THE ST ALBANS PRESS: THE FIRST PUNCH-CUTTER IN ENGLAND AND THE FIRST NATIVE TYPEFOUNDER?

Abstract

'One somtyme scole mayster of saynt Albons', as Wynkyn de Worde, reprinting the work in 1497, characterized the first printer of the Chronicles of England, has been a figure somewhat neglected in recent studies of fifteenth-century English printing. Little has been added to Duff's comprehensive if idiosyncratic account, now nearly seventy years old.1 This is not altogether surprising. Apart from fragments, no more copies of the eight books from his press have come to light, and few have changed hands: events of this sort might have provided the occasion for further study.2 Besides, the giant figure of Caxton, the type of early English printing yet so atypical among prototypographers, has tended to obscure the work of his more ordinary contemporaries. The discovery of the printer's copy of the first Oxford book has, it is true, thrown new light on Theoderic Rood. The connection of the Oxford Press with the stirrings of the new humanism in the University can be seen more clearly, closely parallel with the first press at Paris.3 The work of the London printers, John Lettou and William de Machlinia, remains to be studied, but its purpose, a response to the demands of the legal and mercantile society of the city, is clear enough. The St Albans Press remains something of a mystery. This should not be so. The great abbey of St Albans had for centuries been an important centre of book production,4 and had, under Abbot John Whethampstede (c. 1390-1465), been one of the first centres of learning in England to accept and divulgate the work of the Italian humanists.5 It also had a large and famous library. The Grammar School of St Albans was also of great, perhaps equal, antiquity, and in the twelfth century one of the most famous of English schoolmasters, Alexander Neckam, had been its master. Its fourteenth-century rules still survive, but less is known about it in the fifteenth century.6 The relics of its old library, now dispersed, suggest that it had already acquired a number of printed books before the end of the fifteenth century. All this shows how little surprising it should be that the 'sometime schoolmaster' is found at the press at St Albans. It does not, however, fully explain the choice of texts, the most interesting (after Caxton's) of the first generation of English printers, nor does it throw any immediate light on the business: where the paper came from, whether there was one press

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