But let us turn from this dismal theme to something much more cheerful. While little Richard Duke of York was in Sanctuary with his mother, he must have often run across under the shadow of the great elms that stood before the Abbots House, to the Almonry, a small building near by. For to the Almonry eight years before a wise man had come with a strange new invention. He hung a red pole at the door for a sign; and soon all the learned men in the kingdom began to gather at the Almonry of Westminster, and talk to William Caxton, the printer of books. For he it was who had come from Bruges in Flanders, bringing with him the first printing press that had ever been seen in England. And at Westminster he worked away for fifteen years, translating and printing with ceaseless industry. It was a hard task that the industrious printer had undertaken, for the English language was in a state of transition. The tongue of each shire varied so as to be hardly intelligible to men of the next county; and Caxton says that the old-English Charters which the Abbot of Westminster fetched him as models seemed "more like to Dutch than to English." In his translations he had to choose between two schools--French affectation, and English pedantry. "Some honest and great clerks," he says, "have been with me and desired me to write the most curious terms I could find;" and others blamed him, saying that in his translations he "had over many curious terms which could not be understood of common people, and desired me to use old and homely terms." "Fain would I please every man," the good-tempered printer exclaims. But, happily for his successors, Caxton's excellent sense inclined him to good, plain English, "to the common terms that be daily used"--and he therefore left a far more lasting mark on English literature than can be gauged by the number and importance of the books he printed. [Illustration: MEMORIAL URN IN HENRY THE SEVENTH'S CHAPEL.] The Almonry soon became a centre for all that was most cultivated in England. Lord Arundel pressed the printer to take courage when the length of the Golden Legend made him "half desperate to have accomplisht it," and ready to "lay it apart;" and promised him a yearly fee of a buck in summer and a doe in winter if it were done. Noble ladies lent him their precious books. Churchmen brought him their translations. A mercer of London prayed him to undertake the "Royal Book" of Philip le Bel. The Queen's brother, the hapless Lord Rivers, chatted with him over his own translation of the "Sayings of the Philosophers." His "Tully" was printed under the patronage of Edward the Fourth. And among his chief supporters was Richard, Duke of Gloucester, to whom his "Order of Chivalry" was dedicated.