William Caxton
William Caxton | |
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William Caxton (c. 1422 – c. 1491) was an English merchant, diplomat and writer. He is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England in 1476, and as a printer to be the first English retailer of printed books.
His parentage and date of birth are not known for certain, but he may have been born between 1415 and 1424, perhaps in the Weald or wood land of Kent, perhaps in Hadlow or Tenterden. In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a wealthy London silk mercer.
Shortly after Large's death, Caxton moved to Bruges, Belgium, a wealthy cultured city in which he was settled by 1450. Successful in business, he became governor of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London; on his business travels, he observed the new printing industry in Cologne, which led him to start a printing press in Bruges in collaboration with Colard Mansion. When Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV, married the Duke of Burgundy, they moved to Bruges and befriended Caxton. Margaret encouraged Caxton to complete his translation of the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a collection of stories associated with Homer's Iliad, which he did in 1471.
On his return to England, heavy demand for his translation prompted Caxton to set up a press at
In 2002, Caxton was named among the 100 Greatest Britons in a BBC poll.[1]
Biography
Early life
Caxton's family "fairly certainly" consisted of his parents, Philip and Dionisia, and a brother, Philip.[2] However, the charters used as evidence there are for the manor of Little Wratting in Suffolk; in one charter, this William Caxton is referred to as "otherwise called Causton saddler".[3]
One possible candidate for William's father is Thomas Caxton of Tenterden, Kent, who was like William, a mercer. He was one of the defendants in a case in the Court of Common Pleas[4] in Easter term 1420: Kent. John Okman, versus "Thomas Kaxton, of Tentyrden, mercer", and Joan who was the wife of Thomas Ive, executors of Thomas Ive, for the return of two bonds (scripta obligatoria) which they unjustly retain.
Caxton's date of birth is unknown. Records place it in 1415–1424, based on the fact that his apprenticeship fees were paid in 1438. Caxton would have been 14 at the date of apprenticeship, but masters often paid the fees late.[5] In the preface to his first printed work The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, he claims to have been born and educated in the Weald of Kent.[6] Oral tradition in Tonbridge claims that Caxton was born there; the same with Tenterden.[2] One of the manors of Hadlow was Caustons, owned by the Caxton (De Causton) family.[6] A house in Hadlow reputed to be the birthplace of William Caxton was dismantled in 1936 and incorporated into a larger house rebuilt in Forest Row, East Sussex.[2] Further evidence for Hadlow is that various place names nearby are frequently mentioned by Caxton.[6]
Caxton was in London by 1438, when the registers of the
Printing and later life
Caxton was making trips to
He wasted no time in setting up a printing press in Bruges in collaboration with a Fleming, Colard Mansion, and the first book to be printed in English was produced in 1473: Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye was a translation by Caxton himself. In the epilogue of the book, Caxton tells how his "pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed" with copying the book by hand and so he "practiced and learnt" how to print it.[7] His translation had become popular in the Burgundian court, and requests for copies of it were the stimulus for him to set up a press.[8]
Bringing the knowledge back to England, he set up the country's first-ever press in
Caxton produced chivalric romances (such as Fierabras), the most important of which was Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (1485); classical works; and English and Roman histories. These books appealed to the English upper classes in the late 15th century. Caxton was supported by (but not dependent on) members of the nobility and the gentry. He may also have been paid by the authors of works such as Lorenzo Gulielmo Traversagni, who wrote the Epitome margaritae eloquentiae, which Caxton published c. 1480.[14]
The
Death and memorials
Caxton's precise date of death is uncertain, but estimates from the records of his burial in
Wynkyn de Worde, a Fleming, became the owner of the printing plant after Caxton's death and carried it on for forty-three years. Wynkyn prospered, continuing to put out a steady succession of editions of the small popular pamphlets which were started in Caxton's time.[19]
In 1820, a memorial tablet to Caxton was provided in St Margaret's by the Roxburghe Club and its President, Earl Spencer.[20]
In November 1954, 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 Poets' Corner. The inscription reads:
Near this place William Caxton set up the first printing press in England.[21]
Caxton and the English language
Caxton printed 80 percent of his works in the English language. He translated a large number of works into English and performed much of the translation and the editing work himself. He is credited with printing as many as 108 books, 87 of which were different titles, including the first English translation of Aesop's Fables (26 March 1484[22]). Caxton also translated 26 of the titles himself. His major guiding principle in translating was an honest desire to provide the most linguistically exact replication of foreign language texts into English, but the hurried publishing schedule and his inadequate skill as a translator often led to wholesale transference of French words into English and to numerous misunderstandings.[23]
The English language was changing rapidly in Caxton's time, and the works that he was given to print were in a variety of styles and dialects. Caxton was a technician, rather than a writer, and he often faced dilemmas concerning language standardisation in the books that he printed. He wrote about that subject in the preface to his Eneydos.[24] His successor Wynkyn de Worde faced similar problems.
Caxton is credited with standardising the English language through printing by homogenising regional dialects and largely adopting the London dialect. That facilitated the expansion of English vocabulary, the regularisation of
It is asserted that the spelling of "ghost" with the silent letter h was adopted by Caxton from the influence of Flemish spelling habits.[26][27]
Caxton's "egges" anecdote
In Caxton's prologue to the 1490 edition of his translation of
A mercer called Sheffield was from the north of England. He went into a house and asked the "good wyf" if he could buy some "egges". She replied that she could not speak French, which annoyed him, as he could also not speak French. A bystander suggested that Sheffield was asking for "eyren", which the woman said she understood.[28] After recounting the interaction, Caxton wrote: "Loo what ſholde a man in thyſe dayes now wryte egges or eyren/ certaynly it is harde to playſe euery man/ by cauſe of dyuerſite ⁊ chaũge of langage" ("Lo, what should a man in these days now write: egges or eyren? Certainly it is hard to please every man because of diversity and change of language").[30]
References
- ^ "Great Britons 11–100". BBC. Archived from the original on 4 December 2002. Retrieved 1 August 2012.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-906746-70-7.
- ^ N. F. Blake. "William Caxton" in Authors in the Middle Ages, Volume III.
- ^ "AALT Page". aalt.law.uh.edu. Retrieved 2 May 2023.
- ISBN 9780233960937.
- ^ a b c L.B.L. (1859). "Notices of Kent Worthies, Caxton" (PDF). Archaeologia Cantiana. 2. Kent Archaeological Society: 231–33.
- ^ "William Caxton | English printer, translator, and publisher". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
- ^ Duff, Edward Gordon, William Caxton, p. 25.
- ^ Timbs, John (1855). Curiosities of London: Exhibiting the Most Rare and Remarkable Objects of Interest in the Metropolis. D. Bogue. p. 4.
- ^ Cunningham, Peter (1850). "Victorian London – Districts – Areas – The Almonry". Hand-Book of London. Retrieved 26 September 2020.
- ^ Bordalejo, Barbara. “Caxton’s Editing of the Canterbury Tales.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 108, no. 1 (2014): 41–60.
- ^ Blake, N. F. William Caxton and English Literary Culture. p. 298.
- ^ Lenora D. Wolfgang (1995), "Vignay, Jean de", in William W. Kibler; Grover A. Zinn; Lawrence Earp; John Bell Henneman, Jr. (eds.), Medieval France An Encyclopedia, Garland, p. 955.
- ISBN 978-1-85285-051-7.
- ^ "Incunabula Collection". The University of Manchester. Archived from the original on 1 June 2012. Retrieved 25 February 2012.
- ^ Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester vol. 82, nos. 2 and 3, 2000, p. 89
- ^ A Guide to Special Collections of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. Manchester, 1999; p. 22
- ^ p. 188
- ^ Winship, George Parker (1926). Gutenberg to Plantin: An Outline of the Early History of Printing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
- ^ Thornbury, Walter. "St Margaret's Westminster Pages 567–576 Old and New London: Volume 3. Originally published by Cassell, Petter & Galpin, London, 1878". British History Online. Retrieved 13 July 2020.
- ^ pixeltocode.uk, PixelToCode. "William Caxton". Westminster Abbey.
- ISBN 9780399118883.
- ^ James A. Knapp, "Translating for Print: Continuity and Change in Caxton's Mirrour of the World", in: Translation, Transformation, and Transubstantiation, ed. Carol Poster and Richard Utz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 65–90.
- ^ Wight, C. "Caxton's Chaucer – Caxton's English". www.bl.uk.
- ISBN 9783110288179.
- ISBN 978-1-59240-652-4
- ^ Spell It Out by David Crystal – review, The Guardian, 14 September 2012
- ^ a b c "Caxton's 'egges' story". British Library. Retrieved 24 November 2018.
- ^ Breeze, Andrew. "Caxton's Tale of Eggs and the North Foreland, Kent" (PDF). Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland. Retrieved 24 November 2018.
- ^ "Caxton's Chaucer – Caxton's English". British Library. Retrieved 29 November 2018.
Sources
- Blades, William (1861–63). The Life and Typography of William Caxton, England's First Printer (2 vols.), London: Joseph Lilly.
- required.)
- Blake, Norman Francis (1976). Caxton: England's First Publisher. London: Barnes and Noble. ISBN 0064904504.
- Blake, Norman Francis (1991). William Caxton and English Literary Culture. A&C Black. ISBN 1852850515.
- Blake, Norman Francis (1969). Caxton and His World. Deutsch. ISBN 0233960937.
- ISBN 0-7141-0388-8.
- Childs, Edmund (1976). William Caxton: A Portrait in a Background. Northwood Publications.
- Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Caxton, William". Encyclopædia Britannica. 5 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 587–588.
- Day, Matthew. "William Caxton and Vernacular Classicism." English Studies 103, no. 1 (2022): 19–41.
- De Ricci, Seymour (2010). A Census of Caxtons. General Books LLC. ISBN 978-1-151-95867-9.
- Deacon, Richard (1976). William Caxton: The First English Editor, Printer, Merchant and Translator. London: Frederick Muller.
- Duff, Edward Gordon (1905). William Caxton. Chicago: Caxton Club.
- Duff, Gordon (2022). The Introduction of Printing into England and the Early Work of the Press. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Vol. II ch XIII.
- ISBN 978-0-90465-476-9
- Hellinga, Lotte (2010). William Caxton and Early Printing in England. London: The British Library. ISBN 978-0-71235-088-4
- Hindley, Geoffrey (1979). England in the Age of Caxton. London: Granada. ISBN 978-0-24610-878-4
- James‐Maddocks, Holly. "Illuminated Caxtons and the Trade in Printed Books", The Library, Volume 22, Issue 3, September 2021, pp. 291–315.
- Knight, Charles (1844). William Caxton: The First English Printer. A Biography. Charles Knight & Co.
- Lee, Sidney (1887). "Caxton, William". In Dictionary of National Biography. 9. London. pp. 381–389.
- Loades, David, ed. Reader's Guide to British History (2003) 1: 236–237.
- ISBN 070112198X.
- Plomer, Henry R. (1925). William Caxton (1424–1491). Leonard Parsons
- Plomer, Henry R. (1925). Wynkyn de Worde & His Contemporaries, from the Death of Caxton to 1535. A Chapter in English Printing. Grafton & Co.
- Stuart, Dorothy Margaret. (1960). "William Caxton: Mercer, Translator, and Master Printer" History Today 10:4 pp. 256–264.
External links
- Works by William Caxton at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about William Caxton at Internet Archive
- Works by William Caxton at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Caxton's Canterbury Tales from the British Library
- Selected works, printed by Caxton from the Folger Shakespeare Library's digital image collection
- The Game and Playe of the Chesse. Introduction and text, part of the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series
- Hutchinson, John (1892). . Men of Kent and Kentishmen (Subscription ed.). Canterbury: Cross & Jackman. pp. 31–32.
- "Industries: Printing. A History of the County of Middlesex Volume 2. pages 197-200". 1911. Retrieved 26 June 2023.
Works published by Caxton from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress
- A book of the chesse moralysed
- AL Ingratitude vtterly settying apart, we owe to calle to our myndes the manyfolde gyftes of grace ...
- Cordiale quattuor novissimorum.
- Here begynneth the prohemye vpon the reducynge, both out of latyn as of frensshe in to our englyssh tongue of the polytyque book named Tullius de senectute.
- Here begynneth the table of the rubrices of this presente volume named the Mirrour of the World or thymage of the same.
- Livre des faits d'armes et de chevalerie
- The recuyles or gaderige to gyder of ye hystoryes of Troye...