History of the English People, Volume III: The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540Green, John Richard
History
History of the English People, Volume III: The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540
Green, John Richard
Great Britain -- History
where the alms of the abbey were distributed to the poor. "If it please
any man, spiritual or temporal," runs his advertisement, "to buy any pyes
of two or three commemorations of Salisbury use emprynted after the form
of the present letter, which be well and truly correct, let him come to
Westminster into the Almonry at the red pale, and he shall have them good
chepe." Caxton was a practical man of business, as this advertisement
shows, no rival of the Venetian Aldi or of the classical printers of Rome,
but resolved to get a living from his trade, supplying priests with
service books and preachers with sermons, furnishing the clerk with his
"Golden Legend" and knight and baron with "joyous and pleasant histories
of chivalry." But while careful to win his daily bread, he found time to
do much for what of higher literature lay fairly to hand. He printed all
the English poetry of any moment which was then in existence. His
reverence for that "worshipful man, Geoffrey Chaucer," who "ought to be
eternally remembered," is shown not merely by his edition of the
"Canterbury Tales," but by his reprint of them when a purer text of the
poem offered itself. The poems of Lydgate and Gower were added to those of
Chaucer. The Chronicle of Brut and Higden's "Polychronicon" were the only
available works of an historical character then existing in the English
tongue, and Caxton not only printed them but himself continued the latter
up to his own time. A translation of Boethius, a version of the AEneid from
the French, and a tract or two of Cicero, were the stray first-fruits of
the classical press in England.
[Sidenote: Caxton's work]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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