Reginald Wolfe, so well known and highly esteemed, was a German by birth, and trained in his craft in the office of the Strasburg master Conrad Neobarius, whose device of _The Brazen Serpent_ he afterward adopted. Edward VI appointed Wolfe royal printer in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as bookseller and stationer, with an annuity of 26s. 8d. We find the names of his executors and the chief promoters of the history in the entry on the Registers of the Stationers' Company, under date of July 1, 1578: "Receyued of master harrison and master Bisshop for the licensinge of Raphaels Hollingshedes cronycles XX^s and a copy," which, by the way, Mr. Arber remarks to be the largest fee he had met with. Some copies bear the imprint of one, some of the other; and there are still others with the names of John Harrison (there were four publishers of this name), Lucas Harrison and John Hunne, who were also probably among them "that were to defray the charges for the impression." No printer's name appears in either volume, but the figure of a mermaid upon the title-pages, and a larger mark of two hands holding a serpent upon a crutch at the end of the first volume, show it to have been from the press of Reginald Wolfe's apprentice and successor, Henry Bynneman of The Mermaid, in Knight Rider Street. Boy and man knowing his master's hopes and fears for his _Universal Cosmographie_, acquainted with the long travail put upon it, and so properly desirous, like the rest, to see some fruit born of it, who could have done the work so well and faithfully as he? In the preface to the second volume we are told that it was intended to bring out the histories of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with their descriptions, in one volume, and the descriptions and abridgements of the histories of other countries in another; but that the chronicles of England growing very voluminous it was deemed best to defer printing the histories of the other countries, and to divide the material on hand into two volumes. Here, however, a new difficulty presented itself; the history of England after the Conquest was found to equal in length all the other matter, and, if allowed to follow after the early history of the Island, in its proper order, would make the volumes very unequal in size; so it was given a volume by itself, with the pagination continuing that of the English history in the first volume. The other histories have separate title-pages, paginations, and indexes.