With very few exceptions the decorative and pictorial initials reproduced from foreign books on the preceding pages have been chosen from works printed before 1525, and in most cases before 1500. In Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands, schools of cutters and engravers in wood and soft metal with strongly marked local characteristics came into existence before 1490—in Germany some twenty years earlier—and during the last decade of the century numerous finely illustrated books were issued from the chief continental presses. The good work of one country or town might be imitated, slavishly or freely, in another; here and there also the work produced was quaintly or stupidly bad, and good designs were often spoilt by clumsy cutting. But despite all such individual failures, there was abundance of originality and executive skill, and this is true also, though in a less degree, of Switzerland and Spain. When we turn our eyes homewards, we find a totally different state of affairs. The few English illustrated books of the period with which this monograph is mainly concerned have been divided by specialists into three groups:[34] those with cuts borrowed outright from the Netherlands or France (e.g. Caxton’s Horae cuts, the illustrations in Pynson’s edition of Lydgate’s Falls of Princes, etc.); those slavishly copied, mostly, but not always, very badly, from foreign originals (e.g. Caxton’s Aesop, the editions of the Castell of Labour, Art of Good Living and Good Dyeing, the Ship of Fools, and most of the odd single cuts); lastly, a scanty residue of native origin, illustrating books like the Canterbury Tales or Morte d’Arthur, for which no foreign models could be found. Some of these are almost incredibly bad, others merely wooden, a very few, like the cut to Fisher’s funeral sermon for Henry VII., fairly neat. But, again speaking generally, it is evident that English printers could enlist the services of no designers of any skill and of few woodcutters able to rival the average journeyman-work in foreign books.

Good initials demanded little less skill from their designers, and certainly no less from their cutters, than the larger forms of book-illustration. The great continental centres of printing prove abundantly that good initials are the natural accompaniments of good illustrations, and thus there is no room for surprise that in England, where there was no competent native school of book-illustration, there was also no competent native school of initial-cutters.

Of the fact there can be no doubt. Caxton possessed only one initial of any size, the A shown among our facsimiles, which he used in one or two of his later books. His contemporaries possessed none at all. After Caxton’s death in 1491, for the next half-century and more the history of English initials is as the history of our book-illustrations—they are imported from abroad, copied from foreign originals, or of no artistic value. An early instance of importation is the large grotesque H, shown in facsimile, which De Worde acquired early in his career from Govaert van Os when the latter was moving to Copenhagen; in the same way Julian Notary obtained a few letters from André Bocard. Though it may be thought churlish to look outside England when we find a rebus on an English name, it can hardly be doubted that the initials cut for Pynson’s Morton Missal, of which specimens are given, were made for him in France. Certainly no one could claim these letters as starting an independent English school, and most of those subsequently used by Pynson and De Worde are direct copies, or imitations, from the French. Thus it is only by transcending our bounds that we can offer a few examples of English initials which have at least more independence than these early ventures. It, perhaps, shows some rashness to include among them the excellent H from Grafton’s edition of Halle’s Union of the two Houses of York and Lancaster (1548), for this may perchance have been inspired by those in the Paris edition of the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus (see pages 85 and 230). Nevertheless the book is important, because it was on heraldic lines that some of the best later work was produced. Much of this may be connected with the name of that excellent printer John Day. The pictorial initial to the Bible of 1549, showing Edward Becke, the promoter of the edition, presenting a copy to Edward VI., is full of life, and the portrait initial of Elizabeth from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is excellent work. Between these two books Day had issued, in 1559, a fine edition of Cunningham’s Cosmographical Glasse, and this is adorned by an admirable heraldic D with the arms of the Earl of Leicester, and by some pictorial initials connected with the subject of the book, the authorship of these being still undiscovered, despite the letters IB, IC, ID, found on some of them. At a later date work of the same style appears in his edition of Ascham’s Schoolmaster.

It is a pity that Day, not being the royal printer, could not be entrusted with printing the Bishops’ Bible of 1568, which came from the press of Jugge and Cawood. But his patron, Archbishop Parker, had, of course, a large share in its superintendence, and some of the heraldic initials in the volume are almost as good as the Leicester D. That which has been chosen as a sample shows the arms of Archbishop Cranmer, a pleasing compliment from Parker to his predecessor.

The ornamental title-page to the Bishops’ Bible is not woodcut but engraved on copper, and the fact is significant. Under Day’s guidance English printing and book-illustration lifted up their head, but the effort came too late. After about 1580 woodcuts became unfashionable, copper engravings gradually took their place, and the change was fatal to the production of fine initials, of which no more were produced.