This is the only Oxford book which was illustrated, and the illustrations are very interesting. A series of eleven large oblong woodcuts occur, and all have been mutilated by having some two inches cut off the blocks to allow of their being used on a small folio page. No other editions of the _Festial_ are illustrated, and Bradshaw pointed out that these cuts were really part of a set intended to illustrate an edition of the _Golden Legend_. In the Lyndewode, issued about 1483, the printer had used one of these cuts in a complete state, so that as early as 1483 he had evidently been considering the issue of a _Golden Legend_ and had begun to make preparations. But Caxton in London was at work on the same book, and, finishing his translation in November 1483, no doubt issued his volume early in 1484. From his prologue we learn that the labour and expense of production were so heavy that he was “halfe desperate to have accomplissed it”; and we can quite understand the Oxford printer hesitating to embark upon a rival edition of a book so expensive to produce, and with which the market had just been supplied. The smaller illustrations belong to a set made for a _Book of Hours_, but no edition containing them is known to exist. In this book occurs also the only woodcut initial letter used at the press, a very roughly cut G without any ornament. Though of the very poorest appearance, it was used with considerable frequency; for it is found between fifty and sixty times at the usual commencement of the sermons “Good men and women.” Four copies of the book are known. Two in the Bodleian, very imperfect, and one in the Rylands Library wanting the first two leaves. The finest is at Lambeth, which wants only the last, blank, leaf. The printing of the book was finished in 1486, “on the day after Saint Edward the King,” presumably March 19; but there is nothing to show whether this would be the year 1486 or 1487 of our reckoning. The only other provincial press of the fifteenth century, that of St Alban’s, stopped also in 1486, but so far no good reason has been suggested for this simultaneous cessation. That it was due to any political or religious motive, as is sometimes stated, is very improbable; the growing foreign competition seems a more reasonable cause.