The consideration of the Printer’s Mark as an institution in this country is characterized by extreme simplicity, both as to its origin and to its design. From an entry in one of the Bagford volumes (Harleian MSS. 5910) in the British Museum, we learn that “rebuses or name devices were brought into England after Edward III. had conquered France: they were used by those who had no arms, and if their names ended in Ton, as Hatton, Boulton, Luton, Grafton, Middleton, Seton, Norton, their signs or devices would be a Hat and a tun, a Boult and a tun, a Lute and a tun, etc., which had no reference to their names, for all names ending in Ton signifieth town, from whence they took their names.” Even in England, therefore, the merchant’s trade device was the direct source of the Printer’s Mark, which it antedated by over a century. It will be convenient, first of all, to explain that the first printing-press in England was that of William Caxton at Westminster, whose first book was issued from this place November 18, 1477; the second was that of Theodoricus de Rood, at Oxford, the first book dated December 17, 1478; the third was that of the unknown printer at St. Albans, 1480, and the fourth was that of John Lettou, in the city of London, 1480, the last-named being soon joined by William de Machlinia, who afterwards carried on the business alone. The earliest phases of wood-engraving employed at one or other of these four distinct houses were either initial letters or borders around the page. At Caxton’s press, as the late Henry Bradshaw has pointed out in a paper read before the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, February 25, 1867, simple initials are found in the Indulgences of 1480 and 1481; at the Oxford press an elaborate border of four pieces, representing birds and flowers, is found in some copies of the two books printed there in October, 1481, and July, 1482. Of illustrations in the text, we find a series of diagrams and a series of eleven cuts illustrating the text of the first edition of “The Mirror of the World,” 1481; a series of sixteen cuts to the second edition of “The Game of Chesse Moralised,” 1483; and two works of the following year, “The Fables of Esop” and the first edition of “The Golden Legend,” each contains not only a large cut for the frontispiece, but in the case of the former, a series of 185 cuts, and, in the latter, two series of eighteen large and fifty-two small cuts. At the Oxford press only two books are known with woodcut illustrations, in neither case cut for the work; at the St. Albans press the only known illustrations in the text are the coats-of-arms found in the “Book of Hawking, Hunting and Coat-Armours,” 1486; at the press of Lettou and W. de Machlinia there is no trace of illustrations.