# The Invention of Printing/Chapter 10

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The Preparations for Printing.
Imperfect Preparation of the People of Southern Europe … Repression of Education in England … Early Gropings after Knowledge by English People … The Horn-Book and Clog …Injurious Effects of the Use of Latin in Books … Beginnings of Common Schools … Their Usefulness in Germany and Flanders … Indications of Mental Activity in the Arts … Favorable Condition of Germany as Compared with other States … Profligacy of the Clergy … Growth of Heresy … Early Translations of the Bible … Appreciation of Pictures by the Illiterate … The Dance of Death. Neglect of the People by their Constituted Teachers … Growing use of Paper … Increase of Self-taught Copyists … Guilds of Book-Makers in the North of Europe … Printing as an Aid to Writing … Printing Delayed by Considerations of Expense … Could not be Introduced until there were a Multitude of Readers … Books of Pictures preceded Books of Letters.
Guizot.
To the careless observer of the growth of learning and the state of the mechanical arts at the beginning of the fifteenth century, Italy might be regarded as the nation best prepared to receive and maintain any new method of book-making. The neatly engraved initial letters in manuscript books, the designs printed in many colors on woven fabrics, and the extended manufacture of images and playing cards, prove that the Italians knew how to print from blocks, and that they had mechanical skill in abundance. In spite of her civil wars, Italy was rich and prosperous, and famous all over the world, not only for her universities and learned men, but ​for the cultured tastes of her people. It would appear that all the conditions for the coming of block-book printing had been filled, and that its introduction should have followed as a consequence. But the conditions were only partly met.
To be ultimately successful, it was requisite that printing should begin with the plainest work, and that it should be adapted to the demands of very plain people; but the tastes of Italians were refined, and they could not tolerate rudeness in any form. With all its skill, wealth and culture, there was in Italy no true middle class, and, consequently, no suitable basis for the upholding of an art like xylography. The spirit which Woltmann has specified as the basis of printing,—"the impulse to make each mental gain a common blessing,"—was entirely wanting. As the professional book-makers, who were of the people, did nothing for the advancement of their order, the development of Italian printing had to stop with printed cards, cloths and images. The skill of Italian engravers culminated, not, as it did in Germany, in popular block-books, but in the more artistic and exclusive branch of copper-plate printing. The efforts of Italian scholars to revive the study of classical authors, however useful they may have been to the people of other countries, ended in Italy with a widening of the gulf that separated the ignorant from the educated. For the benefits of printed books, Italy is indebted to the skill of German printers, whose early productions had been excluded from Venice at the petition of her querulous card-makers.
It may seem equally strange that block-book printing was not invented in Spain, where textile fabrics were printed, and where paper was more largely made and used than in any portion of Europe. We there find schools, libraries, and signs of great mental activity. In poetry, architecture, music and other fine arts, the people of Spain were as advanced as the French or Italians. But the love of books, and the culture that comes only from their study, were not firmly rooted in the life and habits of common people. The education and social elevation of the few had been secured at the expense ​of the many, and literature and the literary arts had been so refined that they were in decay. Nothing seems to have been done to pave the way for the introduction of xylographic printing by attempts to educate the people.
The intellectual development of France resembled that of Italy and Spain—it was a development of the literature of the church, and of effeminate tastes among the wealthy, but from these the people derived no benefit. France was then passing through the horrors of what French historians call the "Hundred Years' War" with England, during which her population decreased at an alarming rate, and many of her arts and industries were irreparably injured. The princes and nobles were waging against each other a war of treason and assassination; the peasantry, on whom feudal laws pressed more severely than they did on any other people, broke out in the insurrection of the Jacquerie. In 1407, the pope laid the kingdom under interdict, and the withdrawal of the ministrations of the church were added to the horrors of civil and servile war and the miseries of foreign invasion. It was not a time for cultivating the arts of peace. There is, therefore, no block-book of the fifteenth century in the French language, and there is no reason to believe that any block-book printer ever attempted to establish his business on French territory.
Of all the states of Western Europe, England seems to have been most unfitted for the reception of printing. There were a few ecclesiastics who saw the importance of books, and who tried to found libraries, but the greater part of the clergy were very ignorant. They would not learn, nor would they allow common people to be taught. It was unlawful, even as late as 1412, for laborers, farmers and mechanics to send their children to school. A great opportunity for popular education was presented in Wickliffe's translation of the Bible, which could have been made an effective means for diffusing the knowledge of letters among a religious people. But in 1415 it was enacted that they who read the Scriptures in the mother tongue should be hanged for treason, and burned for heresy.
​The standard of English education was low, even in the universities. An eminent Italian man of letters, in England in 1420, The Clog. [From Chambers.] complains of the scarcity of good books, and is not at all respectful to English scholars. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge had been established rather more than three hundred years, but they taught bad Latin. There were few books of merit in the English language: Wickliffe's translation of the Bible, and the poems of Chaucer, Lydgate and Gower, are all that deserve any notice. There was, as yet, no universally spoken English language: French was the language of the English nobility and of English courts and books of law, as late as the year 1362 merchants and mercantile companies kept their books in French; boys at school were required to translate ​Latin into French. The habitual employment of French as the language of the nobility, and of Latin as the language of literature, shut the doors of knowledge on those who spoke English only. In all countries the elementary text books of the schools were in Latin. To learn arithmetic, grammar or geography, the scholar must begin with the study of Latin. The dead language was the path to all knowledge: it was a circuitous and a wearisome path, but it was traveled by every student destined for the church, or for the profession of law or medicine.
At a very early period the bishops of the Catholic church tried to establish schools for children, but not so much for the teaching of secular as of religious knowledge. In the year 800 a synod at Mentz ordered that parochial priests should establish schools in all towns and villages to teach letters to children. These orders were repeated by other councils, but they could be enforced only in the larger cities. In many rural districts common schools were entirely unknown. As the clergy grew corrupt, they were neglected in cities. The primary schools were not always taught by ecclesiastics, but the church claimed the right to supervise them, and made sure that its doctrines and dogmas should be fully taught.
​These schools seem to have been most useful where they were not overshadowed by great institutions of learning. In the German countries that bordered on the Rhine, and more especially in the Netherlands, where there were no universities, and where the people had a large measure of personal liberty, we find many evidences of a steady progress in. education, and of improvement in social condition. The simple teachings of the schools were received by a plain but utilitarian people who put the knowledge to practical use. The newly developed mental activity did not run to waste, as it did in the universities, in unprofitable metaphysical speculations; it was at once applied to the varied requirements of art, trade and manufactures. When printing came, the common people were fully prepared for it, prepared not only to read books, but to make them. The invention was developed in proper order, and was preceded by improvements in mechanical arts.
As illustrations of this mental activity, it is not out of place to mention some of the many inventions of the men who had studied books only to aid them in studying things. We find gunpowder and fire-arms, glass windows and mirrors, clocks and watches, and numerous contrivances that add to the comforts of social life, some of which, like the tinning of iron, and the putting of chimneys to fireplaces, have seemed too paltry to deserve notice. Trivial as they may seem, when in contrast with the steam engine and railroad, the chimney and window were of the highest service as aids in bringing men from a qualified barbarism to civilization. It cannot be ​proved that these contrivances were invented in Germany, but it is certain that they were there appreciated and used when they were entirely unknown in parts of Europe then supposed to be much more enlightened.
The Germans and Flemings were regarded as a boorish people by the more polished Italians. In the artistic education that can be acquired only from intimate association with men of genius and works of art, the Northern people were deficient; but in the knowledge of useful arts, in originality of invention, in patience and thoroughness as manufacturers, they were superior. The Germans made linen, glass, carved wooden-ware, and useful articles of all kinds needed in home life. In the construction of fine mechanisms, like clocks and curious automatons, they had no rivals. The Flemings were celebrated as weavers, cutlers, goldsmiths, armorers, engravers of silver-ware, and as carvers of wood and stone. They were more than skillful mechanics. Hubert and John Van Eyck, founders of the Flemish school of painting, and instructors of eminent Italian artists, may be regarded as representatives of the practical Flemish character, for they considered no branch of the arts of design as unworthy their attention; they painted on glass as well as on wood or canvas; they illuminated missals, and, as many bibliographers believe, made designs on wood for the engravers of block-books.
​The steady progress made by the people of Flanders and Germany in arts and manufactures was largely due to their liberty. They were not altogether exempt from the bondage of feudalism: there was some discord in Germany, and never-ceasing strife between the nobles and middle class, but the German burgher maintained his independence and lived in comfort. The need of peace and personal liberty as preparations for the introduction of printing may be more clearly perceived in a glance at the social condition of the people.
The discontent of common people at their treatment by constituted authorities was never greater than during the last twenty years of the fourteenth century. Southern Europe was afflicted by sanguinary wars, into which the rulers of the people dragged their unwilling peasantry. Armed bands of ​discharged soldiers roamed about, robbing and murdering at will. Nobles secure in their castles sent out soldiers to make forays in adjacent districts, with no more pretext of law than is claimed by pirates. Outside of large cities there was no safety for life or property. To add to the general misery, famine desolated the most fruitful countries, and in some districts, the awful pestilence of the black death swept away half the population. Where the suffering was greatest, the people rebelled, but to no purpose. In France, the insurgents of the Jacquerie, in 1358, were massacred with savage ingenuity in cruelty; in England, the Wat Tyler revolt of 1385 was put down with violence, and the people were remanded to the old villeinage. In countries where there was no outbreak, a sullen resentment grew up against all authority, but more especially against that of the established church. The exactions and scandalous manners of the superior clergy afforded a sufficient provocation. There were two popes — one at Rome and one at Avignon; in many dioceses were rival bishops, holding authority under the rival popes. The heads of the church were at enmity with each other, and they ruled over God's heritage with the weapons and the spirit of temporal princes. The tribute of money which had been delayed or refused by recusant bishops, and the tribute of homage which had been denied by excommunicated kings or emperors, were paid in the misery and blood of the people. In the prolonged disputes between pope and king, and pope and anti-pope, the pious and loyal, who had been taught to honor those who were in authority, were unable to discern which of the two contestants was the true and which the false pope or bishop. ​From the teachings of each pretender the good turned away. The religious sentiment which had been shocked at the outrageous behavior of the anointed teachers forsook the old altars. It sought out new faiths and founded new sects.
The teachers of the new sects were unwittingly preparing the people for the coming of printing by enforcing the duty of more careful reading and study of the Holy Scriptures. In the year 1380, Wickliffe completed a translation in English of the entire Bible. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, copies of a translation of the Scriptures in Provençal French, made by or under the direction of Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant of Lyons, and the founder of the Waldenses, were circulated in Burgundy and upon the borders of the Rhine. There were many new translations, or at least of the gospels and psalms, in other European languages. Men and women ​gathered together in secret places to hear them read. The timid and irresolute, alienated from the church, and deterred from frequenting prohibited associations, set up altars of the most unpretentious character within their own houses. Too poor to buy books, and perhaps too ignorant to read them, they sought from the formschneiders and image-makers the emblems they needed as visible symbols of their faith. In this hungering after the instruction or consolation afforded by religious pictures, we see the origin of the block-books. A growing fondness for pictures is a marked peculiarity in the intellectual development of the age. It was not confined to the buyers of printed images: it was manifested in the paintings on the walls and windows of magnificent churches, in the pictorial playing cards then in the hands of all people, gentle and simple, and more than all in the fearful pictures of the Dance of Death upon the walls of convents, in the arcades of burying-grounds, and in market-places and town halls. In these hideous paintings, the saint saw the necessity of preparation for death; the sinner interpreted them as an assertion of the equality of all men and the final punishment of the ​
| The Abbot. Death despoils the Abbot of his mitre and crozier, and drags him away. The Abbot resists, about to throw his breviary at his adversary. | The Mendicant Friar. He is about to enter his convent with his money-box and wallet, when Death seizes him by the cowl, and compels him to leave the world. |
| The Preacher. Death, with a stole about his neck, stands behind the Preacher, and holds a jaw-bone over his head, intimating that he is the more forcible teacher. | The Knight. After escaping perils in numerous combats, the Knight ineffectually resists the onset of Death, and is vanquished by one thrust of the spear. |
Holbein's Illustrations of the Dance of Death.
[From Douce.]
​unjust. In the inexorable impartiality of the grinning and stalking skeleton who rudely dragged away the resisting noble and protesting priest, there was a ghastly irony which was keenly appreciated even by the illiterate.
The signs of awakening intelligence, as manifested in the general appreciation of pictures, images, playing cards and books, were entirely disregarded by the authorized teachers of the age, who could have used the method of xylographic printing by which images and playing cards were made, and could have led people from the contemplation of images and allegories of the Dance of Death, to the study of books and letters. They had all the means within reach. There were engravers and printers in Venice in 1400; there is an obscure notice of image-cutters or engravers on wood in the records of the fraternity of St. Luke in Paris for the year 1391. But ​neither the doctors of the universities nor the book-makers of Paris ever attempted to print books or pictures. Nor can it be shown that any one of the many persons laboring for the revival of literature at the beginning of the fifteenth century had anything to do with printing. The significance of this fact should be fairly considered, for it is the proper explanation of the curious and childish literature of the block-books which followed the printed images.
Reduced Fac-simile of the Dance of Death, as shown in the Nuremberg Chronicle.
Early printed work was the outgrowth, not of scholarship, but of comparative ignorance. The first block-printers were men outside the pale of literature, and not indebted to any school or scholar for the suggestion of printing. The first merchantable products of printing on paper were not books, but playing cards and images. The earliest purchasers of ​printing were men who could neither read nor write. The card-makers, who labored for the amusement of boyish tastes, were the ignorant nurses of an art which has preserved the learning of the world. They have had grand success. The once despised fabric of paper has displaced vellum; types do the work of reed and pen, and the work of perpetuating the literature of the world is done by mechanics. Nor has this great revolution been restricted to mechanical processes in book-making. Medieval books are more than out of date: they are dead, beyond all revival. They are known to book-lovers chiefly by reputation. The writings of Anselm, Dun Scotus, Abelard, Peter Lombard, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas and Ockham, are read only through curiosity; they are as obsolete as the works of the old Greek philosophers.
Although much had been done to prepare Germany and Flanders for the reception of printing, one thing was lacking. Printing waited for a wise appreciation of the utility of paper. For centuries paper had been regarded as a plebeian writing surface, unfitted for books, but good enough for shopkeepers, mechanics, and children who had or sought a smattering of education. It was necessary that the prejudices in favor of vellum should be uprooted, and that the practical superiority of paper should be recognized by men of higher authority than card-printers or poor scholars. This change in fashion was effectually made by the rich merchants of Flanders and Germany. The paper rejected of professional book-makers was not so strong nor so attractive as parchment, but it was flexible, durable, and much cheaper. There was no legislative intermeddling with its sale as there had been with parchment. ​Everybody was free to buy and use it at his pleasure. The consequences of this contemptuous abandonment of paper to the people, who were supposed to be almost unfit to use it, were unexpected. Those who knew how to read and write found in paper a ready means of communicating their knowledge. The number of readers grew. With this increase of readers came also an increase of self-taught copyists and of unprofessional book-makers. In the commercial cities, where copyists were not subjected to the censorship of the universities, the practice of making books became as common as it had been exclusive. Book-making became a distinct trade, and shops were established for the sale of alphabets, primers, prayer books, creeds, and elementary text books for schools, all adapted, both in price and in subject, to the very humblest readers. The names of some nooks and corners in London, Paternoster Row, Creed Lane, Amen Corner, Ave Maria Lane, show that these were the places in that city where manuscripts of a religious character were largely made and sold.
As the sale of these books and tracts increased, Northern copyists combined with each other for purposes of mutual protection, after the usage of all the tradesmen of the middle ages. We find a mention of the existence of the Company of Stationers of London in 1405. There were guilds of book-makers at Augsburg in 1418, at Nordlingen in 1428, at Ulm in 1441, at Antwerp in 1441, at Bruges in 1454. These are the years in which the guilds were first mentioned; but it is probable they were incorporated at earlier dates. The ​book-making fraternities of St. Luke, in Venice and in Paris, were constituted of copyists, calligraphers, illuminators and book-binders; but the more practical Northern guilds admitted to membership printers and engravers, and every worker, however humble his work, who contributed to the making of a book. But this combination of copyists with engravers and printers did not at once lead to the printing of books. It did no more than pave the way for its introduction, by making people familiar with paper and printing. For a long time the workmanship of the rival arts was kept distinct; the copyist transcribed books, while the printers made images. But the time came when the copyist had to ask help from the printer.
The printing of books began, not as an independent art, but as an aid to the art of writing. A publisher of London recently described and offered for sale a curious old book, partly printed and partly written, which illustrates the close alliance of labor once maintained between the copyist and the engraver. He describes the book as a folio of 17 leaves of vellum, on which are printed 69 engravings, twelve of them bearing legends, "representing scenes of Christian mythology, figures of patriarchs, saints, devils, and other dignitaries of the church, all colored and illuminated with oxidized gold, impressed in the midst of a manuscript text in German." The engravings of this book are small, about 3 inches long and 2¼ inches broad. They are enclosed by a double border of black lines, and are printed on the left side of the page. The designer of the illustrations was obviously an inexpert, not accustomed to drawing the letters of the inscriptions in reverse order on the block, for some of the letters are turned the wrong way. The engravings were printed before the descriptive text was written. The language of the text, old High German, contains obsolete words which were out of use before typography was invented. Quaritch attributes this ​book to unknown monks of Southern Germany, "about the year 1400." This copy of the Weekly Meditations is a favorable specimen of the combined workmanship of the copyist and the printer; but it is not the only one. Copies or fragments of manuscript books with printed illustrations are in the British Museum, and in many European libraries.
These specimens of book-making during the period of its transition from writing to printing, give us some notions of the estimation in which the process of printing was held by the men who manufactured chap-books. It does not appear that they made use of printing because they thought it was a labor-saving process. They used it mainly, if not entirely, to supplement the deficient skill of the copyist. It was then as it is now — many could write, but few could draw. If the copyist who wrote the text had been competent to draw, the pictures would not have been engraved. Nor would these engravings have been made for one nor even for one dozen copies. We may properly suppose that enough copies were printed to justify the expense of engraving.
While it was expedient to engrave the pictures, it was inexpedient to engrave the text of a book. In many books, the letters constituted the largest part of the work, and to the engraver it was the more difficult part — the expense of engraving would more than offset all the advantages that might have been gained from printing. A full suite of blocks for the text would cost more than the writing of a hundred copies. To the stationer who could sell but few books, xylographic printing was not an economical process: the preliminary cost of engraving was too great. It would be an extravagant estimate to assume that the writer of the Weekly Meditations made one hundred copies of this book; but one ​hundred copies would have been an edition much too small to justify the engraving of its text of seventeen pages. We must accept this as the reason why printing was so sparingly used by the early book-makers. They did not engrave blocks and print books, because there were not enough book-buyers to warrant the expense. This feature of printing — its entire dependence upon a very large number of book-buyers — may require a more extended explanation.
The small prices for which all popular modern books and newspapers are sold lead many into the error that printing is, necessarily and under all circumstances, a much cheaper method of making books than that of writing. As compared with writing, presswork, or the operation of impressing the types on the sheet, is much the quicker and cheaper process; but presswork is not the main branch of the art of printing. Before one impression can be taken, or one copy be made, types must be composed or blocks engraved at very great expense. The composition and stereotyping of the pages of an ordinary duodecimo book may be worth six hundred dollars. On an edition of ten copies the cost of such a book would be, for making plates only, sixty dollars per copy. If there were but one hundred copies, the expense of the plates would be six dollars per copy. Under these conditions few books would be published. But if an edition of one thousand copies should be printed, the cost of the plates would be only sixty cents a copy. In this instance, printing would be much cheaper than writing, but this reduced rate would not necessarily justify the expenses of printing. The risk of sale must be hazarded. No publisher would undertake at his own risk to print even one thousand copies, — much less a smaller number, — if he did not fully believe that the edition could be promptly sold. But the early book-maker did not have this confident belief in large and speedy sale. There were, comparatively, few book-buyers, and the publication of a book by the method of engraving and printing must have seemed very hazardous speculation.
​It can be clearly seen that the cost of printing a book is in inverse ratio with the number printed. When the number is small, the cost per copy is great; when the number is great, the cost per copy is small. Printing is an economical process only for books of many copies. If there were not a very great number of book-readers and book-buyers, printing could not be practised to advantage.
In the fourteenth century this multitude of book-readers had not been created. One hundred copies would have been considered a great edition, and the engravers or printers who took such a hazard would have waited many years for purchasers. Their unwillingness to take an unwise risk has been often regarded as an evidence, not of their sagacity, but of their stupidity. There are writers who have taught that the project of a printed book was a grand conception, not to be imagined by any but a great inventor — an idea far above the capacity of any printer of playing cards or images; but the legends in the image prints teach us that the early engravers knew how to engrave the letters, and that they could have engraved entire books of letters if they had thought it expedient. The advantages or disadvantages of engraving books were considered by them as they would be by publishers of our own time, purely as an economical question. The early engravers decided that books of letters could be appreciated, and would be purchased, only by the educated, a class too small to reward the labor of the engraver. For the making of books, printing was not regarded as an economical process, and books were consequently made by the cheaper process of writing.
While it was unprofitable to engrave letters for books, it was profitable to engrave designs for printed fabrics, images and playing cards. On work of this character, the relations of cost and sale were completely reversed. The expenses for engraving one design, one image, or one suite of cards, was small; but the sale of the work printed from the blocks was generally very large. Fabrics that could be worn, cards that ​could amuse, and images that would serve as decorations or as aids to devotion, had attractions for all people, and especially for the poor and illiterate. Whoever printed merchandise of this nature could rightfully expect that it would be sold in such large quantities that the cost of engraving would be inappreciable.
The world was not ready at the beginning of the fifteenth century to apply its knowledge of printing with ink to the making of books. It was regarded as too expensive a process. It bided its time, waiting for more readers and book-buyers, for paper in greater supply and of better quality, for higher skill on the part of the engravers, printers and ink-makers. If there were no other evidences than those afforded by the partly printed and written books, it could be safely assumed that when the early engravers did begin to print books, they would be, not books of letters, but books of pictures.
* ↑ The horn-book was the primer of our ancestors, established by common use. It consisted of a single leaf, containing on one side the alphabet, large and small, in black letter or in Roman, with, perhaps, a small regiment of monosyllables, and the words of the Lord's Prayer. This leaf was usually set in a frame of wood, with a slice of diaphanous horn in front — hence the name horn-book. Generally, there was a handle to hold it by, and this handle had usually a hole for a string, whereby the horn-book was slung to the girdle of the scholar. It was frequently noticed by early chroniclers. Chambers, ""Book of Days.""
* ↑ It was a square stick of hard wood, and about eight inches long. The entire series of days constituting the year was represented by notches running along the angles of the square block, each side and angle thus presenting three months; the first day of a month was marked by a notch having a patulous stroke turned up from it, and each Sunday was distinguished by a notch somewhat broader than usual. The feasts were denoted by symbols resembling hieroglyphics. Chambers, Book of Days.
* ↑ Men given up to sensuality we may find in abundance, but very few lovers of learning, and those barbarous, skilled more in quibbles and sophisms than in literature. Poggio, as quoted by Hallam.
* ↑ An entry in the books of the Brewers' Company during the reign of Henry V (1415-1430), states the reasons why this change was made from French to English. Whereas our mother tongue, to wit, the English language, hath in modern days begun to be honorably enlarged and adorned, for that our most excellent King Henry V hath, in his letters missive, and in divers affairs, touching his own person, more willingly chosen to declare the secrets of his will; and, for the better understanding of the people, hath, with a diligent mind, procured the common idiom, setting aside others, to be commended by the exercise of writing; and there are many of our craft of brewers who have the knowledge of writing and reading in the same English idiom, but in others, to wit, the Latin and French, before these times used, they do not in any wise understand; for which causes, with many others, it being considered how that the greater part of the lords and trusty commons have begun to make their matters to be noted down in our mother tongue, so we also, in our own craft, following in some manner their steps, have decreed in future to commit to memory the needful things which concern us.
* ↑ In 1446, a petition was presented to the English parliament, to consider the number of grammar schools that sometime were in divers parts of this realm, besides those that were in London, and how few there are in these days. Knight, The Old Printer and Modern Press.
* ↑ In the Netherlands we find the earliest development of the high school. The schools of the Brethren of the Life-in-Common, founded by Gerard Groot of Deventer, in 1385, which were forty-five in number in 1435, and double that number in 1460, were the first nurseries of literature in Germany. The fruits of this attention to education were freely gathered in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The entire Bible was printed in the Flemish or Dutch language within the first thirty-six years of the sixteenth century in fifteen editions. ... Thirty-four editions of the New Testament in that language alone appeared within the same period There can be no sort of comparison between the number of these editions, and consequently the eagerness of the people of the Low Countries for biblical knowledge, considering the limited extent of their language, and anything that could be found in the Protestant States of the [German] Empire. Hallam, Literature of Europe, chap. vi, sec. 38.
* ↑ Æneas Sylvius (subsequently Pope Pius ii), writing near the middle of the fifteenth century, said that the kings of Scotland would rejoice to be as comfortably lodged as the second class of citizens of Nuremberg. Hallam says that Pope Pius also praised their well-furnished and splendid dwellings, their easy mode of living, the security of their rights and the just equality of their laws.
* ↑ Flanders, during the fifteenth century, was the richest and most densely populated part of Europe, It was famous for the extent of its foreign trade and the variety of its industry. It was not uncommon for one hundred and fifty ships in one day to enter the port of Bruges, in which city were mercantile agents from seventeen different nations, Flanders was full of industries, but its great business was the making of cloth. All the world, wrote an enthusiastic chronicler of the period, is clothed by Flanders. Ghent had fifteen thousand workmen employed on stuffs of wool; Ypres had four thousand makers of cloth; Courtray had six thousand drapers.
* ↑ As early as the twelfth century; the emperor Henry v undertook to curb the exactions of feudalism by the establishment of free cities, and by the grant of extraordinary privileges to mechanics and manufacturers. To the nobility and petty princes of Germany these privileges were a constant offense, and the occasion of many local strifes; but the burghers were industrious and public-spirited, and took care of their rights. To protect their trade from the rapacity of the princes on the Elbe and the coast, the cities of Germany, in the year 1249, established a mercantile organization, known as the Hanseatic League. In the fifteenth century, this league was constituted of traders from all parts of the Netherlands and Germany. It was so powerful that it monopolized the trade of Northern Europe: by threat of war it compelled Edward vi of England to grant extraordinary concessions; it made successful war against Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The Hanseatic League is a wonderful example of the sudden development of successful legislative and executive ability among men of little or no culture, who till then had been excluded from every position of honor in the state.
* ↑ Peasants could not claim exemption from arbitrary arrest or military servitude. They had no liberty to choose a residence, to learn a trade, to travel, to go to school, to marry, to keep property, to transact business, or to associate with others in any peaceable enterprise. Practically, they were but little better than slaves. Beaumanoir, a French jurist of the thirteenth century, defines the nature of their servitude in the plainest words. He says that The third estate of man is that of such as are not free; and these are not all of one condition, for some are so subject to their lord, that he may take all they have, alive or dead, and imprison them whenever he pleases, being accountable to none but God ; from others the lord can take nothing but the customary payments, though at their death all they have escheats to him.
* ↑ The determination to keep the peasants enslaved was stronger than all enmities. During the insurrection of the Jacquerie, the English knights who accompanied King Edward iii in his invasion of France made truce with the French nobles, and joined them in putting down this rebellion. Froissart, the chronicler of chivalry, admired this exhibition of magnanimity. For the sufferings of the peasants he has no sympathy.
* ↑ "Villeins you have been, villeins you are, and shall be," — said King Richard to the miserable peasantry of Essex, after the killing of Wat Tyler, — "not as before, but in a bondage much more bitter."
* ↑ The ecclesiastical history of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, says Hallam, teems with sectaries and schismatics, various in their aberrations of opinion, but all concurring in detestation of the established church. The heresy which began during the twelfth century, or earlier, with the Manichees of Bulgaria, was made more and more formidable by the Albigenses of Languedoc, by the Waldenses of France and Germany, by the Vaudois of the Alps, by the Lollards of the Netherlands and England, and afterward by the disciples of John Huss of Bohemia, until the faith of the mass of the people was uprooted from its foundation. In Germany, enthusiastic but mystical priests like Eckhardt, Tauler and Suso, keeping themselves within the pale of the church, weakened its rigid discipline by preaching against the arrogant prerogatives of the clergy, and by commanding a higher worship of the heart and life.
* ↑ The British Museum contains a Bible in Flemish verse, known as the Rym Bible, written by Jacob von Maerlandt of Damne, near Bruges in Flanders. It is a manuscript of the fifteenth century, upon vellum, with ornamented capitals, and is one of many copies of a version of the Scriptures made in the year 1270. Except the Waldensian translation in the Provençal language, this version is, consequently, the most ancient in existence, in the vernacular, and must have preceded by a century the versions of Raoul de Presles, of John Trevisa or the Hermit of Hampole. ... The British Museum had another manuscript in prose, of parts of a Bible in Flemish, written in the fifteenth century. It is part of a translation made in the early part of the fourteenth century, and was the text used for the Bible printed in Delft in 1477. Sotheby, Principia Typographica, vol. iii, p. 123. The British Museum has, also, a manuscript in Flemish of five books of the Old Testament, made in the fourteenth century.
* ↑ It is a noteworthy fact that the first complaint of an unauthorized reading of the Bible came from the city where the Bible was first printed. Pope Innocent iii, alarmed at the consequences of this innovation, and writing at the beginning of the thirteenth century, says he had been informed by the bishop of Mentz that: No small multitude of laymen and women, having procured the translation of the Gospels, Epistles of St. Paul, the Psalter, Job and other books of Scripture to be made for them into French, meet in secret conventicles to hear them read and to preach to each other, and having been reprimanded for this by some of their parish priests, have withstood them, alleging reasons from the Scriptures why they should not be so forbidden. Some of them, too, deride the ignorance of their ministers, and maintain that their own books teach them more than they can learn from the pulpit, and that they can express it better. Although, Innocent proceeds, the desire of reading the Scriptures is rather praiseworthy than reprehensible, yet they are to be blamed for frequenting secret assemblies, for usurping the office of preaching, for deriding their own ministers and for scorning the company of those who do not concur in their novelties. He presses the bishop and chapter to discover the author of this translation, which could not have been made without a knowledge of letters. He wished to know what were his intentions, and what degree of orthodoxy and respect for the holy see those who used it possessed. In another letter Innocent complains that some of the members of this association continued refractory, and refused to obey either the bishop or the pope. Hallam, Middle Ages.
* ↑ At the beginning of the fifteenth century, paintings of the Dance of Death were in all the large cities of Europe. Woltmann has distinctly stated the causes which gave popularity to these horrible compositions. The misery and unhappiness which at this period more than any other visited the nations of the West, increased more and more the ascetic views on the subject of death. The great aims and ideas of medieval life had passed away, and the ideas of the new period were now fast beginning to form themselves. ... Licentiousness prevailed in all lands; immoderate festivity and boundless excesses of sensuality gained more and more the upper hand. ... Upon this life of self-will and self-indulgence, of riot and revelry, the terrors of death burst all the more fearfully. In addition to the constant wars, the acts of violence and the shedding of blood which prevailed among men, we find the most various alarms in nature. Famine and desolating pestilences, and in the middle of the fourteenth century the Black Death, made their fearful and triumphal progress through Europe. To escape the dread and thought of this misery, men gave themselves up on the one side all the more passionately to the intoxication of the senses; but on the other they believed themselves struck by the vengeance of God, and sought for safety in contrition and repentance, which often led them into the most repulsive forms of ecstasy. But the most forcible sermons exhorting to repentance, the sermons that spoke to the people in the most intelligible form, were the figurative representations which proclaimed the almighty power of death. Holbein and his Time (Bunnèt's translation), p. 248.
* ↑ Tailleres ymagiers, the words of the record, may be construed as engravers on wood, or as carvers of wooden statuettes; but the tailleres were, probably, engravers. The fraternity of St. Luke consisted chiefly of men who made or contributed to the making of books: an engraver would properly belong to the guild. The words tailleres ymagiers suggest engraving quite as clearly as form-schneider does in German.
* ↑ Laborde, a brilliant French writer on early printing, who traces the origin of printing to playing cards, acknowledges its very ignoble origin with evident mortification:—"What a mother for such a son!"
* ↑ The history of literature, like that of Empire, is full of revolutions; our public libraries are cemeteries of departed reputation; the dust accumulating upon these untouched volumes speaks as forcibly as the grass that waves over the ruins of Babylon. Hallam, Middle Ages.
* ↑ The University of Paris made no opposition to the free sale of paper. It was not subjected to taxes or duties in France, not even when oppressive taxes were levied on most manufactures. Didot, Essai sur la typographie, p. 730.
* ↑ A school ordinance of Bautzen in Saxony, dated 1418, gives the names and prices of some of these books. For an A B C and Pater Noster, etc., 1 groschen; for a good Donatus, or child's grammar, 10 groschen; for a complete Doctrinal, 1 half-mark; for the First Part, 8 groschen. There has also been preserved the advertisement of one Dypold Lauber, a teacher and copyist of books at Hagenau in Germany, who lived during the middle of the fifteenth century, from which we may gather a clear notion of the books that were most salable among the people. His catalogue begins with the Deeds of the Romans, with illustrations. Then follow poetical works, romances of chivalry, biblical and legendary works, edifying books, religious books, books for the people, fortune-telling books, and other works of like character. Van der Linde, Haarlem Legend of the Invention of Printing, pp. 2, 3.
* ↑ Bernard Quaritch, Catalogue of Block-Books , 8vo. October, 1873, pp. 1373–1375. The title of the book, of as he gives it, is Ein Vorrede das Puch haist wockenlich Andack zu Seligkayt der weltlichen Menschen.
* ↑ They were common during the first quarter of the fifteenth century, Bernard, De l'origine de l'imprimerie, vol. i, p. 102. Fournier, De l'origine et des productions de l'imprimerie, p. 176. Papillon, Traité historique et pratique de la gravure sur bois, vol. i, p. 101. Guichard, Notice sur le Speculum, p. 118. They have been noticed also by Passavant. It is plain that copyists everywhere recognized the utility of engraving.