Caxton abroad—Caxton's mercantile pursuits—Restrictions on Trade—
Caxton's Commission—Merchants' Marks—Beginnings of Printing—Playing
Cards—Wood-engraving—Block-books—Moveable Types—Guttenberg—Guttenberg's
Statue—Festival at Mentz.
Robert Large, the master of Caxton, became Lord Mayor of London in
1439-40. He died in 1441. That he was a man of considerable substance
appears by the record of his bequests, in Stow's Survey of London:
"Robert Large, mercer, mayor 1440, gave to his parish church of St.
Olave, in Surrey, two hundred pounds; to St. Margaret's, in Lothbury,
twenty-five pounds; to the poor, twenty pounds; to London-bridge, one
hundred marks; towards the vaulting over the watercourse of Walbrook,
two hundred marks; to poor maids' marriages, one hundred marks; to poor
householders, one hundred pounds."[10] By his last will he bequeathed to
his servant, William Caxton, twenty marks, a considerable sum in those
days. From this period it would seem that Caxton resided abroad. In the
first book he translated, the "Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye,"
which bears upon the title to have been "ended and finished in the holy
city of Cologne, the 19th day of September, the year of our Lord one
thousand, four hundred, sixty, and eleven," he says, "I have continued
by the space of thirty year for the most part in the countries of
Brabant, Flanders, Holland, and Zealand." The Rev. John Lewis, who wrote
the Life of Master William Caxton, about a century ago, says, "It has
been guessed that he was abroad as a travelling agent or factor for the
Company of Mercers, and employed by them in the business of
merchandise." Oldys adds, but certainly without any authority, "It is
agreed on by those writers who have best acquainted themselves with his
story, he was deputed and intrusted by the Mercers' Company to be their
agent or factor in Holland, Zealand, Flanders, &c., to establish and
enlarge their correspondents, negociate the consumption of our own, and
importation of foreign manufactures, and otherwise promote the advantage
of the said corporation in their respective merchandise." This, indeed,
was a goodly commission, if we can make out that he ever received
such,—an employment which seems to speak of free and liberal intercourse
between two countries, each requiring the commodities of the other, and
conducting their interchange upon the sound principles of encouraging
mutual consumption, and thus producing mutual profit. Doubtless, we may
believe, upon a superficial view of the matter, that the agent of the
Mercers' Company was conducting his operations with the full authority
of the government at home, and with the hearty support of the rulers of
the land in which he so long lived. The real fact is, that for twenty of
those years in which Caxton describes himself as residing in the
countries of Brabant, Holland, and Zealand, there was an absolute
prohibition on both sides of all commercial intercourse between England
and the Duchy of Burgundy, to which those countries were subject; and
for nearly the whole period, no English goods were suffered to pass to
the continent, except through the town of Calais; and "in France," says
Caxton, "I was never." If Caxton had any mercantile employment at all
from his Company, it was, in all probability, for the purpose of finding
channels in trade that were closed up by the blind policy of the
respective governments. He could not have conducted any mercantile
operation in those countries, except in violation of the absurd
commercial laws which would not allow the people to seek their own
interest in their own way. It is by no means improbable, however, that
by the connivance of the royal personages who wanted for themselves rich
commodities which they could only obtain by that exchange which they
denied their subjects, William Caxton was in truth an accredited
smuggler for law-makers who attempted to limit the wants, and the means
of satisfying the wants, of the people they governed, in deference to
the prejudices of those who thought that trade could only exist under a
system of the most stringent prohibition.
While Edward the Fourth, and Charles the Good, Duke of Burgundy, were
launching against each other ordinance and enactment to prevent their
subjects becoming exchangers for the better supply of their respective
wants, some politic understanding between these princes led them
eventually to adopt a wiser system. It is pretty clear that William
Caxton was one of the agents, and a principal one, in putting an end to
a policy which the Duke of Burgundy said was "evermore to endure." In
1464 Edward the Fourth issued a commission to his trusty and
well-beloved Richard Whitehill and William Caxton, to be his especial
ambassadors, procurators, nuncios, and deputies to his most dear cousin
the Duke of Burgundy for the purpose of confirming an existing treaty of
commerce, or, if necessary, for making a new one. In 1466, this
commission being dated in October, 1464, a treaty was concluded with the
Duke of Burgundy, by which the commerce between his dominions and
England, which had been interrupted for twenty years, was restored; and
a port of Flanders was subsequently appointed to be a port of the
English staple, as well as Calais. It is pleasant to us to believe that
this extension of a principle which must eventually bind all nations in
a common brotherhood was effected by the good sense of a mercer of
London; who was afterwards to bestow upon his country the blessings of
an art which has been the great instrument of that country's progress in
real greatness and prosperity, and before which all impediments to the
continued course of that prosperity—all prejudices amongst her own
children, or amongst other peoples, that make the great family of
mankind aliens and enemies, and keep them from the enjoyment of the
advantages which each might bestow upon the other—will utterly perish.
It is pleasant to us to believe that William Caxton, the first English
printer, in his day opened the ports of one great trading community to
another great trading community. When he, the mercer's apprentice,
stamped the merchant's mark upon his master's bales, he knew not, he
could not have divined, that by this process of stamping, carried
forward by the ingenuity of many men into a new art, there would arise
consequences which would change the face of the world. He could not
imagine that he, whose education had consisted in learning to buy wool
and measure cloth, should, by the natural course of his commercial life,
be thrown into a society where a great wonder was to fill the minds of
all men with astonishment—the multiplication of manuscripts by some new
and secret process, as if by magic; and which some men, and he probably
amongst the number, must have regarded with a higher feeling than
wonder,—with something like that prophetic view of its consequences
which have been described by the novelist, who, perhaps more than any
man, has employed that art to the delight of all classes in every
country. We refer to the passage in Sir Walter Scott's Quentin Durward,
where Louis the Eleventh of France, and Martivalle Galeotti the
astrologer, speak of the invention of printing, and the sage predicts
"the lot of a succeeding generation, on whom knowledge will descend like
the first and second rain, uninterrupted, unabated, unbounded,
fertilizing some grounds, and overflowing others; changing the whole
form of social life."
[Illustration: Merchants' Marks.]
[Illustration: Blocks and Stencil Instruments.]
In a list of foreign goods forbidden to be imported into this country by
statute of 1464, the reader might be surprised to find that
playing-cards were of sufficient importance, from their general use, to
require that the native manufactories should be protected in the
production of them. Playing-cards were known in France for more than a
hundred years before this statute of Edward IV.; so that the common
notion that they were invented to furnish amusement to an insane king,
Charles VI. of France, about 1393, is a popular error. It is clear that
both in France and Spain at that period cards were the amusement not
only of the royal and noble inmates of palaces, but of the burghers and
the working people. The King of Castile, in 1387, prohibited cards
altogether; and they appear, with other games of skill and chance, to
have interfered so much with the regular labour of the artificers of
Paris, that the provost of that city, in 1397, forbade all working
people to play at tennis, bowls, nine-pins, dice, or cards, on
working-days. The earliest cards were probably painted by means of a
stencil, by which name we call a piece of pasteboard or plate of thin
metal pierced with apertures, by which a figure is formed upon paper or
other substance beneath it when fluid colour is smeared over its surface
with a brush. But it has also been conjectured, from their being in the
hands of the working-people, that their cheapness must have been
produced by some rude application of a wood-engraving to form the
outline which the stencilling process filled up with colour. There can
be no doubt that cards were _printed_ before the middle of the fifteenth
century; for there is a petition extant from the Venetian _painters_ to
their magistracy, dated 1441, setting forth that the art and mystery of
card-making and of _printing_ figures, which were practised in Venice,
had fallen into total decay, through the great quantity of foreign
playing-cards and coloured printed figures which were brought into the
city. The Germans were the great card-makers of this period; and the
name by which a wood-engraver is still called in Germany,
_Formschneider_, meaning figure-cutter, occurs in the town books of
Nuremburg as early as 1441. Some of the early cards were very rude. Here
is the Knave of Bells—for spades, diamonds, hearts, and clubs were not
then the universal symbols. Others called forth the skill of very clever
artists, such as he who is known as "the Master of 1466," whose knave is
a much more human knave than the traditionary worthy whom we look upon
to this hour. When Caxton, therefore, was abroad for thirty years, he
would unquestionably have seen every variety of these painted bits of
paper; some rich with crimson and purple, oftentimes painted on a golden
ground, and calling forth, like the missals, the highest art of the
limner; others impressed with a rude outline, and daubed by the
stenciller. It appears that the impressions of the engraved cards, as
well as of most of the earlier block-prints, were taken off by friction.
This is the mode by which, even at the present day, wood-engravers take
off the specimen impressions of their works called proofs. The Chinese
produce their block-books in a similar manner, without the aid of a
press.
[Illustration: Knave of Bells.]
[Illustration: Knave, of Master of 1466.]
But there was another application of engraved blocks, about the same
period, which was approaching still nearer to the art of printing. The
representations of saints and of scriptural histories, which the limners
in the monasteries had for several centuries been painting in their
missals and bibles, were copied in outline; and being divested of their
brilliant colours and rich gilding, presented figures exceedingly rude
in their want of proportion, and grotesque in their constrained and
violent attitudes. But they were nevertheless highly popular; and as the
pictures were accompanied with a few sentences from Scripture, they
probably supplied the first inducement to the laity to learn to read,
and thus prepared the way for that diffusion of knowledge which was to
accompany the invention of printing from moveable types. In the
collection of Earl Spencer there is a very curious print from a
woodblock, representing St. Christopher carrying the infant Saviour.
This print bears the date 1423. It is probably not the earliest specimen
of the art; but it is the earliest undoubted document which determines
with precision the period when wood-engraving was generally applied to
objects of devotion. In a very few years from the date of this print the
art was carried onward to a more important object,—that of producing a
_book_.
Several of such books are now in existence, and are known as
block-books. One of them is commonly called 'Biblia Pauperum,' the Bible
of the Poor. But an ingenious writer on the progress of woodcutting, in
the valuable book on that subject published by Mr. John Jackson, has
shown very clearly that this was not the original title of the book; and
he adds that it was rather a book for the use of preachers than the
laity:—"A series of skeleton sermons ornamented with woodcuts to warm
the preacher's imagination, and stored with texts to assist his memory."
This very rare book consists of forty leaves of small folio, each of
which contains a cut in wood, with extracts from the Scriptures, and
other illustrative sentences. Of other block-books the most remarkable
is called 'Speculum Salutis,'—the Mirror of Salvation. In this
performance the explanations of the text are much fuller than in the
'Biblia Pauperum.' In addition to these works, wooden blocks were also
used to print small manuals of grammar, called Donatuses, which were
used in schools. We present a fac-simile of a woodcut from one of the
early block-books.
[Illustration: The Wise Men's Offering.]
The use of carved blocks for the multiplication of copies of
playing-cards and devotional pictures gave birth to a principle which
has effected, and is still effecting, the most important changes in the
world. These devotional pictures had short legends or texts attached to
them; and when a text had to be printed, it was engraved in a solid
piece, as well as the picture. The first person who seized upon the idea
that the text or legend might be composed of separate letters capable of
rearrangement after the impressions were taken off, so as to be applied,
without new cutting, to other texts and legends, had secured the
principle upon which the printing art was to depend. It was easy to
extend the principle from a few lines to a whole page, and from one page
to many, so as to form a book; but then were seen the great labour and
expense of cutting so many separate letters upon small pieces of wood or
metal, and another step was required to be made before the principle was
thoroughly worked out. This step consisted in the ready multiplication
of the separate letters by casting metal in moulds. Lastly, instead of
using the old Chinese mode of friction to produce impressions, a _press_
was to be perfected. All these gradations were undoubtedly the result of
long and patient experiments carried on by several individuals, who each
saw the importance of the notion they were labouring to work out. It is
this circumstance which has given rise to interminable controversies as
to the inventors of printing, some claiming the honour for Coster of
Haarlem, and some for Guttenberg of Mentz; and, as is usual in all such
disputes, it was represented that the man to whom public opinion had
assigned the credit of the invention had stolen it from another, who, as
is also usual in these cases, thought of it in a dream, or received it
by some other mysterious revelation. The general consent of Europe now
assigns the chief honour to Guttenberg.[11]
During the summer of 1837 a statue of John Guttenberg, by Thorwaldsen,
was erected at Mentz (or Mayence), and on the 14th of August and the
following days a festival was held there, upon the occasion of the
inauguration of the monument. Abundant evidence has been brought forward
of late years to show that Guttenberg deserves all the honours of having
conceived, and in great part perfected, an art which has produced the
most signal effects upon the destinies of mankind. At that festival of
Mentz, at which many hundred persons were assembled, from all parts of
Europe, to do honour to the inventor of printing, no rival pretensions
were put forward; although many of the compatriots of Coster of Haarlem
were present. The fine statue of Guttenberg was opened amidst an
universal burst of enthusiasm. Never were the shouts of a vast multitude
raised on a more elevating occasion;—never were the triumphs of
intellect celebrated with greater fervour.
Passing his life amidst the ceaseless activity that belongs to the
commerce of literature in London, the writer of this volume felt no
common interest in the enthusiasm which the festival in honour of
Guttenberg called forth throughout Germany; and he determined to attend
that celebration. The fine statue which was to be opened to public view
on the 14th of August had been erected by a general subscription, to
which all Europe was invited to contribute. We apprehend that the
English, amidst the incessant claims upon their attention for the
support of all sorts of undertakings, whether of a national or
individual character, had known little of the purpose which the good
citizens of Mentz had been advocating with unabated zeal for several
years;—and perhaps the object itself was not calculated to call forth
any very great liberality on the part of those who are often directed in
their bounties as much by fashion as by their own convictions. Thus it
is that we have monuments out of number to warriors. Caxton has no
monument; neither has Shakspere. Be that as it may, England literally
gave nothing towards the statue of a man whose invention has done as
much as any other single cause to make England what she is. The
remoteness of the cause may also have lessened its importance; and some
people, who, without any deserts of their own, are enjoying a more than
full share of the blessings which have been shed upon us by the progress
of intellect (which determines the progress of national wealth), have a
sort of instinctive notion that the spread of knowledge is the spread of
something inimical to the pretensions of mere riches. We met with a lady
on board the steamboat ascending the Rhine, two days before the festival
of Mentz, who, whilst she gave us an elaborate account of the
fashionable dulness of the baths of Baden and Nassau, and all the other
German watering-places, told us by all means to avoid Mentz during the
following week, as a crowd of low people from all parts would be there,
to make a great fuss about a printer who had been dead two or three
hundred years. The low people did assemble in great crowds: it was
computed that at least fifteen thousand strangers had arrived to do
honour to the first printer.
The modes in which a large population displays its enthusiasm are pretty
much the same throughout the world. If the sentiment which collects men
together be very heart-stirring, all the outward manifestations of the
sentiment harmonize with its real truth. Thus, processions, and
orations, and public dinners, and pageantries which in themselves are
vain and empty, are important when the persons whom they collect
together have one common feeling which for the time is all-pervading. We
never saw such a popular fervour as prevailed at Mentz at the festival
of August, 1837. The statue was to be opened on Monday the 14th; but on
the Sunday evening the name of Guttenberg was rife through all the
streets. In the morning all Mentz was in motion by six o'clock; and at
eight a procession was formed to the Cathedral, which, if it was not
much more imposing than some of the processions of trades in London and
other cities, was conducted with a quiet precision which evidenced that
the people felt they were engaged in a solemn act. The fine old
Cathedral was crowded;—the Bishop of Mentz performed high Mass;—the
first Bible printed by Guttenberg was displayed. What a field for
reflection was here opened! The first Bible, in connexion with the
imposing pageantries of Roman Catholicism—the Bible, in great part a
sealed book to the body of the people; the service of God in a tongue
unknown to the larger number of worshippers;—but that first Bible the
germ of millions of Bibles that have spread the light of Christianity
throughout all the habitable globe! The Mass ended, the procession again
advanced to the adjacent square, where the statue was to be opened. Here
was erected a vast amphitheatre, where, seated under their respective
banners, were deputations from all the great cities of Europe. Amidst
salvos of artillery the veil was removed from the statue, and a hymn was
sung by a thousand voices. Then came orations;—then dinners—balls—
oratorios—boat-races—processions by torchlight. For three days the
population of Mentz was kept in a state of high excitement; and the echo
of the excitement went through Germany,—and Guttenberg! Guttenberg! was
toasted in many a bumper of Rhenish wine amidst this cordial and
enthusiastic people.
And, indeed, even in one who could not boast of belonging to the land in
which printing was invented, the universality of the mighty effects of
this art, when rightly considered, would produce almost a corresponding
enthusiasm. It is difficult to look upon the great changes that have
been effected during the last four centuries, and which are still in
progress everywhere around us, and not connect them with printing and
with its inventor. The castles on the Rhine, under whose ruins we
travelled back from Mentz, perished before the powerful combinations of
the people of the towns. The petty feudal despots fell, when the
burghers had acquired wealth and knowledge. But the progress of
despotism upon a larger scale could not have been arrested had the art
of Guttenberg not been discovered. The strongholds of military power
still frown over the same majestic river. The Rhine has seen its pretty
fortresses crumble into decay;—Ehrenbreitstein is more strong than ever.
But even Ehrenbreitstein will fall before the power of mind. The Rhine
is crowded with steamboats, where the feudal lord once levied tribute
upon the frail bark of the fisherman; and the approaches to the Rhine
from all Germany, and from France and Belgium, have become a great
series of railroads. Such communications will make war a game much more
difficult to play; and when mankind are thoroughly civilized, it will
never be played again. Seeing, then, what intellect has done and is
doing, we may well venerate the memory of Guttenberg of Mentz.
[Footnote 10: We believe that the text of Stow, "St. Olave in _Surrey_,"
is a mistake for "St. Olave in _Jewry_,"—for Robert Large was buried in
St. Olave in the Jewry, where a plated stone in the ground, in the south
aisle, recorded his death on the 24th of April, 1441.]
[Footnote 11: See Appendix A.]