Printing in England (Radio Edit)

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Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner.

I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster.

And today we are coming to you live from the Hay Literary Festival in Wales, which means I get to say, hello audience.

And we have got a suitably literary subject for you today as we are grabbing our library cards and book tote bags and heading all the way back to the 15th century to learn about the first 100 years of book printing in England.

And to help us spread the word, we have two very special guests.

In History Corner, she's a lecturer in Middle English Literature at the University of Glasgow.

She's a specialist in late medieval literature.

and handily for us she works both with manuscripts and early printed books.

It is Dr.

Lydia Zeldenrust.

Welcome Lydia!

Did I get the name anywhere near right?

Yes, it's a trickiest Dutch name, yeah, so it's always difficult.

Zeldenrust.

Zeldenrust.

And in Comedy Corner, he's an acclaimed comedian, author, broadcaster.

He does absolutely everything.

You will probably best know him from co-hosting the infinitely fantastic science show The Infinite Monkey Cage, a BBC Radio 4 programme that pairs brilliant academic experts with comedians.

How would that work?

He's also the author of many wonderful books, including Bibliomaniac.

It's Robin Ince.

Welcome to the show, Robin.

Thank you.

You're normally buttressed by scientists, luxuriously buttressed by scientists, and now you are buttressed by historians.

Are you feeling comfortable or are you out of your element today?

I think I'm always out of my element.

I think that's the lucky thing.

It's like, you know, when I'm surrounded by scientists, I know how much I don't know, and now I'm surrounded by historians.

You know, a man's got to know his limitations, and every single day I find a new limitation.

And that's, you should always be the stupidest person in the room, because then you're in the right room.

Yes, unless you're president.

So, what do you know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject.

And I imagine you're all familiar with printed books because you're at a literary festival.

And those of you at home, books are a thing, I guess.

Hopefully, you know what they are.

But the history of early printing, and especially in England, which is what we're talking about today, might be something we're less familiar with.

Maybe you've heard of Gutenberg, who invented the printing press.

But did Gutenberg really invent printing?

How did this brand-spanky new technology make its way into medieval England?

Let's find out.

Right, Robin, here's a once-upon-time scenario for you.

The year is 1474.

You are living in England, you're a man of learning, you've got a bit of cash.

Have you read Book?

I think no, I not read Book.

I think what I do is once every May, I go and see various people reenacting a merchant's tale because there's a moment where they go, and gan pullen up the smock and an he throng.

That, by the way, is all the Chaucer I know.

Merchant's Tale was my A-level Chaucer text.

So I think I was generally enjoying occasional strolling players, but I wasn't that keen on the dancing bears because I'm someone who empathises with bears.

That's a lovely answer.

It's not really what I asked but it's a lovely answer.

No.

I'll tell you what if you're expecting a linear route then you've never listened to the infinite monkey cage.

This is.

When I say book I mean the book because there's just the one.

Can you guess what it is?

Would it be the doomsday book?

Oh, that's a good guess.

No, it's a classic by the name of William Caxton's Recoil of the Histories of Troy.

What's your favourite line, would you say?

Do you know what?

I've only got the pop-up version.

Right, yeah.

And I'll tell you what, that horse could take an eye eye out.

So that was done before the Bible then.

So that was printed before.

Oh.

Dr.

Lydia, Robin has done a very good job there of sort of asking the question.

So Caxton's the book, History of Troy?

Yeah, so it's really a collection of the histories of Troy.

It's a Troy story, basically.

Hey, yeah.

I have to say it's a bit of a misnomer because most of it is about Hercules.

If you know the history of Troy and the fall of Troy, he's not really in there.

It's mostly focused on Hercules' earlier adventure.

It turns out he destroys Troy twice before the sort of Trojan War that we all know and love.

But yes, it is mostly about Hercules and the Trojan War as a bit of an afterthought.

So, yeah, this is the first book printed in English.

It was printed by William Caxton, you will know his name, I'm sure, in 1473 to 74.

It actually wasn't, though, printed in England, but it was printed abroad in Flanders, probably for exploitation towards England, but also it was aimed at a kind of local community of merchants in Flanders, English merchant who lived there.

Who's Caxton then?

Because printing's a new thing.

It can't be a family business he's inherited.

He was a merchant and quite a successful one, a well-connected merchant as well.

So we know that he joined the Mercer's Company in his teens and then he went over to Flanders, which was economically quite successful at this time.

And it was also experiencing a kind of cultural flourishing.

And what is Flanders?

So, Flanders is basically the southern Low Countries.

So, in 1462, he's made governor of the English merchants in Flanders, so they give him a bit of power.

We know that at some point, he's in a short period of exile and he finds himself in Cologne, comes into contact with the printing business because it's really taken off there.

So, you could say that the new technology really made an impression on him.

That's really bad, I'm sorry.

Yeah, so I think the problem was that that you really gave up on that before you delivered it.

And he publishes an English translation of a French history of a Greek story of Troy.

It's a classic, we've all done it.

And Robin, why do you think he's choosing that story to be his first?

See, now you've added the Hercules thing, so I can see it as something like a kind of Marvel franchise idea.

Because the mere fact he knows that this is a universe that once you've got the kind of the Troy franchise, that's as big as Guardians of the Galaxy or any of those things.

And you've also got all the merchandise, you know, the Troy story thing, as you said, the Hercules dolls, you know, the glamorous kind of Cindy-like Helen of Troy.

Because I've always seen Helen as more of a Cindy than a Barbie.

That's just the way I am.

So yeah, that's what I'm seeing it as for merch possibilities.

I think that's a great answer.

I mean, you're wrong.

So, Lydia, why translate this, this history of Troy, this recoil of Troy?

The reason he chooses this particular text probably has something to do with the Burgundian court.

So, we know that Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy was a noted bibliophile, as were both his legitimate and illegitimate sons, known as Charles the Bold and Antoine the Grand Batar, or Great Bastard,

respectively.

Sorry, I prefer that one.

You can guess which one is the legitimate one and which one is the illegitimate one.

Caxton's work brought him into contact with this court and with these dukes, and it also brought him into contact with Margaret of York, who is the younger sister of Edward IV, and she's also the wife of Charles the Bold.

She lent her support to this translation and to the printings.

And we know that the Dukes of Burgundy were great lovers of Greek myths.

Did you say Burgundian?

Yes.

So that's the correct way.

If you're talking about, you know, a group of Burgundy nobility, it's Burgundian.

Burgundian, yeah.

I am going to work out a way of getting that into conversation with Greek.

Caxton becomes the Prince of Prince.

This book is the first book printed in English, but it's not the first book ever printed full stop.

So, Robin, do you know where printing technology was invented?

In which modern country would we describe it?

So, I mean, was it Bible?

Was it, I just can't believe that it can't be, and I reckon it will be, and that wasn't called Germany then, was it?

It wasn't really.

So, so, so, well, I'll say Bavaria instead then.

So, I think, because there's some alliteration, I think it was a Bavarian Bible.

It's a lovely answer.

It's the answer most people would probably give, and you're only 4,000 miles wrong.

Oh, that's pretty good on a cosmological scale.

Okay.

I mean it's it's it's bad on a terrestrial scale but I view everything and a much, you know, add a lot of light years to that.

That is fair.

Lydia, the printing press, well printing is an Asian invention, East Asia, right?

Yes.

So one of the earliest factors in the invention of printing that we need to kind of address first is the invention of paper.

And paper was invented in China in the first century CE and printing itself started in the 7th century.

So we are looking to an East Asian context and China in particular.

And Chinese printing, in this case, we're talking about wood block printing.

In the West, we like to say that Gutenberg invented metal-movable type printing.

He did, sort of, but that doesn't mean he was the first.

So this too was invented in China in the 11th century.

It's not quite metal-movable type, but it's movable type using baked clay.

But in China, wood-block printing kind of remained dominant.

So the wood block printing, that technique that they used in China, goes to Korea as well.

But the Koreans innovate and kind of go, here's metal.

And this was invented in Korea in the early 13th century.

And the oldest surviving book in the world printed with movable metal type is a Buddhist text produced in Korea in 1377.

So Gutenberg, you know, independently comes up with it.

The story is sort of a wine press.

Obviously, the Islamic world was really important in some ways earlier in preserving knowledge and printing culture as well.

So Gutenberg is in Mainz, is that right?

In the 1450s?

He is, yes.

So yeah, Gutenberg, in a way, he's interesting because we kind of say that he invented all this.

He didn't quite, although he did perfect lots of techniques.

So like you said, he made his own ink.

And also the press was based on agricultural presses.

The key part there is that he invented a press that put equal pressure on the page.

So that means that the ink gets distributed equally.

So printing spreads through Germany, Mainz, we know 1471 Caxton's hanging out in Cologne, but it gets into Italy as well.

Yes.

And we have, I like this story, two German clerics turned printers.

They're hanging out in Rome, and they slightly overcalculate their loyal readership by 12,475 unsold copies.

What was the year they did that again?

This is 1472.

So the very first remainder bookshop, and it's your, that's the only book there.

There's no other book.

Literally no, there's not even a market.

That bit of rejected, well, don't you want to buy it?

No, we don't want to buy your your book.

There's no other books.

There's no other books.

So 1455, Gutenberg sort of invents the printing press.

Caxton prints the first English language book in 1474 in Flanders.

When does the actual physical printing press cross the English Channel and arrive in England?

So Caxton at one point goes back home and he sets up a press in London.

We know that he also had a little stall in Westminster Abbey, basically on the precincts of Westminster Abbey.

Yeah, he had a stall in Westminster Abbey.

It was a good position, really, because he was quite near the court, but also near the inns of court.

So it meant that he had kind of lawyers walking by, scholars, academics, etc., but also the nobility, people with money, so he could kind of suck up to all of them and try and sell his books.

But it's important to note that we are talking specifically about England here.

So, yeah, the first presses are in London, and that kind of dominates for ages.

So, there are some kind of experiments with printing in Scotland, in Edinburgh, in particular, for a few years.

And then we know about a sort of movable press that was set up in some cave in Wales for secret reasons or something like that.

But these don't last very long, these are kind of short experiments.

The centre of printing really is London.

Robin, this being a new, brand new industry, who do you think are the kind of early hipsters going into the field?

It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the Burgundians and their friends were like, yeah,

he's done it.

But I mean, I presume it was the Dukes and the noblemen, and the, because also I can't imagine that anyone else had any money.

Was it them?

No.

So who are the printers?

Are they immigrants?

Are they locals who are being trained up?

Who's physically doing the squishing?

I mean, Robin is right that the support, financial support and moral support and kind of marketing support in a way, lending your name to something, does come from nobility and kind of these well-known people.

But the printers themselves, most of the early printers in England were from abroad.

So for instance, Wink in the Word, which I think is the best-named printer ever.

He is Caxton's successor.

He's probably from the Low Countries or from northern France, and they also employed tradesmen from the continent.

And at first, they were protected, but we do see some public hostility towards these foreign craftsmen, and we do see over time that that grows.

So, from 1523 onwards, there are more and more acts or laws that progressively restrict the activity of printers from overseas.

So, there's more of a focus on native involvement and not these foreigners kind of coming in and taking jobs.

And I say that as a Dutch person working in UK academia.

The Recoil of History of Troy was the first book in English, the language.

But what was the first book that Caxton printed on English soil, Robin?

Do you know?

Dick Francis' whip hand.

Very good guess.

It's Canterbury Tales, close.

I even mentioned Canterbury.

Can pull an obvious bock and wrong.

There we go.

Back to me A-level English essay.

Yeah, and it's incredibly popular, isn't it?

This is a sort of bestseller.

And it becomes even more so in a way, and partly because of Caxton.

So he really gives it a bit of an extra push.

He adds a little prologue in which he hails Chaucer as kind of our great English poet.

And this really contributes later to the canonisation of Chaucer.

So this is around a period in the 16th century when the literary canon starts to take shape.

By 1557, there were print shops in York, Cambridge, Oxford, St Albans, Canterbury, Norwich, Ipswich, Abingdon, all lovely places.

But Lydia, the print industry wasn't just made up of typesetters and the ink squisher.

I don't know if their job is ink squisher.

That's what I want to call them.

I like the ink squisher job.

That is squish it, squish it down.

But there are other people in the industry, right?

We have a huge network of kind of various trades, people, and craftspel in the sale of books.

We've got typecutters, so they make the letters.

We've got block cutters as well, they make the wood blocks, so that's for the illustrations and things like that.

In this case, what usually happens is they kind of steal images from continental books.

They look at them and go, that looks good.

I'll copy that.

I'm afraid they weren't as skilled usually.

So they usually look like crap versions of a continental book, but there you go.

They sort of steal it, so they copy that.

And we've got the producers of ink, so the ink needs to be made.

We've got binders, people who bind books together, because early printer books were sold without a cover.

And we've also got distributors, booksellers.

I told you about the little store that Caxton has.

I'm making it sound really cute.

with the merchandise and the Hercules plushies that you probably have there.

You've sort of mentioned slightly the idea of stealing art from the continent and not doing quite as well, which sort of feels very AI now, doesn't it?

But Robin, what do you think is the situation with copyrights and ownership?

Look, I've been wrong on everything.

You've got to stop asking me.

Lillian knows much more than I do.

I don't know why you keep turning round here.

I haven't got a clue.

It's ridiculous.

There is a problem in the format, isn't there?

The copyright thing,

I reckon anyone can make a kind of ballsed up version of some great text just as long as they've got

the letters and the squidgy ink.

Yeah, I think you bang on with that because I mean copyright isn't really a thing that exists legally, but we do hear people complaining about their stuff being nicked.

Yeah, so there is no copyright, so really there's nothing to stop other printers to kind of steal your stuff.

And so you get pirated copies.

There is some attempt to stop this.

So there is the stationers register in the late 16th century.

The idea is that printers have to register for kind of exclusive rights to print a particular text.

And so we're hearing about, you know, people ripping each other off and stealing each other's work.

Sometimes the competition went too far.

In December 1492, Henry the typecutter, what a great name.

Obviously, his parents knew what he was doing.

Oh, yeah, nominative disagreement.

Nomination.

What should I do, father?

He got into a disagreement in the print shop with his boss, the Dutch printer.

Oh, oh, I can't pronounce this.

Quick, Lydia.

Hand over to me.

Girad Leo.

Oh, no, I can't do that.

Leo means lion, so he's called like something lion yeah okay okay

so he got in a dispute with that guy and he wanted to leave and start his own business do you want to guess what Henry did to negotiate his exit package oh did he kill him yes he did yeah

I thought it had taken a long time for a history program to get up to a bit of homicide and I reckon this would be the time now.

Yeah.

You know when you look at the clock on a show stage and you go, it's murder time.

Yeah, he stabbed him in the head with his type cutting tools.

All of us have felt murderous towards a printer, but normally it's because it won't connect to the Wi-Fi.

So,

you know.

So printers were literally killing each other over the, you know, the race to profits.

And once printing has been established, what sort of text do you think are being sold in shops?

What kind of material do you think you can get?

Are you talking about under the counter or above the counter?

Well, I was thinking, because in all forms of art and creativity, there's always this thing which is quite early on someone will go, if we really want to make money, we want to make, you know, erotic lithographs, you know, erotic haikus.

So I'm reckoning that there were people who were beginning to do the kind of sexy texts.

Sexy texts?

Do we have any sexy texts?

I think there are some.

Depends on what you think is sexy, I suppose.

But I will say, so again, wink in the word, he keeps coming up.

He is someone who does start a bit of a trend of kind of salacious stories.

He picks this up from trends in the Low Countries, which is kind of precursors to Penny Dreadfuls and things like that.

It's quite a diverse group, so we've got kind of more serious texts, so things like legal treatises, but we all and school books.

School books, there's a good market for that.

Those are those are good sellers'cause obviously there'll be new students every year and they have to buy the new books and it's a good grift basically.

But you've got narrative fiction as well, verse, kind of the literary text that we would think of.

There's also texts of religious instructions, there's all kinds of texts being sold in these shops.

And by the late 16th century, we see music being printed as well, which is interesting.

We see a rise in vernacular reading as well, printers printing for a local market.

And it also established the vernacular as a language suitable not just for literature, but also for science and learning and not just being in Latin.

And indulgences, too, aren't they?

So there's a lot being printed and being sold.

What effect do you think this has on society?

I'm going to guess that not nearly as much as we might imagine, because it's it's such a small specific market.

You're maintaining it in Latin as well, so you're also making it a kind of exclusive thing, which means that it's not going to affect the people who are working in the fields and things like that.

So that's my initial idea.

That's an interesting idea actually.

Lydia, where do you stand?

I mean, historians have often described the printing press as the engine room of the Protestant Reformation.

Where would you stand on that as a historian of medieval literature and the printing press?

I think that's partly true.

So we do see that across Europe, printing kind of becomes associated with the spread of new ideas, and partly those new ideas are Protestantism.

So we do see texts related to Martin Luther, John Calvin, etc., but also revolutionary scientific ideas.

So Copernicus's weird ideas also get spread in this sense.

But there's other ways that it has a bit of an impact.

So if we're looking at an English context, particularly, printing also plays a key role in the standardization of language.

It also introduces standardization in certain spellings that we still use today.

One of my favourites would be the H in ghost.

In medieval English, it's G-O-S-T.

Do you know where the H comes from?

No.

He's figured it out.

He knows what happens here.

He gives an answer to my mopping.

I'm excited by the word by the...

No, because

the standardisation is one of my favourite things, like the standardisation of time with the rail time time.

Yeah, that comes back.

Yeah, exactly.

Does it come from Herrowwood the Wake?

Oh, that's lovely.

No, no, a bit early, but no, it comes from the Low Countries again.

It's all the Dutch printers who've come over with weaving the words.

I was just wondering if it does.

Because I've come to notice

there's been very much a low country bias ever since you brought on a low country historian.

As if the whole thing is nothing more than a marketing campaign.

He's on to us.

He's on to us.

Visit the Netherlands.

Yes.

It's lovely.

It's lovely.

Go north to Friesland.

Sorry, that's very funny.

No, it's but that's but basically it's it's you've got people in the low countries and they're going, I I feel like this word needs an H in it, so I'm just going to spell it ghost.

And that's why we spell it ghost.

So the BBC sitcom would be ghosts.

Who are you going to call?

Ghostbusters?

It doesn't work, right?

I quite like ghost.

It's beautiful.

We are nearing the end of the episode, so we need to sort of mention how the authorities reacted to this new communication technology.

Where do the authorities, where does the church, where does the king stand on printing presses as a new problem in society or a new exciting technology?

I would imagine that the moment there was the suggestion that some, you know, especially if we're talking about Chaucer, I mean, Chaucer really is, and I don't mean this to joke away at all, it is tremendously racy.

It's people, you know, sticking their asses out of windows and those asses getting kissed and all that kind of thing.

And so I would imagine there was a sense that they had to make sure that this did not get into the hands of what they would consider to be the uneducated people.

Yeah, so the powers that be did find a use for printing to some extent as well.

So we talked about those indulgences.

So that's obviously religious institutions making a bit of cash on the side.

But we also get the institution of the king's or the queen's printer from 1504, so someone who kind of prints works on behalf of the monarch.

But there are problems too, so we do see that religious and secular authorities across Europe also want to control the flow of these new ideas.

So, again, Protestantism, things like that.

So, we see that the first printed edition of the New Testament in English, which is by William Tyndale, which was published in 1525 to 1526, it actually had to be printed abroad, couldn't be printed in England.

The first English Bible was printed in England not until 1539.

So there's all that concerns.

And we know that Henry VIII makes a proclamation at some point, this is in 1538, against naughty printed books.

And he kind of forbids the printing in English without the approval of the Privy Council.

And he also bans the importation of books to England without a royal license.

The nuance window!

Well, we have turned all the pages in our riveting story, so it's time to hit Ctrl-P print on the nuance window.

This is where Robin and I pull out a book and do some silent reading for two minutes while Dr.

Lydia takes centre stage to tell us something that we need to know about the early history of printing.

Without much further ado, take it away, Dr.

Lydia.

Wait, so though print was often billed as a revolution, print was actually far from an overnight sensation.

So manuscript and early print culture existed side by side for a long time.

Early printed books were even made to look like manuscripts.

So Caxton's books used types that imitated handwritten Burgundian manuscripts because this is what his readers were familiar with.

Many book lovers owned both manuscripts and printed books and some even copied books by hand, complete with drawings kind of made to look like printed woodcuts.

Artisans involved in the book trade did not necessarily distinguish between the two either.

So binders might put both manuscripts and printed books together.

And printed books were sometimes illuminated by hand.

Another myth that needs busting is that print made books cheaper and available to everyone.

Early printer books were actually still very expensive, so they were often huge.

Their paper is also excellent quality.

So, some of the 500-year-old books that I work with for my research are in a much better shape than my own 10-year-old paperbacks.

And they required a massive investment in both time and money.

Because the price of printed books was hefty, their readers were those people who had a bit of cash lying around.

So late medieval manuscript production already saw a rise in wealthy merchants, lawyers, and scholars owning books and not just the nobility or religious institutions.

And this trend continues with printed books.

We are talking about the literati, really.

This is a wealthy, well-educated, elite minority, and it takes centuries before we get a sense that your average person can afford books or printed books.

But as the example of Margaret of York showed, there were a surprising number of women who supported printed books and over time female readership grew.

We also see women printers, often widows, but someone like Elizabeth Pickering actually printed under her own name in the 1540s.

And this rise of women as the makers and consumers of books led to another kind of panic that has nothing to do with Protestantism or censorship, but with the age-old fear that women who read are dangerous.

And we are, I can confirm.

Thank you, Lydia.

Robin, are women dangerous?

No, I thought

it was a good idea.

I think anyone who reads, if you read well, you should be dangerous to society because you should be able to, you know, and that's the thing that I absolutely love.

And I was thinking of Sinead O'Connor.

She was so funny and she was so smart and she was so brilliant.

You know, one of my favourite lines of hers, I'm sorry, I know I've gone off on a tangent, but I just for well, I've been doing that now for 35 years, but it's I lie 52.

And there's a beautiful line.

Sinead O'Connor said, they buried me, but they didn't know that I was a seed.

And I think that's part of what reading is about as well.

When you are buried inside a book, when you are buried inside the library, you are going to grow into something magnificent.

Oh, that's lovely.

Love that.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much, Robin.

Thank you, Dr.

Lydia.

In History Corner, we had the fabulously book-smart Dr.

Lydia Zeldenbrust from the University of Gelasgow.

Thank you, Lydia.

And in Comedy Corner, we had our favourite bookworm, Robin Ince.

Thank you, Robin.

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as you crack the spine and another exciting historical story.

But for now, I'm off to send 12,450 unsold copies of my books to the Vatican.

Bye!

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