This testimony was generally corroborated by the other printers and persons examined, to many of whom it appeared to be notorious that Roger Ward had printed the book in a letter not his own, and that he had since cast a new fount of type for his own use. The whole inquiry throws a curious light on the methods of business of the printers of the day. Composition then, as Mr. Arber points out, was not necessarily done in the master-printer’s house where he kept {126} his press. Of course that which was done by himself and his apprentices was done there, but work given out to journeymen (who were generally householders), was probably done in their houses and paid for by piecework. “A custom which,” continues Mr. Arber, “was facilitated by most of the books then printed being almost always in some one size of type. Therefore there could not be so much control exercised over the literature in respect to the guardianship of the type—however easy it was for printers of that day to identify the printer of a book by its typography—neither do we find any such attempted; but only in respect to the custody of the hand printing press, which was doubtless well secured every night as a dangerous instrument, lest secret nocturnal printing should go on without the owner’s consent.”[208] In the same year, 1582, Christopher Barker, the Queen’s printer, drew up an able report on the condition of printing as it then existed, in which, among other matters, he referred to the cost of making type, and its consequent effect on publishers and printers. “In King Edward the Sixt his Dayes,” he says, “Printers and printing began greatly to increase; but the provision of letter, and many other thinges belonging to printing was so exceeding chargeable, that most of those printers were Dryven throughe necessitie, to compound before[hand] with the booksellers at so low value, as the printers themselves were most tymes small gayners and often loosers . . . The Bookesellers . . now (1582) . . keepe no printing howse, neither beare any charge of letter, or other furniture, but onlie paye for the workmanship . . . so that the artificer printer, growing every Daye more and more unable to provide letter[209] and other furniture . . . will in tyme be an occasion of great discredit to the professours of the arte.” The report goes on to mention that at that time (December 1582) “there are twenty-two printing howses in London, where eight or ten at the most would suffise for all England, yea, and Scotland too.”[210]