doubt City connections of an honorable kind. Either Caxton’s father or his grandfather must have been a man of weight and distinction. “I was born and learned my English in Kent in the Weald, where I doubt not is spoken as broad and rude English as in any place of England.” These are his own words. In another place he writes, concerning his own style, “whereof I humbly and with all my heart thank God, and also am bounden to pray for my father’s and mother’s souls, that in my youth set me to school, by which, by the sufferance of God, I got my living--I hope truly.” The Weald, in which he apparently spent his childhood, was at this time largely peopled by the descendants of the Flemish cloth-workers brought over to England by Edward IV. He therefore heard as a child the Flemish language, or at least English with a large mixture of Flemish words, a fact which perhaps had something to do with his subsequent residence in Bruges. But where he went to school, what he learned there, and at what age he was taken from his lessons, he does not tell us. He was born, I am sure, in the year 1424. It seems very clear that the usual age of apprenticeship was fourteen; and Caxton was certainly apprenticed in the year 1438, and since the age of admission to the City freedom was twenty-four, ten years were passed in servitude: a long time, but not too long to learn the various branches of a merchant’s work, and to acquire the habits of obedience which afterward are transformed into the habit of authority. It has been said that his master was the richest merchant of his time. He was Robert Large, Mercer, Warden of the Company in 1427, Sheriff in 1430, and Lord Mayor in 1440. When this great man received an apprentice he was receiving either the son of a personal friend or of someone whom he desired to oblige. It is significant that at the same time Large received another apprentice, the son of a brother mercer, named Harrowe, and that Harrowe received as apprentice another Caxton--Robert, perhaps brother of William, but concerning him nothing is discoverable. Robert Large occupied a house already historic; it was situated at the northeast corner of Old Jewry. In the thirteenth century the Jews who lived in that quarter built for themselves a synagogue; in the year 1262 there was a popular outbreak of hatred against the Jews, and a terrible massacre, in the course of which their synagogue was plundered and taken from them. In the year 1271 Henry III. gave the place as a House to a new order of Mendicant Friars called _Fratres de Pœnitentiâ Jesu, or Fratres de Saccâ_.