A little over thirty years ago a most preposterous attempt was made in a series of letters published in the _Athenæum_ to prove that the schoolmaster printer of St Alban’s was the real printer of many of the books attributed to Caxton at Westminster. A number of quite irrelevant assertions were made and vague arguments brought forward of which the following is apparently the strongest. Because Caxton’s edition of the _Description of Britain_, printed in 1480, has not the place of printing mentioned in the colophon, while some of the later editions speak of the _Chronicles_ and _Description of Britain_ as printed by the schoolmaster of St Alban’s, therefore Caxton’s edition was printed at St Alban’s. This is surely a quite unwarranted argument from the fact that W. de Worde preferred to reprint the St Alban’s edition rather than Caxton’s. The writer sums up as follows. “Putting all these facts together they form very strong circumstantial evidence that Caxton had two presses at work at one and the same time, at Westminster and St Alban’s; that what he could not print at Westminster, for lack of time and space, he had printed for him by this schoolmaster at St Alban’s, and that all the books of Caxton’s which bear no date or place come from St Alban’s.” The writer also asserts that all Caxton’s early books were printed by him at St Alban’s before he moved his press to Westminster. One other strange assertion about the St Alban’s press remains to be noticed. It is both the newest and the most absurd. Under the article, St Alban’s, in the latest edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, the history of the early press is summed up in these few lines. “On a printing press, one of the earliest in the kingdom, set up in the Abbey, the first English translation of the Bible was printed.” As at Oxford, the St Alban’s press ceased its work in 1486 for no reason that we can explain, but most probably owing to competition. The Oxford and St Alban’s printers must both have seen that in Latin books they could not hope to compete with their foreign rivals, either in excellence of workmanship or in cheapness, and each made a final effort by the production of books in English where foreign rivalry would not be felt. Just as at Oxford, too, a second press was at work for a few years in the sixteenth century, which will be noticed later; but a period of nearly fifty years elapsed between the stopping of the first, and the beginning of the second.