the Flemings, was distributed over the whole of Europe, and much of it returned to English shores.

Equally famous were becoming the wealth and prosperity which accrued to Flanders through this very cloth-making, and Edward III was the first to attempt a far-sighted experiment. Profiting by the internal dissensions which raged among the trade Guilds and individual townships of the Low Countries, he persuaded some four-score high class Flemish families to settle in Kent and to carry on the manufacture of cloth where the source of wool was ready to hand. Royal patronage favoured the little colony from the first and freedom from taxation among many other privileges enabled it to thrive vigorously and to spread with rapidity. The Flemish became naturalised and year by year they grew wealthier, until in the Fifteenth Century, writes Hasted, " their trade was of great importance, and exercised by persons who possessed most of the landed property in the Weald insomuch that almost all the antient families of these parts (in 1778) now of large estates, are sprung from ancestors who have used this staple manufacture."

Describing Kent some two decades after Caxton was born there, at the time of Cade's rebellion, John Richard Green 1 names it "the great manufacturing district of the day, seething with a busy population, and especially concerned with the French contests through the piracy of the Cinque Ports, where every house showed some spoil from the wars"; so great had its importance become that it was the rising in Kent" which brought about the victory of Northampton "2 in the civil war which followed.

We have therefore some idea of the district in which Caxton was born: the exact locality of his birth and his parentage remain a complex problem. Previous biographers without exception have suggested that William Caxton's family was connected either with the important manor of Caustons, near Hadlow, in the Weald of Kent, or with the Caxtons of Canterbury.

The ultimate origin of the name Caxton would appear to lie in Cambridgeshire, for therein occurs the place-name Caxton, written in Domesday Book as Caustons. The derivation of the 2 Ibidem.

1

"History of the English People," VI. 2.

:

name is a little obscure, but the late Professor Skeat1 connecte it with the mysterious proper name Cah, which may be inferre from the patronymic Cahing, and which might have given i the genitive Cahes-tün, whence Middle English Cagheston c (by contraction) Cagh'ston. The contracted ghs could well hav given x.2 Dr. Odon Schram3 points out that the assumption that the Norfolk place-name Cawston is a mere variant of the Cambridgeshire name is erroneous. Spellings such as Caluestur could never have risen from the h, gh medial sounds and he suggests Old English cealf as the basis of the Norfolk

name.

The actual difference in the spelling of the proper name are of no account, for William Caxton himself appears as Catston, Caxston, Caxtun, and Kaxsum; Thomas Caxton as Cawston, Causton, Cauestun, and John de Cawston as John Cawystin or Caxton.

There is definite reason to suppose that William Caxton came of good stock, not only because his learning, which he constantly deprecates, is of no mean order for the time and in the circumstances and of which good schooling must needs have been the basis, but also from the mere fact of his being apprenticed in the most exclusive of companies to a mercer of such repute as Robert Large and at the same time as Large's John Wheeler, writing considerably later, but with authority, since he was the Secretary of the Merchant Adventurers, remarks that "The Merchant Adventurers sende their yong men, sonnes, and servauntes or apprentices, who are for the most part Gentlemen's sonnes, to the Marte Townes beyonde the seas, there to learne good facions and knowledge in trade." 4

own son.

Of the Canterbury family, William Caxton, a mercer, took up the freedom of that city by redemption 5 in 1431 and Robert owned considerable property in the parish of St. Alphege, as we learn from a will proved in the Consistory Court of Canterbury and from the records of the early Chancery Proceedings. It is

1 In "The Place-names of Cambridgeshire."

* cp. N.E.D. hox (OE. hōh-sinu.

however very unlikely that William, the printer, had any close connection with this particular family.

But the Caxtons of Hadlow seem to have lost possession of the manor of Caustons and to have disintegrated at a period considerably earlier than that of the printer's birth. This fact has generally proved a stumbling-block, although it was always vaguely suggested that the family might quite probably have retained much of its former wealth and position.

In the first half of the fourteenth century there flourished in London a Mercer whose name was William de Causton; he died in 1354, leaving a widow, Christiana de Causton. It is to be noted here that what appears to be the same family of London Mercers a little later drop the de and become plain Causton, which fact suggests that their place of origin (near Hadlow in the Weald?) became forgotten.

Now there exist in the Muniments of Westminster Abbey nearly four hundred documents relating to lands and tenements,1 feoffments and other transactions, concerning this same William. These, although classified and indexed to conform to the complete scheme of cataloguing now nearly completed at the Abbey, were at one time contained in a box labelled "Foreign Estates"-that is, estates such as had never been in the possession of the Abbot or Convent of Westminster. 2

Edward J. L. Scott, one-time keeper of the Manuscripts in the British Museum, was the first to discover these relics, and he raised the very pertinent question as to how they came to be incorporated in the Abbey Muniments. The suggestion that he made was that the documents had been handed down in the family, had come into the possession of William Caxton, printer, who spent the last fifteen years of his life in the Abbey precincts and whose documentary possessions, seeing that he died without male issue, might well have come at his death into the hands of the Abbot of Westminster and thus into the muniments.

He also noted that two of the documents were of a later date of the reign of Richard II-and concluded that they might have been added by the printer to the earlier collection: these refer

1 Chiefly in Edelmeston [Edmonton], Enfield and Tottenham. From a study of these documents it would appear that W. de C. must have been very rich indeed.

? See Athenæum, 1893, June 10.

to William Causton,1 apparently the son of William de Causto who died in 1354. The names of Henry, John and Nichola de Causton, all citizens and mercers of London, appear also a contemporaries of the elder William in these documents.

We learn from the Hustings Rolls of the City of London that this second William Causton died before 1406, for his wi had been proved before that year. Scott suggested that Willian de Causton (1354) was the grandfather of the printer, but thi is very unlikely unless we assume unusually late dates o marriage in the lives of the men concerned. It would be more suitable to consider him as the great-grandfather and William Causton (1406) as grandfather of the printer.

Such an ancestry of rich citizens and influential members of the Mercers' Company would explain at once the favourable circumstances of William Caxton's early education and apprenticeship, but there are two difficulties. Caxton tells us that he was "born in Kent in the Weald," not in London, and it appears that William Causton, the postulated grandfather, died without male issue himself, for the Hustings Roll refers to Isabella, cousin and heir to William Causton.3

The possibility that a son of this William Causton (and so father of the printer) fell into his father's displeasure, returned to Kent, and was left out of the will in favour of his father's cousin, is too remote to be of much value. But if there were no connection between the printer and this family of Mercers, how came the documents to be among the Abbey Muniments?

There was, however, at the Abbey one, Richard Caxton, of whom some little must be said in its proper chronological place, who was Treasurer of the Abbey in the years 1501-3, and it is possible that he may be the link between the documents and the abbey. We shall see later that there is some reason to believe that Richard and William Caxton were in an obscure way connected, so that the severance is, after all, not complete.

When the editors of the Dictionary of National Biography came in 1908 to re-issue the volume containing that of William

Caxton, they added to "in Kent in the Weald" the words "at Tenterden." This addition does not appear to be really justified, but it is based on the general supposition that William was the brother of Thomas Caxton of Tenterden, but which there is no documentary evidence to support.

Since, however, Thomas Caxton of Tenterden also appears among the documents in the muniments of the Abbey, there may well have been a connection between the De Caustons and him, or, more likely, between him and Richard Caxton.

He has been described 1 as "a man of business with a sound, shrewd, lawyer mind a man in no wise inferior to his more famous brother (sic), as witness the incessant journeys made by him on the town's behalf (the town is Lydd) to interview the King and the authorities in Dover, Canterbury and London." Finn, in his "Records of Lydd," describes him as "the most important man of business of his time" and tells 2 how "struggling to free itself from Romney together with the over-rule of the Archbishop and frequent difficulties with the Abbot of Battle, as to boundaries and the rights of the seashore, kept Lydd for many years in a perpetual state of unrest and anxiety. Again and again the salary of Thomas Caxton, secured as Common Clerk, the most astute lawyer of the countryside, was raised, so that the best skill should be given to the Town's affairs." Badly written as this is, it gives briefly the setting in which Thomas Caxton's work lay.

The earliest record previously known was for the date 1438, when Thomas Caxton brought at New Romney a complaint against William atte Mylle in plea of debt; but there is no reason to believe he was then resident at Romney.

In 1416-17, however, he was taxed ten shillings upon his goods and chattels (pro bonis et catallis) in the Hundred of Bircholt, then spelt Borcholte, in Kent.3 The sum is large and shows him to have been a man of possessions at that early date. It appears from this, too, that he was not actually at Tenterden, unless he owned lands in two parishes, for Bircholt is in the lathe of Shepway and Tenterden in that of Scray.

1 Times Lit. Suppl., 1915, p. 405. See correspondence for previous month. "Records of Lydd," p. xviii.

2

3 Subsidy Roll, Kent, 124. 88 (12a) "De Thomas Caxton x"."

CAXTON.

..

C