From the twelfth century onward Oxford appears to have been a great centre of book-binding, not only as the seat of a University, but from the number and importance of the religious houses in its immediate neighbourhood. From various records and registers we get the names of individual binders in an unbroken series. While we can point to exquisite bindings produced at London, Durham, and Winchester as early as the twelfth century, and while doubtless similar fine bindings were produced in Oxford, yet strangely enough and very unfortunately we cannot point to any definite specimen of a decorated Oxford binding earlier than the second half of the fifteenth century. From about 1460 to the end of the century, on the other hand, examples are plentiful, and the bindings of this period have a very distinctive style of their own. The old styles of binding seem to have lingered on in Oxford and even some of the old tools. The earliest binding which we can definitely point to as executed there is on a volume of sermons written in 1460. The decoration consists of stamps arranged as parallelograms one inside the other and covering the main part of the side. One of the stamps used on this binding, depicting a strange bird, is the identical stamp found on a twelfth-century binding in the British Museum. On the back are found small roundels arranged in sets of three, an ornament very common on all early Oxford bindings, and a single stamp on which the three roundels are engraved seems peculiar to Oxford work. Three manuscripts in Magdalen College, Oxford, written and bound between 1462 and 1470, are of similar early style, and might from their appearance and dies be considered two centuries older. The advent of Rood in Oxford agrees in point of time with the introduction of a class of binding very distinctive in style. The centre of the side contains a panel composed of horizontal rows of stamps and enclosed by a frame formed with an oblong stamp of foliage twined round a staff. On spaces outside the frame are stamped roses and roundels in sets of three. The stamps employed on these bindings show a distinct foreign influence, and many of them are almost identical with those used by foreign binders notably of the Low Countries. Some bindings, certainly produced in Oxford about this time, have not only foreign dies upon them but have them disposed in quite a foreign style, and are probably the work of foreign binders settled in the town. The number of different dies used on Oxford bindings, between 1480 and 1500, is very large. Gibson, in his work on the subject, gives drawings of nearly a hundred; and though some of these are of the simplest character and in no way distinctive, many of them are both clever in design and extremely well engraved.