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EARLY PRINTING AT YORK. 219
needless to say how this development was stimulated
by the uprising of that mighty art which utterly
superseded the slow and laborious toil of the
transcribers of the books of Holy Scripture, of manuals
of devotion, of historical chronicles, of the treatises of
the philosopher and the verses of the poet. The
introduction oftheartof printing revolutionized everything.
It stimulated a thirst for knowledge, and it
furnished material wherewith to slake that thirst.
" Books, from slow, toilsome, costly productions,
became cheap, were multiplied with rapidity which
seemed like magic, and were accessible to thousands
to whom manuscripts were utterly unapproachable.
The power, the desire, increased with the facility of
reading."!
Printing, as we all know, was introduced into
England by Caxton, who was carrying on his work at
Westminster in 1474. Before the close of the century
a press was set up in the city of York.
It is an interesting
testimony to the importance of York, for with the
exception of the University of Oxford and the monastery
of St. Alban's, where books are said to have been
printed as early as 1480, it is the only provincial town
where the art of typography is known to have been
practised previously to the commencement of the
sixteenth century.
It speedily put an end to one branch of industry
which had long been carried on at YOrk to a very
considerable extent. As early as the reign of
Edward III. the scriJ>toria of the monasteries had
'
Milman's "Latin Christianity," ix. p. 348.