As a wool merchant in Bruges he prospered, and in time rose to be Governor of the Company of Merchant Adventurers, or "The English Nation," and in that capacity probably dwelt at the _Domus Angliæ_, the Company's headquarters in Bruges. In 1468, and while holding this honourable and important position, he began his translation of _Le Recueil_, but soon laid it aside, unfinished. Two years later he took it up again, but by this time he had resigned the governorship, and was engaged in the service of the Duchess of Burgundy, sister of Edward IV. of England. When or why he took this position, and in what capacity he served the Duchess, is not known, but it was her influence which brought about the completion of his literary work and indirectly caused the subsequent metamorphosis of the mercer into the typographer. In the prologue to _The Recuyell_ he relates that the duchess commanded him to finish the translation which he had begun, and this lady's "dredefull comandement," he says, "y durste in no wyse disobey because y am a servant vnto her sayde grace and resseiue of her yerly ffee and other many goode and grete benefetes." _The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye_, when finished, immediately found favour in the eyes of the English dwellers in Bruges, who, rejoiced to have the favourite romance of the day in their own tongue, demanded more copies than one pair of hands could supply. So because of the weariness and labour of writing, and because of his promise to various friends to provide them with the book, "I haue practysed & lerned," he tells us, "at my grete charge and dispense, to ordeyne this said book in prynte after the maner & forme as ye may here see, and is not wreton with penne and ynke, as other bokes ben, to thende that every man may haue them attones." Where Caxton gained his knowledge of printing is a matter of dispute. Mr Blades holds that he was taught by Colard Mansion, the first printer of Bruges, others that he learned at Cologne. Mr Blades adduces in support of his view the similarity of the types of Mansion and Caxton, the reproduction in Caxton's work of various peculiarities to be observed in Mansion's, the improbability that Caxton would have travelled to Cologne to get what was already at hand in the city where he lived, and the absence in his work "of any typographical link between him and the Mentz school." For the Cologne theory Wynkyn de Worde, who carried on the work of Caxton's printing-office at Westminster after the latter's death, supplies some foundation in his edition of Bartholomæus _De Proprietatibus Rerum_, where he says: "And also of your charyte call to remembraunce The soule of William Caxton, the first prynter of this boke In laten tongue at Coleyn, hymself to avaunce, That every well-disposed man may thereon loke."