One other small class of books, printed like liturgies for the most part in Latin, but with lapses into English, must be noticed before we proceed further--the Latin Grammars for the instruction of English school-boys. The earliest of these is an edition of the Grammar of Perottus, printed by Egidius van der Heerstraten at Louvain, about 1486, and other grammar-books by Anwykyll and Joannes de Garlandia are said to have been printed during the fifteenth century at Deventer, Antwerp, Cologne, and Paris. If any Member of the Society can give me a list of these dreadful little books I shall be very grateful to him, but they have always filled me with so much compassion for the unfortunate children who had to learn them, that I am afraid I have taken no notes of the few I have seen.
In order to give an idea of the way in which the English books printed abroad reflect the changing phases of our national life I propose now to trace with a little more particularity the history of the classes of the English books printed at Antwerp, where throughout the sixteenth century they are specially plentiful. We begin in the quiet days of Gerard Leeu and Jan van Doesborgh, who, good honest men, could have had no other object in their English publications than the making a little profit out of some popular subjects which our native printers were neglecting. The three grammar-books printed by Thierry Martens for Jacobi and Pelgrim in 1507 and 1508, are not very interesting. Christopher of Endhoven, who calls himself with equal frequency Ruremondensis, followed in 1523 in a higher branch of the trade, competing with the printers of Rouen and Paris who produced the Sarum Service-books in such numbers. From 1523 to 1531, the succession of Missals, Processionals, Manuals, Psalters, Hymnals, Breviaries and Horae, which were printed by Endhoven at Antwerp, and sold in London, mostly by Francis Byrckman or Peter Kaetz, is broken only by an edition of Lyndewood's 'Provinciale.' In 1531 we hear for the first time a different note, three books being printed in that year for William Tyndal, which are ascribed to the press of Martin Lempereur, viz.: 'The prophete Jonas, with an introducciõ before, teachinge to vnderstonde him'; 'The exposition of the fyrste Epistle of seynt Jhon'; and 'The praier and complaynte of the ploweman unto Christe'; the latter an old book which the title assigns to not long after 1300. The next year the widow of Endhoven printed another Sarum 'Hymnal,' but in 1534 she was employed by the Reformers, printing George Joy's revision of Tyndal's New Testament, while Joy's English Psalter, and Tyndal's own New Testament were printed by Lempereur. Antwerp editions of the same year of the 'Rudimenta Grammatices,' originally drawn up for Wolsey's school at Ipswich, and of a 'Prognostication,' show that the Dutch printers did not quite forget the existence of untheological English readers, but for a long time to come theology was paramount in English books printed abroad. Several editions of Tyndal's New Testament were printed at Antwerp in 1535, 1536 and 1538, and though the attribution of the Coverdale Bible of 1535 to the press of Jacob van Meteren (a point which I leave to our Bible experts) is not undisputed, it seems generally agreed that the composite version known as 'Matthew's Bible,' brought out by Grafton and Whitchurch in 1537, was really the work of an Antwerp printer, probably Martin Lempereur.