Episode 21 is all about William Caxton, the first English printer.
Podcast recommendation:
BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time
In Our Time Episode on William Caxton and the Printing Press
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Episode Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I’m your host, Heather Teysko. A special shout out to my husband, Jonathan, who is learning a lot about home recording for his music, and is recording me using his fancy equipment right now, holding a mic up as we speak. I hope you can notice a difference in quality. So I still want to do that episode on Tudor colleges but I haven’t had a chance to do the reading for that I want to. I blame it on the teething eight-month-old with whom I live and the lack of sleep associated with that.
So anyway, today I’m going to talk about William Caxton and the printing press. One of my favorite Radio 4 shows is called In Our Time, which you can download as a podcast on iTunes. And they did an episode on William Caxton about two years ago, I’ll stick a link up to it on the blog. It got me interested in the history of the printing press. And later readings on Elizabeth Woodville, who was an early supporter of printing books in England also got me interested.
So William Caxton was a 15th-century technological pioneer who introduced the printing press to England in 1476. He was also the first English retailer of printed books. Printing was a game-changer in the mid-15th century, the way the Internet has been for us. Before printing, if you want copies of a book, you had to get them written out by hand by educated people, usually monks. Not only was this time-consuming, but it also meant that there was room for error and revisions.
Printing presses meant that you could have multiple copies of the same text quickly. Pamphlets which all read the same could be disseminated quickly and easily. Suddenly, there was a push for people to learn to read, since there were materials available that they could read. If you mix together a push for a population to become literate, with easily available reading materials, and a religious reformation, you have the ingredients you need to cause a seismic shift in society.
So let’s talk about William Caxton who helped to contribute to these huge societal changes. Caxton was born around 1420 in Kent, about 30 years before printing was invented by Johann Gutenberg in the 1450’s. Like many new inventions early on, the technology spread slowly from Mainz where Gutenberg was based and printed his famous Bible around 1454. In the mid-1460’s, it spread more rapidly and reached Cologne around 1465. That was where Caxton first engaged with printing in 1471/72.
But back to Caxton’s early life, a house in Hadlow reputed to be the birthplace of William Caxton was dismantled in 1436 and incorporated into a larger house rebuilt in Forest Row, East Sussex. Kent was largely inhabited by descendants of the Flemish cloth makers who had been induced by Edward III to settle in that district. And this would have had an effect on the English that was spoken there, which Caxton himself described as quote, “Broad and rude”.
He received a good education, though were not told where, and having determined to take up the business of the cloth merchant, was apprenticed in 1438 to Robert Large, one of the most wealthy and important merchants in London, and a leading member of the Mercers Company. Robert Large died in 1441, and Caxton stayed at the Mercers business becoming successful, and eventually becoming a member of the household of Margaret, the Duchess of Burgundy, who was also the sister of Edward IV and Richard III. Caxton had some leisure time in his new position, and he turned his attention towards literature and travel.
In 1472 he made that trip to Cologne where he observed the new printing industry, and he was significantly influenced by German printing. He immediately went home and set up a press in Flanders with two founts of type cut in imitation of ordinary book-hand. And the first book to be printed in English, was produced in 1473 Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, which is the Collection of the Stories of Troye, a translation by Caxton himself, which would become very popular in the Burgundian court. The book was a French courtly romance written by Raoul Lefèvre, chaplin to Phillip III, Duke of Burgundy. And a concluding letter in his first printed book, Caxton described how he had labored on his translation of the text, and how useful the new invention of the printing press was. He says,
“And for as much as in the writing of the same my pen is worn, my hand weary and not steadfast, mine eyne dimmed with overmuch looking on the white paper, and my courage not so prone and ready to labour as it hath been, and that age creepeth on me daily and feebleth all the body, and also because I have promised to divers gentlemen and to my friends to address to them as hastily as I might this said book, therefore I have practised and learned at my great charge and dispense to ordain this said book in print, after the manner and form as ye may here see, and is not written with pen and ink as other books be, to the end that every man may have them at once.”
He brought his knowledge back to England, and they set up a press at Westminster in 1476 and the first book known to have been produced in England, was an edition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Another early title was Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres first printed in November of 1477 and translated by Earl Rivers, the king’s brother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s brother. Caxton’s translation of the Golden Legend published in 1483, and The Book of the Knight in the Tower published in 1484, contain the earliest verses of the Bible to be printed in English.
He produced also the first translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in English. He produced chivalric romances, the most important of which was Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, classical works, and English and Roman histories. These books appeal to the English upper classes in the late 15th century. He was supported by, but not dependent on members of the nobility and gentry.
The precise date of his death is uncertain, but estimates from the records of his burial in St. Margaret’s Westminster, tend to show that he died near March of the calendar year 1492. But there is some confusion around that because the calendar that was still used at the time ended on the 24th of March, so it was either 1491 or 1492.
In November 1954, so like almost 500 years later, a memorial to Caxton was unveiled in Westminster Abbey by J.J. Astor, chairman of the Press Council. The white stone plaque is on the wall next to the door to Poet’s Corner. The inscription reads
“Near this place William Caxton set up the first printing press in England. The stone was placed here to commemorate the greatest assistance rendered to the abbey appeal fund by the English-speaking press throughout the world.”
Caxton printed 4/5 of his works in the English language. He translated a large number of works in English, performing much of the translation and editing work himself. He’s credited with printing as many as 108 books, 87 of which are different titles. He also translated about 26 titles himself. His major guiding principle and translating was an honest desire to provide the most linguistically exact replication of foreign language texts into English, but he was always on a hurried schedule, and he was not a good translator, and so a lot of the translations in his books are kind of wrong, and it’s sort of funny sometimes.
To most of his publications, he added prologues, epilogues, which have a personal touch, they’re kind of like letters. And they show us that he had a really good sense of humor, and he would often write up self-deprecating explanations of why his translations were so imperfect.
He is credited with standardizing the English language that is homogenizing regional dialects through printing. And this also facilitated the expansion of English vocabulary, which we would, of course, see blossom with Shakespeare 100 years later, and also the regularization of inflection and syntax.
So one note, if you’re in Southern California, the copy of the book presented to Margaret of Burgundy is actually at the Huntington Library in San Marino. So if you’re in Southern California, it’s definitely worth it to make a trip there. I was just there a couple of weeks ago, and I didn’t see it, because I didn’t know it was there. So I’m going to have to make a trip back very soon to check it out.
And I’m actually reading a book right now called The Pirate Queen about Queen Elizabeth and her support of piracy during the war with Spain. So I’ll probably start to do an episode on that soon. Because I know this is supposed to be like the Renaissance English History Podcast, and most of the stuff I’ve been talking about lately has been more medieval. But I’m in a medieval phase, so there we go. We’ll do more Elizabethan stuff as the year goes on.
So that’s it this week, except for the book recommendation, which is actually the podcast recommendation, the In Our Time podcast on William Caxton, there aren’t really a lot of books about him. And the podcast is really interesting. So I’ll put links to that up in the blog. You can also visit the blog to send me comments, story ideas, or other general random thoughts. The address is https://www.englandcast.com. You can also find me on Facebook at Facebook.com/Englandcast. And also, if any of you out there in podcastland are in New Zealand, I’m going to be there in just over two weeks, my first trip there. So drop me a message if you’d like to meet up, because I would love to talk about Renaissance history to some Kiwis. So thanks so much for listening, and have a wonderful rest of your month. Bye!
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave us a rating on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]