Holland's Influence on English Language and Literature

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Chapter XIV On William Caxton

William Caxton is the famous name connected with the introduction of the printing press into England. Caxton printed more than one hundred books. ‘A greater benefactor, indeed, to the intellectual improvement of his country it would be difficult to mention than him, who introduced the art of printing.’ His four hundredth anniversary was celebrated in England on the 18th of November, 1877, that date having been adopted as marking the introduction of printing into England, because, according to the unique colophon of a copy of the ‘Dictes and Sayinges of the Philosophers’ this work was published on the 15th of November, 1477, while the date of the earliest publications of Caxton is unknown. ‘For many years an old building, which tumbled down in 1846, was pointed out as Caxton's house, but it was proved to be no older than the time of Charles the Second. This did not prevent parts of the woodwork being made into walking-sticks and snuff-boxes, and presented to various patrons of literature as genuine relics of our famous printer.’¹

Born in ‘Kent in the Weeld,’ a place about the situation of which topographers do not agree, and at a date (perhaps 1420) unknown till this day, William Caxton was educated to be a merchant. In the year 1438 he was entered apprentice to Robert Large,

1 F.C. Price, Facsimiles with a Memoir of our first Printer. London, 1877. Printed only in 125 copies.

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who, in the next year, became Lord Mayor of London, and died in 1441. One year after the death of his master, Caxton went abroad and lived at Bruges, the Burgundian Capital in the Southern Netherlands, and he stayed there for the following thirty-five years, with the exception of some short visits to London, Cologne and perhaps some other places. As a youth of twenty years, Caxton came to the Netherlands; as a man of fifty-five he went back to England, to spend there the remaining fourteen years of his life, so that for more than half of his life he lived in the Netherlands. In 1463 Caxton became what they called at that time ‘governor of the English nation’ at Bruges, which post he retained till the year 1469; but about this time some reverse of fortune apparently befell him, by which he was obliged to leave Bruges for a while. But in the year 1467 Count Charles the Bold had married Margaret, the sister of the English King, Edward IV, and now we know that Caxton ‘received some appointment in the court of the English wife of Charles at Bruges, and became a favorite with the noble lady.’¹ Before the Princess Margaret came to the Netherlands, Caxton, having no great charge or occupation, had commenced for his amusement the translation of ‘Le recueil des Histoires de Troye’ by Raoul le Fèvre, from French into English, but, discouraged, he had abandoned the task. This he told one time to Margaret and she, as he himself tells it, not only encouraged but commanded him to continue and finish the work. Caxton obeyed and the translation was finished in 1471. The work was printed at Bruges by Caxton, and Colard Mansion, a copyist and calligrapher, who about that time had started a printing office. After this first book, another one was printed, viz., ‘The game and the

1 Price, Facsimiles and Memoir

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playe of chesse moralysed,’ and soon after that time Caxton took leave of the land of his adoption, where he had lived for thirty-five years, and arrived at London, ‘laden with a freight more precious than the most opulent merchant adventurer ever dreamed of, to endow his country with that inestimable blessing, the printing press.’¹

‘Towards the end of the year 1476 or in the beginning of 1477 we find Caxton in occupation at Westminster, his press erected in the Almonry. At the time Caxton started in England his whole stock of type consisted of two fonts, or sets of types, a church or text type, and a secretary type. These fonts he purchased in the Low Countries and brought them with him.’² From that time Caxton began the printing of a series of at least one hundred works, which continued till his death in the year 1491.

As a young apprentice of a merchant's office, Caxton went to the Netherlands, and after thirty-five years he came back to England as a man, acquainted with book-printing, with the literature, the language, with the whole civilization of a city like Bruges, the capital of the Burgundian Counts, the most brilliant and most luxurious, the most wealthy, and highly civilized center of European civilization, at that time. The fruits of his thirty-five years of abode in the Netherlands we see in what he performed during the remaining fourteen years of work in his native country. As translator and as printer he blessed his people with the literature, and the civilization, he had observed, and made himself acquainted with, in the Netherlands. To the Dutch language he was so accustomed that he used many Dutch words (of which

1 Ibid.

2 Price, Facsimiles and Memoir.

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De Hoog gives a list of twenty-nine examples) as if they were pure English. The famous animal-epos of Reinard the Fox he translated, not from the original French, but from the Dutch version, which is ‘much superior to the original and admittedly the finest version of the Reynard story.’¹

1 Herbert J.C. Grierson, in vol. VIII, p. 5, of the Periods of European Literature, by Prof. Saintsbury, New York, 1906.