Cyril James Humphries Davenport - English Embroidered Bookbindings
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8 ENGLISH EMBROIDERED BOOKBINDINGS
[Illustration: 19--Christopherson, Historia Ecclesiastica. Lovanii,
1569.]
EDITED BY
ALFRED POLLARD
ENGLISH
EMBROIDERED
BOOKBINDINGS
BY CYRIL DAVENPORT, F. S. A
AUTHOR OF
'THE ENGLISH REGALIA'
ETC.
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUeBNER
AND COMPANY, LIMITED
1899
The English
Bookman's
Library
Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty
CONTENTS AND LIST OF PLATES
PAGE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION, ix
By Alfred W. Pollard.
ENGLISH EMBROIDERED BINDINGS
By Cyril Davenport.
CHAPTER I.--Introductory, 1
PLATES.
1. Embroidered Bag for Psalms. _London_, 1633, 17
2. Embroidered Cover for New Testament. _London_, 1640, 18
CHAPTER II.--Books Bound in Canvas, 28
PLATES.
3. The Felbrigge Psalter. 13th-century MS., 29
4. The Miroir or Glasse of the Synneful Soul. MS. by
the Princess Elizabeth. 1544, 32
5. Prayers of Queen Katherine Parr. MS. by the
Princess Elizabeth. 1545, 33
6. Christian Prayers. _London_, 1581, 37
7. Psalms and Common Praier. _London_, 1606, 38
8. Bible, etc. _London_, 1612, 39
9. Sermons by Samuel Ward. _London_, 1626-7, 41
10. New Testament, etc. _London_, 1625-35, 42
11. The Daily Exercise of a Christian. _London_, 1623, 44
12. Bible. _London_, 1626, 45
13. Bible, etc. _London_, 1642, 48
14. Bible. _London_, 1648, 49
CHAPTER III.--Books Bound in Velvet, 52
PLATES.
15. Tres ample description de toute la terre Saincte,
etc. MS. 1540, 52
16. Biblia. _Tiguri_, 1543, 54
17. Il Petrarcha. _Venetia_, 1544, 55
18. Queen Mary's Psalter. 14th century MS., 57
19. Christopherson, Historia Ecclesiastica. _Lovanii_, 1569,
_Frontispiece_
20. Christian Prayers. _London_, 1570, 59
21. Parker, De antiquitate Ecclesiae Britannicae. _London_, 1572, 60
22. The Epistles of St. Paul. _London_, 1578, 63
23. Christian Prayers, etc. _London_, 1584, 65
24. Orationis Dominicae Explicatio, etc. _Genevae_, 1583, 67
25. Bible. _London_, 1583, 68
26. The Commonplaces of Peter Martyr. _London_, 1583, 69
27. Biblia. _Antverpiae_, 1590, 70
28. Udall, Sermons. _London_, 1596, 71
29. Collection of Sixteenth-Century Tracts, 72
30. Bacon, Opera. _Londini_, 1623, 75
31. Bacon, Essays. 1625, 76
32. Common Prayer. _London_, 1638, 77
33. Bible. _Cambridge_, 1674, 78
CHAPTER IV.--Books Bound in Satin, 80
PLATES.
34. Collection of Sixteenth-Century Tracts, 80
35. New Testament in Greek. _Leyden_, 1576, 81
36. Bible. _London_, 1619, 84
37. Emblemes Chrestiens. MS. 1624, 85
38. New Testament. _London_, 1625, 86
39. New Testament and Psalms. _London_, 1630, 89
40. Henshaw, Horae Successivae. _London_, 1632, 90
41. Psalms. _London_, 1633, 91
42. Psalms. _London_, 1635, 92
43. Psalms. _London_, 1633, 94
44. Bible. _London_, 1638, 96
45. Psalms. _London_, 1639, 98
46. The Way to True Happiness. _London_, 1639, 99
47. New Testament. _London_, 1640, 101
48. Psalms. _London_, 1641, 103
49. Psalms. _London_, 1643, 105
50. Psalms. _London_, 1643, 106
51. Psalms. _London_, 1646, 108
52. Bible. _London_, 1646, 109
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
A new series of 'Books about Books,' exclusively English in its aims,
may seem to savour of the patriotism which, in matters of art and
historical research, is, with reason enough, often scoffed at as a
treacherous guide. No doubt in these pleasant studies patriotism acts as
a magnifying-glass, making us unduly exaggerate details. On the other
hand, it encourages us to try to discover them, and just at present this
encouragement seems to be needed. There are so many gaps in our
knowledge of the history of books in England that we can hardly claim
that our own dwelling is set in order, and yet many of our bookmen
appear more inclined to re-decorate their neighbours' houses than to do
work that still urgently needs to be done at home. The reasons for this
transference of energy are not far to seek. It is quite easy to be
struck with the inferiority of English books and their accessories, such
as bindings and illustrations, to those produced on the Continent. To
compare the books printed by Caxton with the best work of his German or
Italian contemporaries, to compare the books bound for Henry, Prince of
Wales, with those bound for the Kings of France, to try to find even a
dozen English books printed before 1640 with woodcuts (not imported
from abroad) of any real artistic merit--if any one is anxious to
reinforce his national modesty, here are three very efficacious methods
of doing it! On the other hand, English book-collectors have always been
cosmopolitan in their tastes, and without leaving England it is possible
to study to some effect, in public or private libraries, the finest
books of almost any foreign country. It is small wonder, therefore, that
our bookmen, when they have been minded to write on their hobbies, have
sought beauty and stateliness of work where they could most readily find
them, and that the labourers in the book-field of our own country are
not numerous. Touchstone's remark, 'a poor thing, but mine own,' might,
on the worst view of the case, have suggested greater diligence at home;
but on a wider view English book-work is by no means a 'poor thing.' Its
excellence at certain periods is as striking as its inferiority at
others, and it is a literal fact that there is no art or craft connected
with books in which England, at one time or another, has not held the
primacy in Europe.
It would certainly be unreasonable to complain that printing with
movable types was not invented at a time better suited to our national
convenience. Yet the fact that the invention was made just in the middle
of the fifteenth century constituted a handicap by which the printing
trade in this country was for generations overweighted. At almost any
earlier period, more particularly from the beginning of the fourteenth
century to the first quarter of the fifteenth, England would have been
as well equipped as any foreign country to take its part in the race.
From the production of Queen Mary's Psalter at the earlier date to that
of the Sherborne Missal at the later, English manuscripts, if we may
judge from the scanty specimens which the evil days of Henry VIII. and
Edward VI. have left us, may vie in beauty of writing and decoration
with the finest examples of Continental art. If John Siferwas, instead
of William Caxton, had introduced printing into England, our English
incunabula would have taken a far higher place. But the sixty odd years
which separate the two men were absolutely disastrous to the English
book-trade. After her exhausting and futile struggle with France, England
was torn asunder by the wars of the Roses, and by the time these were
ended the school of illumination, so full of promise, and seemingly so
firmly established, had absolutely died out. When printing was introduced
England possessed no trained illuminators or skilful scribes such as in
other countries were forced to make the best of the new art in order not
to lose their living, nor were there any native wood-engravers ready to
illustrate the new books. I have never myself seen or heard of a 'Caxton'
in which an illuminator has painted a preliminary border or initial
letters; even the rubrication, where it exists, is usually a
disfigurement; while as for pictures, it has been unkindly said that
inquiry whence they were obtained is superfluous, since any boy with a
knife could have cut them as well.
Making its start under these unfavourable conditions, the English
book-trade was exposed at once to the full competition of the
Continental presses, Richard III. expressly excluding it from
the protection which was given to other industries. Practically all
learned books of every sort, the great majority of our service-books,
most grammars for use in English schools, and even a few popular books
of the kind to which Caxton devoted himself, were produced abroad for
the English market and freely imported. Only those who mistake the
shadow for the substance will regret this free trade, to which we owe
the development of scholarship in England during the sixteenth century.
None the less, it was hard on a young industry, and though Pynson,
Wynkyn de Worde, the Faques, Berthelet, Wolfe, John Day, and others
produced fine books in England during the sixteenth century, the start
given to the Continental presses was too great, and before our printers
had fully caught up their competitors, they too were seized with the
carelessness and almost incredible bad taste which marks the books of
the first half of the seventeenth century in every country of Europe.
Towards the close of the eighteenth century, as is well known, the
French thought sufficiently well of Baskerville's types to purchase a
fount after his death for the printing of an important edition of the
works of Voltaire. But the merits of Baskerville as a printer, never
very cordially admitted, are now more hotly disputed than ever; and if I
am asked at what period English printing has attained that occasional
primacy which I have claimed for our exponents of all the bookish arts,
I would boldly say that it possesses it at the present day. On the one
hand, the Kelmscott Press books, on their own lines, are the finest and
the most harmonious which have ever been produced; on the other, the
book-work turned out in the ordinary way of business by the five or six
leading printers of England and Scotland seems to me, both in technical
qualities and in excellence of taste, the finest in the world, and with
no rival worth mentioning, except in the work of one or two of the best
firms in the United States. Moreover, as far as I can learn, it is only
in Great Britain and America that the form of books is now the subject
of the ceaseless experiment and ingenuity which are the signs of a
period of artistic activity.
As regards book-illustration the same claim may be put forward, though
with a little more hesitation. We have been taught lately, with
insistence, that 'the sixties' marked an epoch in English art, solely
from the black and white work in illustrated books. At that period our
book-pictures are said to have been the best in the world; unfortunately
our book-decoration, whether better or worse than that of other
countries, was almost unmitigatedly bad. In the last quarter of a
century our decorative work has improved in the most striking manner;
our illustrations, if judged merely for their pictorial qualities, have
not advanced. In the eyes of artists the sketches for book-work now
being produced in other countries are probably as good as our own. But
an illustration is not merely a picture, it is a picture to be placed
in a certain position in a printed book, and in due relation to the size
of the page and the character of the type. English book-illustrators by
no means always realise this distinction, yet there is on the whole a
greater feeling for these proprieties in English books than in those of
other countries, and this is an important point in estimating merits.
Another important point is that the rule of the 'tint' or 'half-tone'
block, with its inevitable accompaniment of loaded paper, ugly to the
eye and heavy in the hand, though it has seriously damaged English
illustrated work, has not yet gained the predominance it has in other
countries. Our best illustrated books are printed from line-blocks, and
there are even signs of a possible revival of artistic wood-engraving.
In endeavouring to make good my assertion of what I have called the
occasional primacy of English book-work, I am not unaware of the danger
of trying, or seeming to try, to play the strains of 'Rule Britannia' on
my own poor penny whistle. As regards manuscripts, therefore, it is a
pleasure to be able to seek shelter behind the authority of Sir Edward
Maunde Thompson, whose words in this connection carry all the more
weight, because he has shown himself a severe critic of the claims
which have been put forward on behalf of several fine manuscripts to be
regarded as English. In the closing paragraphs of his monograph on
_English Illuminated Manuscripts_ he thus sums up the pretensions of the
English school:--
'The freehand drawing of our artists under the Anglo-Saxon kings
was incomparably superior to the dead copies from Byzantine models
which were in favour abroad. The artistic instinct was not
destroyed, but rather strengthened, by the incoming of Norman
influence; and of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there is
abundant material to show that English book-decoration was then at
least equal to that of neighbouring countries. For our art of the
early fourteenth century we claim a still higher position, and
contend that no other nation could at that time produce such
graceful drawing. Certainly inferior to this high standard of
drawing was the work of the latter part of that century; but still,
as we have seen, in the miniatures of this time we have examples of
a rising school of painting which bid fair to attain to a high
standard of excellence, and which only failed for political
causes.'[1]
To this judicial pronouncement on the excellence of English manuscripts
on their decorative side, we may fairly add the fact that manuscripts of
literary importance begin at an earlier date in England than in any
other country, and that the Cotton MS. of _Beowulf_ and the
miscellanies which go by the names of the _Exeter Book_ and the
_Vercelli Book_ have no contemporary parallels in the rest of Europe.
[Footnote 1: _English Illuminated Manuscripts._ By Sir Edward Maunde
Thompson, K. C. B. (Kegan Paul, 1895), pp. 66, 67.]
When we turn from books, printed or in manuscript, to their possessors,
it is only just to begin with a compliment to our neighbours across the
Channel. No English bookman holds the unique position of Jean Grolier,
and 'les femmes bibliophiles' of England have been few and
undistinguished compared with those of France. Grolier, however, and his
fair imitators, as a rule, bought only the books of their own day,
giving them distinction by the handsome liveries which they made them
don. Our English collectors have more often been of the omnivorous type,
and though Lords Lumley and Arundel in the sixteenth century cannot,
even when their forces are joined, stand up against De Thou, in Sir
Robert Cotton, Harley, Thomas Rawlinson, Lord Spencer, Heber, Grenville,
and Sir Thomas Phillips (and the list might be doubled without much
relaxation of the standard), we have a succession of English collectors
to whom it would be difficult to produce foreign counterparts. Round
these _dii majores_ have clustered innumerable demigods of the
book-market, and certainly in no other country has collecting been as
widely diffused, and pursued with so much zest, as in England during
the present century. It is to be regretted that so few English
collectors have cared to leave their marks of ownership on the books
they have taken so much pleasure in bringing together. Michael Wodhull
was a model in this respect, for his book-stamp is one of the most
pleasing of English origin, and his autograph notes recording the prices
he paid for his treasures, and his assiduous collation of them, make
them doubly precious in the eyes of subsequent owners. Mr. Grenville
also had his book-stamp, though there is little joy to be won from it,
for it is unpleasing in itself, and is too often found spoiling a fine
old binding. Mr. Cracherode's stamp was as graceful as Wodhull's; but,
as a rule, our English collectors, though, as Mr. Fletcher is
discovering, many more of them than is generally known have possessed a
stamp, have not often troubled to use it, and their collections have
never obtained the reputation which they deserve, mainly for lack of
marks of ownership to keep them green in the memory of later possessors.
That this should be so in a country where book-plates have been so
common may at first seem surprising. But book-plates everywhere have
been used rather by the small collectors than the great ones, and the
regrettable peculiarity of our English bookmen is, not that they
despised this rather fugitive sign of possession, but that for the most
part they despised book-stamps as well.
Of book-plates themselves I have no claim to speak; but for good taste
and grace of design the best English Jacobean and Chippendale specimens
seem to me the most pleasing of their kind, and certainly in our own day
the work of Mr. Sherborn has no rival, except in that of Mr. French,
who, in technique, would, I imagine, not refuse to call himself his
disciple.
I have purposely left to the last the subject of Bindings, as this,
being more immediately cognate to Mr. Davenport's book, may fairly be
treated at rather greater length. If the French dictum 'la reliure est
un art tout francais' is not without its historical justification, it is
at least possible to show that England has done much admirable work, and
that now and again, as in the other bookish arts, she has attained
preeminence.
The first point which may fairly be made is that England is the only
country besides France in which the art has been consistently practised.
In Italy, binding, like printing, flourished for a little over half a
century with extraordinary vigour and grace, and then fell suddenly and
completely from its high estate. From 1465 to the death of Aldus the
books printed in Italy were the finest in the world; from the beginning
of the work of Aldus to about 1560 Italian bindings possess a freedom of
graceful design which even the superior technical skill quickly gained
by the French does not altogether outbalance. But just as after about
1520 a finely printed Italian book can hardly be met with, so after
1560, save for a brief period during which certain fan-shaped designs
attained prettiness, there have been no good Italian bindings. In
Germany, when in the fifteenth century, before the introduction of gold
tooling, there was a thriving school of binders working in the mediaeval
manner, the Renaissance brought with it an absolute decline. Holland,
again, which in the fifteenth century had made a charming use of large
panel stamps, has since that period had only two binders of any
reputation, Magnus and Poncyn, of Amsterdam, who worked for the
Elzeviers and Louis XIV. Of Spanish bindings few fine specimens
have been unearthed, and these are all early. Only England can boast
that, like France, she has possessed one school of binders after
another, working with varying success from the earliest times down to
the present century, in which bookbinding all over Europe has suffered
from the servility with which the old designs, now for the first time
fully appreciated, have been copied and imitated.
In this length of pedigree it must be noted that England far surpasses
even France herself. The magnificent illuminated manuscripts, the finest
of their age, which were produced at Winchester during the tenth
century, were no doubt bound in the jewelled metal covers of which the
rapacity of the sixteenth century has left hardly a single trace in this
country. But early in the twelfth century, if not before, the Winchester
bookmen turned their attention also to leather binding, and the school
of design which they started, spreading to Durham, London, and Oxford,
did not die out in England until it was ousted by the large panel stamps
introduced from France at the end of the fifteenth. The predominant
feature of these Winchester bindings (of which a fine example from the
library of William Morris recently sold for L180), and of their
successors, is the employment of small stamps, from half an inch to an
inch in size, sometimes circular, more often square or pear-shaped, and
containing figures, grotesques, or purely conventional designs. A
circle, or two half-circles, formed by the repetition of one stamp,
within one or more rectangles formed by others, is perhaps the commonest
scheme of decoration, but it is the characteristic of these bindings, as
of the finest in gold tooling, that by the repetition of a few small
patterns an endless variety of designs could be built up. The British
Museum possesses a few good examples of this stamp-work, but the finest
collections of them are in the Cathedral libraries at Durham and
Hereford. Any one, however, who is interested in this work can easily
acquaint himself with it by consulting the unique collection of rubbings
carefully taken by Mr. Weale and deposited in the National Art Library
at the South Kensington Museum. In these rubbings, as in no other way,
the history of English binding can be studied from the earliest
Winchester books to the charming Oxford bindings executed by Thomas
Hunt, the English partner of the Cologne printer, Rood, about 1481.
During the first half of this period the English leather binders were
the finest in Europe; during the second, the Germans pressed them hard,
and when the large panel stamps, three or four inches square and more,
were introduced in Holland and France, the English adaptations of them
were distinctly inferior to the originals. The earliest English bindings
with gold tooling were, of course, also imitative. The use of gold
reached this country but slowly, as the first known English binding, in
which it occurs, is on a book printed in 1541, by which time the art had
been common in Italy for a generation. The English bindings found on
books bound for Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Mary I., all of which are
roughly assigned to Berthelet as the Royal binder, resemble the current
Italian designs of the day, with sufficient differences to make it
probable that they were produced by Englishmen. We know, however,
that until the close of the century there were occasional complaints
of the presence of foreign binders in London, and it is probable that
the Grolieresque bindings executed for Wotton were foreign rather than
English. Where, however, we find work on English books distinctly unlike
anything in France or Italy, it is reasonable to assign it to a native
school, and such a school seems to have grown up about 1570, in the
workshop of John Day, the helper of Archbishop Parker in so many of his
literary undertakings. These bindings attributed to Day, especially
those in which he worked with white leather on brown, although they have
none of the French delicacy of tooling, perhaps for this reason attack
the problem of decoration with a greater sense of the difference between
the styles suitable for a large book and a small than is always found in
France, where the greatest binders, such as Nicholas Eve and Le Gascon,
often covered large folios with endless repetitions of minute tools whose
full beauty can only be appreciated on duodecimos or octavos. The English
designs with a large centre ornament and corner-pieces are rich and
impressive, and we may fairly give Day and his fellows the palm for
originality and effectiveness among Elizabethan binders. In the next
reign the French use of the seme or powder, a single small stamp, of a
fleur-de-lys, a thistle, a crown, or the like, impressed in rows all over
the cover, was increasingly imitated in England, very unsuccessfully,
and, save for a few traces of the style of Day, the leather bindings of
the first third of the century deserve the worst epithets which
can be given them.
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