A spark of genius

Living abroad proved inspirational for four great British minds, as Carla Passino discovers

- Carla Passino

BRUGES changed William Caxton’s life. He went to the Belgian city, then part of the Duchy of Burgundy, as a mercer, settling there by 1453, and came back as England’s first book printer. A successful merchant, he later joined the household of Edward IV’s sister, Margaret, who had married Charles, Duke of Burgundy. As part of her retinue, he travelled extensively across Europe, including to Cologne, where he had some of his books printed. With his ‘hande wery & not stedfast’ from the effort of duplicating the translation of Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troyes he had done for Margaret and his ‘eyen dimed with ouermoche lokyng on the whit paper’, Caxton embraced the printing process, which had the all-important advantage of allowing him to distribute copies of his books to everyone ‘attones’. Having learned the technique ‘at grete charge and dispense’, he opened a press in Bruges, where he printed his Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye in 1473. Returning to England in the 1470s, he brought his new craft with him and set up a shop in Westminster, where he printed the very first books in the English language. He died in 1491 as he was about to print his 100th book.