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Printing in England
Printing in England Printing came to England through the work of William Caxton, a merchant born in Kent, who travelled extensively in Europe as a diplomat, by 1462 being posted to Bruges. After a period in exile in Cologne, where he encountered the new art of printing, Caxton returned to Bruges and began to translate a romantic epic by Raoul Le Fevre called the Recueil des Histoire de Troye (or the Recounting of the History of Troy). He finished the translation in 1471 and set about printing it in Bruges, completing the work in 1475. This was the first book to be printed in the English language.
Caxton returned to England in the Spring of 1475, and by the Autumn of 1476 had established a printing press in the grounds of Westminster Abbey, where he remained as a printer until his death in 1491. The first full book to come from his press and therefore, the first book printed in England was Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, printed in 1477. In the same year he also produced the first dated book to come out of England, Dictes or Sayengis of the Pholosophres.
In Europe Caxton saw the rapidly expanding industry producing books, mostly scholarly in Latin, but he chose to exploit a different area of the market, namely for books in the English language, as well as in other languages for the English market, such as religious books, quickly establishing a virtual monopoly in this area. Many of these books were literary in nature, betraying Caxton's own interest in English literature, his edition of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (1477), being of special importance, as it was the first major book printed in England. Another key early work produced by Caxton was The Golden Legend.
Like other early printers, William Caxton employed the use of a 'device' (like a logo), which also served as a hall-mark of quality. Caxton's device is bold and simple, with his initials 'W' and 'C' appearing on either side of the numbers '4' and '7', which probably refer to 1447 the year he became a Freeman of the Mercer's Company. Other versions of the device exist in which different dates have been inserted. On his death, Caxton's press was taken over by his assisrtant, Wynkyn de Worde.
Printing spread slowly to other parts of England during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth, partly due to the monopoly on printing which was obtained by the Stationer's Company, which effectively confined printing to London, and by special dispensation to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.