The first English printer and publisher; translator of Godfrey of Boloyne, an account of the First Crusade (1096-1099). Caxton was born in Kent around 1422 and apprenticed to
A silk mercer in London in 1438. From 1441 he lived in Bruges, and around 1470 won the patronage of Margaret of York, the daughter of King Edward IV of England and wife of Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy. He presented to Margaret his first translated work: The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. Caxton learned printing while in Cologne in 1471-1472 and on his return to Bruges set up a press, from which the Recuyell was the first printed book (1474 or 1475). He transferred his enterprise to Westminster in England in 1476, and until his death he occupied himself with translating, writing, and printing. In all he published at least 18,000 pages under eighty different titles. Most of these works were chivalric or religious in nature, such as Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, and he translated twenty-two of them himself: twenty-one from French and one from Dutch.
Godfrey of Boloyne or The Siege and Conqueste of Jherusalem (1481) is a translation into Middle English of the Old French Estoire de Eracles empereur et la conqueste de la terre d’Outremer, itself a translation of William of Tyre’s Latin chronicle. The version used by Caxton was probably a codex known to have belonged to Louis of Bruges. Its hero was Godfrey of Bouillon, the first Christian ruler of Jerusalem after the crusader conquest of 1099, whom Caxton placed in the “thyrde stalle of the moost worthy of Cristen men” [God-effroy of Boloyne, ed. Colvin, p. 3]: that is, he was seen as the world’s greatest hero since Arthur and Charlemagne. This comment occurs at the beginning of the work, which ends with Godfrey’s death. In a colophon Caxton gave his purpose: “to thende that every cristen man may be the better encoraged tenterprise warre for the defense of Cristendom” [Godeffroy of Boloyne, p. 311], reflecting the enthusiasm for crusading in England at the time. The work survives in thirteen copies and one set of fragments.
-Susan B. Edgington
Bibliography
Blake, N. F., William Caxton: A Bibliographical Guide (New York: Garland, 1985).
The Boke Intitulede Eracles and... ofGodefrey of Boloyne, Caxton, Westmester, 1481 (New York: Da Capo, 1973).
Fichte, Joerg O., “Der Kreuzzugsgedanke in Caxtons Verlagsprogramm: Ideologie und Strategie,” in Hochmittelalterliches Geschichtsbewuftsein im Spiegel nichthistoriographischer Quellen, ed. Hans-Werner Goetz (Berlin: Akademie, 1998), pp. 377-388.
Godeffroy of Boloyne or The Siege and Conqueste of Jerusalem by William, Archbishop of Tyre, ed. Mary Noyes Colvin (London: Kegan Paul, 1893).
William Caxton and his printing press. (Pixel That)
The History of Godefrey of Boloyne and of the Conquest of Iherusalem, ed. H. Haliday Sparling (Hammersmith, UK: Kelmscott, 1893).
Tyerman, Christopher, England and the Crusades, 1095-1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
World History
