William Caxton: Mercer Translator and Master Printer
Dorothy Margaret Stuart describes how the earliest English printed book was issued from William Caxton’s press at Westminster in 1477, under the patronage of the ruling House of York.
In the year 1468, when Johannes Guthenberg died at Mainz, there occurred in the city of Bruges an event that determined the time and the place of the first introduction into England of the art with which his name must always be linked—the art of printing.
This event was the marriage of Edward IV’s sister, Margaret of York, and Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.1
To the merchants of London and to their shrewd King, the political and commercial advantages implicit in the Anglo-Burgundian alliance were clear: what no one could then have foreseen was that within the next decade a new and decisive influence would be thence brought to bear upon the lives of all but the most abjectly illiterate Englishmen.
The young Duchess, coming from a country divided and to some extent impoverished by the Wars of the Roses, must have looked with wonder and delight at “the Florence of Flanders,” with its lordly libraries, its skillful limners, illuminators and architects, its classically-minded pageant-masters.
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