WYNKYN DE WORDE was the most brilliant, as he was the most prolific, English printer of the fifteenth century. Inheriting some, if not all, of his master Caxton’s matrices, he cut a large number of new letters for himself, and appears in the execution of these founts to have perfected the manual processes of the manufacture, so as to leave no doubt that his types were produced in true adjustable moulds, out of durable matrices, impressed with hard metal punches. His letters are clear and regularly cast; indeed, his English or Black-letter was so excellent that it became a model for all future letter-cutters, and was closely imitated, not only in England, but, apparently, abroad. Some writers have considered that De Worde supplied duplicate matrices of his Black-letter to some of his contemporaries, or else cast founts from his own matrices for the trade. The close resemblance between some of his founts and those of other English printers of the period, seems to give colour to such a suggestion, although the probability is that his old discarded types occasionally found their way into the provinces, where (as at the press of Goes of York) they appeared during the lifetime of their original founder. Palmer (or Psalmanazar) makes the following {90} note on this subject: “There is one circumstance,” he says,[155] “that induces me to think he was his own letter-founder; which is, that in some of his first printed books, the very letter he made use of, is the same used by all the printers in London to this day; and, I believe, were struck from his puncheons. The first is the two lin’d Great Primmer Black, the next is the Great Primmer Black.” Of each of these two founts he shows a specimen (a facsimile of which is here given), which, as Rowe Mores explains, were taken from the matrices at that time (1732) in Grover’s foundry, where they were reputed at one time to have belonged to De Worde.[156] [Illustration: 17. Black Letter, supposed to be from De Worde’s matrices. (From Palmer’s _General History of Printing_.)] This piece of evidence is not very convincing. It is more to the point that some of his early types are not to be observed in books from the press by any foreign printer at that time; which could scarcely have been had he, along with other English printers, purchased founts from some of the foreign founders at that time carrying on a brisk trade with this country. It is, however, to be borne in mind that every printer cut or provided himself with Black as regularly as with Roman and Italic; and the Black-letter, especially in the large sizes, being easy to imitate, the general resemblance among the founts of that period may mean nothing more than that De Worde’s models were faithfully copied by his imitators.