A Newly Discovered Fragment Of William Caxton's Ordinale

Given the sustained attention that William Caxton's printing has received from bibliographers and book collectors from the eighteenth century onwards, the discovery of unknown fragments from the products of his presses has become a considerable rarity. The recent find of a hitherto unknown leaf from his Ordinale seu Pica ad usum Sarum (1476–77), also known as the Sarum Pie, at the University of Reading Special Collections Service is therefore noteworthy, particularly because it concerns such an early work of which no complete copies are known to survive.¹ Most of the books that Caxton printed in Westminster in 1476 and 1477, in the first two years after he had set up the first English printing house, survive in single copies and fragments.² The addition of a new fragment to the corpus of Caxton's surviving early works thus notably increases the available evidence that documents the workings of Caxton's Westminster shop in its early years.

Bibliographical description

The only other two surviving Ordinale fragments were famously discovered by William Blades in the binding of a copy of Caxton's edition of Chaucer's translation of Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae at St Albans Grammar School in 1858.³ Both are now held at the British Library.⁴ They each consist of two outer sheets of eight-leaf quires. Each of the pages is

Fig 1.

Ordinale seu Pica ad usum Sarum (1476/77), recto, University of Reading Special Collections Service. Reproduced by kind permission.

rubricated. The bibliographical features of the newly discovered leaf are consistent with these fragments. The Reading leaf, which is cropped on all sides, measures 176 × 136 mm, with the type area measuring 147 × 95 mm. Because there is no watermark it cannot be determined whether the paper

Fig 2.

Ordinale seu Pica ad usum Sarum (1476/77), verso, University of Reading Special Collections Service. Reproduced by kind permission.

stock is the same as was used for one of the BL fragments, which was also used for Caxton's first edition of the Canterbury Tales.⁵ There are twenty-two lines with uneven line endings on each page, and there are no running headings, signatures, foliation or catchwords. Like the fragments at the BL, the Reading leaf is printed entirely in type 3, which Caxton purchased not long after having published his earliest works in Westminster.⁶

The style of the rubricated paraphs is different to that of the BL fragments, which indicates that the leaf originates from a different copy or set of waste leaves. Based on her study of the rubrication in Caxton's early books, Satoko Tokunaga has suggested that Caxton's books were rubricated 'soon after printing … in or around the printing house'.⁷ The style of rubrication is different from the styles of Caxton's recurring rubricators that Tokunaga has distinguished. However, this need not indicate that the Reading leaf was not rubricated in or near the printing house. The evidence is too limited to offer any conclusive answers, both in terms of the number of copies printed during the early years of Caxton's Westminster shop that survive and in terms of the rubrication on the Reading leaf, which consists exclusively of paraphs.

A noticeable feature of the Reading leaf that is absent from the BL fragments is the use of the virgula to indicate medial pauses on the verso side of the leaf. On the recto side of the leaf and on each of the BL pages, the punctus is used exclusively to indicate medial pauses, whereas on the verso side of the Reading leaf, the virgula is used to indicate medial pauses in seven out of nine instances. In addition, although the page is not fully justified, a clear attempt at more even line endings is made here. Two potential explanations for this difference may be offered. Caxton is known to have employed at least two compositors from at least 1477 onwards.⁸ In his study of the first edition...