into those of the
laity. Knowledge became vulgarized, it stooped to lower and meaner forms
that it might educate the whole people. England was slow to catch the
intellectual fire which was already burning brightly across the Alps, but
even amidst the turmoil of its wars and revolutions intelligence was being
more widely spread. While the older literary class was dying out, a glance
beneath the surface shows us the stir of a new interest in knowledge
amongst the masses of the people itself. The very character of the
authorship of the time, its love of compendiums and abridgements of such
scientific and historical knowledge as the world believed it possessed,
its dramatic performances or mysteries, the commonplace morality of its
poets, the popularity of its rimed chronicles, are proof that literature
was ceasing to be the possession of a purely intellectual class, and was
beginning to appeal to the nation at large. The correspondence of the
Paston family not only displays a fluency and grammatical correctness
which would have been impossible a few years before, but shows country
squires discussing about books and gathering libraries. The increased use
of linen paper in place of the costlier parchment helped in the
popularization of letters. In no former age had finer copies of books been
produced; in none had so many been transcribed. This increased demand for
their production caused the processes of copying and illuminating
manuscripts to be transferred from the scriptoria of the religious houses
into the hands of trade-gilds like the Gild of St. John at Bruges or the
Brothers of the Pen at Brussels. It was in fact this increase of demand
for books, pamphlets, or fly-sheets, especially of a grammatical or
religious character, in the middle of the fifteenth century that brought
about the introduction of printing. We meet with the first records of the
printer's art in rude sheets struck off from wooden blocks, "block-books"
as they are now called. Later on came the vast advance of printing from
separate and moveable types. Originating at Maintz with the three famous
printers, Gutenberg, Fust, and Schoeffer, this new process travelled
southward to Strassburg, crossed the Alps to Venice, where it lent itself
through the Aldi to the spread of Greek literature in Europe, and then
floated down the Rhine to the towns of Flanders.

[Sidenote: Caxton]

It was probably at the press of Colard Mansion, in a little room over the
p