"In the infancy of printing in this country (owing to the competition of foreigners) it would seem that our own printers (who were both booksellers and book-binders) had suffered considerably in their trade, by being obliged to carry their goods to a market where the generality of purchasers were pleased with more elegantly executed works at an inferior price. The legislature felt, as every patriotic legislature would feel, for their injured countrymen; and, accordingly, the statute of Richard III. was enacted,[176] whereby English printers and book-binders were protected from the mischiefs, which would otherwise have overtaken them. Thus our old friend Caxton went to work with greater glee, and mustered up all his energies to bring a good stock of British manufacture to the market. What he usually sold his books for, in his life time, I have not been able to ascertain; but, on his decease, one of his _Golden Legends_ was valued, in the churchwardens' books, at six shillings and eight pence.[177] Whether this was a great or small sum I know not; but, from the same authority we find that twenty-two pounds were given, twelve years before, for eleven huge folios, called '_Antiphoners_.'[178] In the reign of Henry VIII. it would seem, from a memorandum in the catalogue of the Fletewode library (if I can trust my memory with such minutiae) that Law-Books were sold for about ten sheets to the groat.[179] Now, in the present day, Law-Books--considering the wretched style in which they are published, with broken types upon milk-and-water-tinted paper--are the dearest of all modern publications. Whether they were anciently sold for so comparatively extravagant a sum may remain to be proved. Certain it is that, before the middle of the sixteenth century, you might have purchased Grafton's abridgment of Polydore Virgil's superficial work about _The Invention of Things_ for fourteen pence;[180] and the same printer's book of _Common Prayer_ for four shillings. Yet if you wanted a superbly bound _Prymer_, it would have cost you (even five and twenty years before) nearly half a guinea.[181] Nor could you have purchased a decent _Ballad_ much under sixpence; and _Hall's Chronicle_ would have drawn from your purse twelve shillings;[182] so that, considering the then value of specie, there is not much ground of complaint against the present prices of books."