Patents, Pictures and Patronage

John Day and the Tudor Book Trade

Elizabeth Evenden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754654803
• eBook ISBN: 9781351912679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

John Day (1522-1584) is generally acknowledged to be the foremost English printer of the later sixteenth century. As well as printing some of the most important books of his day, most notably John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, he also pioneered enormous advances in English typography and book illustration. Yet despite his revered position in printing history, this book is the first full-length study to look into Day's life and legacy. Scholars have paid much attention of late to the Acts and Monuments but without placing it within the context of Day's overall business strategy. He was a printer whose success and range of titles, like his connections and influence, went far beyond John Foxe. Day may have gained his notoriety as the printer of Foxe's book but in order to understand both the man and his business, as Evenden shows, we must look at the wider range of Day's productions and the motivation behind them. The study begins by setting Day in the context of the sixteenth-century printing industry, examining his disputed origins and his establishment as a London printer. A number of Day's most celebrated Elizabethan productions are then discussed in detail, in order to understand not only his business strategies but also his religious and political affiliations throughout this period; similarly, Evenden examines his connections with the Stranger communities in London, and how they assisted Day's business and helped to enhance his reputation. Throughout the book it is argued that Day's printing empire and wealth were founded on a combination of two crucial factors: outstanding technical skills, and the ability to attract patrons and patents. Day carried out technically demanding printing assignments (most notably the heavily illustrated Acts and Monuments) for leading Elizabethan statesmen and churchmen and was rewarded with exclusive rights to print more lucrative works such as the ABC, Catechism, and Metrical Psalms. Thus, his success rested on both cheap and exp

CHAPTER 1

John Day’s Early Activities in the Book Trade

The wooden bridge that spans the river Cam at Queens’ College, Cambridge is known as the ‘mathematical bridge’ because of its intricate, geometric design. According to local lore the bridge was once held together by nothing more than its intricate design and the ways in which the different components of the bridge fitted together. The bridge was disassembled, so the story goes, and then it was discovered that it was impossible to reassemble it to its original state. The new bridge had to be supported and held together with metal bolts. Deconstructing the different, inter-related, components of the life and career of an individual carries the same risk. Once disassembled, there is the danger that we will never be able to rebuild the whole structure. Yet it is necessary to deconstruct the structure in order to understand its various parts. If the passage of time has forced such deconstruction upon us, then the task becomes yet more onerous still.

This is particularly true in a study of the printer John Day, for he is something of an enigma. Speak to anyone working on the Tudor period and they will have heard of him. If you work on music or literature you will know a piece of him, of his business, of his output. In that respect, many scholars are familiar with sections of his life or work. The challenge here is that with an output of more than 350 texts from his press, a complex web of associates, and a personal life and family that fragmented in its own right on a number of occasions, the chances of rebuilding even only parts of his life becomes a formidable task. Periods of his life are anything but an open book.

John Day is renowned as the leading English printer in the latter half of the sixteenth century. He is lauded as the printer of John Foxe’s seminal martyrology, the Acts and Monuments, and as the printer of the metrical psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins.¹ Yet this book is not an attempt to provide an in-depth analysis of these, the most famous offerings from his press. To do so warrants detailed, individual analysis, which is outside the intentions of this present study.² Rather, this book aims to understand them as just part of his output and to assess why their production and presentation was crucial to the success of Day’s business. Certainly, it was the presentation of books, such as the Acts and Monuments, which sealed his reputation as the master of his trade. In Foxe’s book and elsewhere, Day revealed himself as an innovator, since he pioneered the use of Anglo-Saxon type, and drastically raised the quality of English book illustration.³ Day’s output and his interests were certainly diverse. He also printed books on palmistry, astrology, almanacs, ballads, sermons, primers, poetry, as well as texts about medicine, mathematics and navigation. Hence his career and achievements cannot be understood merely from a consideration of the best-known products of his printing house. Rather, the total extent of Day’s activities, where known, must be analysed in order to understand not only his output but his motivations and inspirations also. To understand John Day, we must understand the importance of the patents he held, the financial risks involved in producing so many visually impressive texts, and the patrons who both acquired the patents for him and who appreciated his labours. Day was not only a man of business and an entrepreneur, but also a right-hand man to the Protestant regimes he served.

Needless to say, problems in reconstructing his life and his business dealings arise since some avenues of inquiry are inevitably thwarted by the passage of time. Documents get lost, books get damaged, and what the elements do not destroy, the private collector can hide from the eyes of the world. Little wonder then that historical research is often described as a form of detective work. One is always in danger of trying to make bricks without clay. The aim of this present study, it should be noted, is to provide biographical information where known when it is pertinent to his choices as a man of business and to assist in our understanding of Day’s actions at any given point. The intent is to assess his career as a printer, the patents he received, and his role in the production of Tudor literature and polemic within the context of known events in his life. To provide biographical details of an early modern figure there must be, inevitably, owing to the passage of time, some gaps in the tale being told, and John Day is no exception. To find the gaps in the documented life of this Tudor printer, we must start at the very beginning, for his exact route into the book trade remains a mystery.

The early years of John Day’s life remain unclear. The year of his birth, 1522, is conjectured from a woodcut profile of the printer, dated 1562, which bears the inscription: ‘Life is death and death is life: ætatis suæ XXXX’ (Plate 1).⁴ Nothing is known of his parentage, place of birth, or where he spent his childhood. Since he spent his known life in London, it would seem most likely that he originated from there. Tantalising possibilities lie in the fact that there are a number of denizens of London named Day but no firm connection to John Day the printer has been established.⁵ The records for the areas around London with which Day was later affiliated are patchy at best. If Day did not originate from London, then it is possible that he came from Norwich, since his strong connections to the area in later life would be explained by a family connection with the area.⁶ But, again, the survival rates for parishes during the period are scarce there also. Such a lack of solid evidence for his birthplace has, inevitably, led to speculation, some of it groundless.

John King declares that there is a ‘tradition’ that John Day was from Dunwich in Suffolk, and sees no reason to doubt that Day was originally a denizen of Dunwich.⁷ But traditions do not make for fact. Certainly Day owned a house in Dunwich later in his life but the parish records for St Peter’s parish in Dunwich do not survive and his name does not appear in the local subsidy returns or muster lists for the period 1549–1600.⁸ There could be any number of reasons why Day owned a house there; his connection with property there cannot be considered proof of origin. After all, Day maintained his shop in Cheapside throughout much of his career; this still does not prove a connection with the Thomas Day who also ran a shop in that area. At best it leaves us uncertain, at worst, in danger of error.⁹

The mist begins to clear in 1546, when a number of events in Day’s life come to light. By his early twenties, he had acquired two interests: one for books and another for a young woman named Alice Richardson, whom he married that year. Alice was the daughter of a Merchant Taylor, Simon Richardson, and his wife Amy, who lived in the parish of St Ewen’s, within Newgate.¹⁰ Alice must have been at least 18, since on 28 January 1546 she was given permission to marry. On 9 February that year, the newly-weds acknowledged that they were satisfied with Alice’s portion from her father’s estate.¹¹ At this point Day is described in the records as a ‘stationer’ – that is, he is not yet a printer, only a bookseller at this early stage in his career. It is worth noting that he was not yet even described as ‘citizen and stationer’ at this point. But he was a member of the Stringers’ Company and in October that year he was one of the stringers taking steps towards redemption from the Company. He is listed in the records as a ‘howsholder’ – in other words, he owned a business.¹² If he was already a householder, then either he was selling books legitimately outside the City limits (the ward boundaries) or he lived inside them. If living inside the City limits, then he had to be selling books wholesale, otherwise he had to have been retailing them illegally. If he was a journeyman working for a freeman prior to his attempts to seek redemption from the Stringers’ Company, then he would have had to have commenced work as a printer in his own right prior to 12 October 1546, in order to have been deemed a householder. This he could have done legally in the 1540s, since no company yet had control of the printing trade. So, when Day got married he was a bookseller; within months of this marriage it is likely he had begun printing books for himself.

From Bookseller to Printer

Certainly the evidence appears to support this. Although it is not clear just how Day his made his way from selling to manufacturing the printed word, it does appear, at least from the evidence of imprints, that Day had begun work as a printer in his own right by 1547. It is possible that he served out a seven-year apprenticeship (which would have been the normal route), but any clear record of him having done so does not appear to have survived. However, he must have done some sort of training in the lead up to his first sole imprints of that year. It is possible that Day had been working, perhaps as an apprentice, for the printer Thomas Raynolde prior to 1540. The City of London Archives preserve a deposition made in 1540 by a John Day who is described as having been servant to Thomas Raynolde.¹³ If it is the same John Day, then he must only have been 18 years of age and therefore would not have served out a full apprenticeship yet. It is possible that Day was learning his trade from Raynolde as a young man while selling books for him, although, again, no evidence survives in imprints or elsewhere to support this. Thomas Raynolde was both a physician and a printer, and is known for being the first printer to use copper engravings in his printing.¹⁴ If Day did work with him in the 1530s and 1540s, Raynolde’s innovations in and impressive use of illustrations in his texts must have been an inspiration to the young man starting out in his career. But if John Day were with Raynolde, he remained there for only a brief time, most probably leaving because printing was not Raynolde’s primary concern.

A more likely possibility is that he had some sort of business connection with William Tylley, a barbersurgeon who, like Raynolde, had a brief dalliance with the art of printing in the 1540s. He was Upper Warden of the Company in 1546 and candidate for Master in 1550, although he was not elected.¹⁵ He was, however, considered important enough in the Company to feature in a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger of Henry presenting the Company with their charter.¹⁶ Tylley was based in the parish of St Anne and St Agnes (where Day would later set up business) and on 1 September 1548, when he made his will, John Day witnessed it and was named as one of his overseers. In 1551, just months after his unsuccessful attempt to become Master, Tylley lay dying; one his last few a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 John Day’s Early Activities in the Book Trade
• 2 The Reign of Mary Tudor
• 3 1558–1563: The Return to Protestant Printing
• 4 1563–1568: Innovation and Reputation
• 5 Day’s Technical Achievements: Improvements in Book Illustration
• 6 1569–1576: Premier Printer to the Protestant Regime
• 7 1576–1584: The Final Years
• 8 Day’s Achievements and Legacy
• Select Bibliography
• Index