationer Thomas Hunte. Notable productions include the Lyndewode Constitutions, the Phalaris, and Mirk’s Festial, whose woodcuts derive from preparations for a Golden Legend. The press ceased about 1486. Duff also describes Oxford’s stationers, including Hunte, Peter Actors, George Chastelain, Henry Jacobi, and John Dorne. Dorne’s 1520 ledger reveals a bookseller’s trade in schoolbooks, liturgical works, Erasmus, English sheets, ballads, and fairs. Oxford binding developed a distinctive late-fifteenth-century style, often marked by foreign influence, but later binding is less notable. A revived Oxford press operated briefly under John Scolar and Charles Kyrfoth from 1517 to 1519, printing academic texts under University favour and privileges. At St Alban’s, the anonymous “schoolmaster-printer” began about 1479. Duff dismisses the invented name “John Insomuch.” The press first issued Latin works, then English books, especially the Chronicles of England and the Book of St Alban’s, famous for its hawking, hunting, heraldry, and early colour printing. It ceased in 1486. A second press, associated with abbots Robert Catton and Richard Stevenage, worked from 1534 until the abbey’s suppression, with John Herford apparently its printer; its material later passed to Nicholas Bourman. York’s book trade combined local printing with books commissioned from Rouen, Paris, Venice, and London. Frederick Freez and Gerard Wandsforth dealt in service books, while litigation after Wandsforth’s death records extensive stocks of missals, breviaries, picas, schoolbooks, and bindings. Hugo Goes printed a York Directorium in 1509–10, and Ursyn Mylner printed York liturgical supplements and a Whitinton grammar. John Gachet, a French stationer, dominated York’s service-book trade, commissioning missals, breviaries, manuals, processionals, hymnals, and hours. Later restrictions against foreign traders and the decline of service books weakened this activity. Hereford and Exeter had stationers who commissioned books without maintaining presses. At Hereford, Ingelbert Haghe and John Gachet are associated with a Breviary and Ortus Vocabulorum. Exeter is represented by books printed at Rouen for Martin Coffin. Duff stresses that many lost books are known only through catalogues, notes, lawsuits, or fragments. Cambridge printing began in 1521 with John Siberch, probably aided by the University. Siberch printed works by Henry Bullock, Erasmus, Galen, Fisher, Papyrius Geminus, and Lily and Erasmus, introducing genuine moveable Greek type into England. His privileges, royal-armorial woodcuts, changing title-pages, vellum copies, bindings, and surviving waste sheets illuminate his methods. He ceased printing after 1522, while his materials passed to other hands. Cambridge stationers and binders, especially Garret Godfrey and Nicholas Speryng, produced important roll-tooled bindings; the University repeatedly protected stationers, including foreign craftsmen. Tavistock produced a Boethius in 1525 and the Stannary statutes in 1534. Abingdon’s sole known press book was John Scolar’s 1528 Benedictine Breviary. Ipswich became a short-lived reforming centre in 1547–48, where Anthony Scoloker and John Oswen printed translations and polemics. Oswen then moved to Worcester, whose press from 1549 to 1553 produced Prayer-books, Testaments, sermons, statutes, and reforming works; it was the most productive provincial press of the period. Canterbury printer John Mychell issued psalters, chronicles, theological controversy, schoolbooks, and verse, continuing at least to print Cardinal Pole’s visitation articles in 1556. Duff concludes that provincial output was very small: roughly 111 books printed provincially and twenty-one commissioned for provincial stationers. Yet printers formed only a tiny part of a larger trade dominated by stationers, binders, imported books, fairs, foreign craftsmen, lawsuits, and shifting religious policy. Foreign competition, restrictions on alien traders, the suppression of service books, doctrinal conflict, censorship, and finally the 1557 Charter constrained provincial enterprise. The surviving evidence is fragmentary, but its gaps offer the prospect of further discoveries.

By E. Gordon Duff · First published 1557 · Genre: Book History, Bibliography, History of Printing · 4 chapters · 40,506 words

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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.

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English printing history · early modern book trade · incunabula · provincial printing presses · Oxford printing · St Albans printing · York book trade · Cambridge printing · English stationers · bookbinding history · fifteenth-century England · Tudor England

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