orch of St. Donat's at Bruges, that William Caxton learned the art which
he was the first to introduce into England. A Kentish boy by birth, but
apprenticed to a London mercer, Caxton had already spent thirty years of
his manhood in Flanders as Governor of the English gild of Merchant
Adventurers there when we find him engaged as copyist in the service of
Edward's sister, Duchess Margaret of Burgundy. But the tedious process of
copying was soon thrown aside for the new art which Colard Mansion had
introduced into Bruges. "For as much as in the writing of the same,"
Caxton tells us in the preface to his first printed work, the Tales of
Troy, "my pen is worn, my hand weary and not steadfast, mine eyes dimmed
with over much 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 the
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 see, and is not written with pen and ink as other books be, to the end
that every man may have them at once, for all the books of this story here
emprynted as ye see were begun in one day and also finished in one day."
The printing-press was the precious freight he brought back to England in
1476 after an absence of five-and-thirty years. Through the next fifteen,
at an age when other men look for ease and retirement, we see him plunging
with characteristic energy into his new occupation. His "red pale," or
heraldic shield marked with a red bar down the middle, invited buyers to
the press he established in the Almonry at Westminster, a little enclosure
containing a chapel and almshouses near the west front of the church,
where the alms of the abbey were distributed to the poor. "If it please
any man, spiritual or temporal," runs his advertisement, "to buy any pyes
of two or three commemorations of Salisbury use emprynted after the form
of the present letter, which be well and truly correct, let him come to
Westminster into the Almonry at the red pale, and he shall have them good
chepe." Caxton was a practical man of business, as this advertisement
shows, no rival of the Venetian Aldi or of the classical printers of Rome,
but resolved to get a living from his trade, supplying priests with
serv