[45] Including perhaps the four sets of decorative capitals attributed to Holbein, one ornamental, the others representing a Dance of Peasants, Children, and a Dance of Death. CHAPTER XII PRINTING IN ENGLAND (1476-1580)[46] Something has already been written about the earliest English books on the scale to which they are entitled in a rapid survey of European incunabula. We may now consider them more in detail as befits a book written in English. [Illustration: XXVII. WESTMINSTER, CAXTON, C. 1490 THE FIFTEEN OES.] William Caxton, a Kentishman, born about 1420, had been brought up as a mercer in the city of London, and the relations between the English wooltraders and the clothmakers of Flanders being very intimate, he had, as he tells us himself, passed thirty years of his life (in round numbers the years from twenty years of age to fifty) "for the most part in Brabant, Flanders, Holland, and Zealand." During the last few years of this time he had held the important position of Governor of the English merchants at Bruges, but about 1469 he surrendered this in order to become secretary to Edward IV's sister, Margaret, wife of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Some years before this, Raoul Lefevre, chaplain to the Duke's predecessor, had compiled an epitome of the histories of Troy, _Le Recueil des histoires de Troye_, and in March, 1469, Caxton amused himself by beginning to translate this into English. Dissatisfied with the result he laid it on one side, but was bidden by his patroness, the Duchess, to continue his work. This he finished on 19 September, 1471, while staying at Cologne. According to a distinct statement by Wynkyn de Worde, whom (at least as early as 1480) he employed as his foreman, Caxton printed at Cologne "himself to avaunce" the first Latin edition of the _De Proprietatibus Rerum_, a kind of encyclopaedia "on the properties of things," by an English friar of the thirteenth century named Bartholomew. Now the first edition of this work is undoubtedly one printed at Cologne about 1471 or 1472 at an anonymous press which Bradshaw called that of the printer of the 1473 edition of the _Dialogi decem Auctorum_, and Mr. Proctor, less happily, that of the printer of the _Flores Sancti Augustini_, an undated book in the same type. The _De Proprietatibus Rerum_ is certainly slightly earlier than either of these, and there are some typographical differences which suggest that between the completion of the one book and the beginning of the other two the press may have changed masters. The _De Proprietatibus_ is by far the largest book of the whole group, and being by, or credited to, an English author, it is highly probable that the well-to-do ex-Governor of the English merchants became temporarily a member of the firm for its production and shared in the venture. This is the natural meaning of Wynkyn de Worde's statement that Caxton was the "first prynter of this