ed and one blank leaf, was evidently to
carry the last remaining leaf of the fourth book and thereby make
possible a division of the volume at this point into two nearly
equal parts. Advantage has apparently been taken of this division
to bind the Grenville copy (Brit. Mus. IB. 55060) in two volumes.
Wynkyn de Worde, who reprinted the Polychronicon in 1495, followed
in this particular Caxton's example and in order to begin the fifth
book with a new signature left at the end of the fourth book nearly
a whole leaf blank, though he separated the other books by a blank
space of no more than three or four lines. Caxton's use of arabic
figures for signatures was confined to the years 1481-1483; after
that date he used letters only. The first few chapter-headings of
each book have Latin ordinals (Capitulum primum, secundum, etc.)
which are soon dropped for arabic figures. Gothic letter, Caxton's
fourth font, forty lines to the page, with headline. Two- to
seven-line spaces left for chapter and book initials, which are
supplied in red. Chapter-headings underlined in red. Blades ii,
172. Ames-Dibdin i, 138. Seymour de Ricci p. 60.

Seventy-two leaves, including the five blanks, are wanting in this copy,
viz.: sign. a-C; 1, 1, 4, 5, 8; 2, 1, 4, 5; 3, 2; 4, 1; 27, 3; [28*,2];
44, 7; 50-55. The lacking parts comprise the first twenty leaves
(Prohemye and alphabetical index), the last forty leaves (Caxton's
eighth book), and twelve intermediate leaves. Of these the Proheyme is
supplied in facsimile and sign. 4, 1 in manuscript. What is possibly an
original impression of Caxton's large device is placed at the end of the
volume. This was used by Caxton only during his last years, 1487-91, and
by Wynkyn de Worde, into whose hands the original block passed, in his
folios for thirty years longer. From one of the latter this may have
been taken, possibly from the Polychronicon of 1495, where the other
side of the leaf it occupied was blank, as is the case here also.

Trevisa's translation of Higden was completed, according to the best
MSS., in 1387, not in 1357 as stated on fol. 389^b. (In 1357 the 18th of
April fell on Tuesday, not Thursday, and Thomas Lord Berkeley was then
in the fifth, not the thirty-fifth year of his age.) Caxton was himself
the translator of twenty-two of the one hundred books which he printed
and it was therefore not strange that T