[SAINT ALBANS CHRONICLE] | Wynkyn de Word, 1497

Property from the Library at Spetchley Park

[THE SAINT ALBANS CHRONICLE.]

Here begynneth a shorte & a breue table on these cronycles... Westminster : Wynkyn de Worde, 1497

folio (261 x 190mm.), 202 leaves, second edition of the 'Saint Albans Chronicle', woodcuts in the text, printer's device at the end, COLLATION: Aa⁶ a-z⁶ [con]⁶ A-H⁶ I⁴, first leaf mounted and repaired at margins, some restoration to margins of first gathering (affecting a few letters), final leaf I4 with repaired tears and mounted (cut out at centre preserving printer's device on verso), some water-staining throughout (heavy at the beginning), a few small worm-holes

[bound with:]

Higden, Ranulf. The descrypcyon of Englonde... Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde, 1498, folio, COLLATION: A-D⁶, woodcut on title page, some water-staining and slight soiling throughout, a few edge-tears, neat repairs to final leaves just affecting a few letters, very slight worming to inner margins, a few small holes affecting a few letters

two works in one volume, early nineteenth-century calf gilt, spine in five compartments, marbled edges, rebacked preserving spine, new endpapers, edges of binding slightly worn and rubbed, lower joint cracked

A VERY RARE COMPLETE COPY OF ONE OF THE EARLIEST ENGLISH CHRONICLES TO APPEAR IN PRINT.

This is the second edition of the "Saint Albans Chronicle", so-called after the first edition "compiled in a booke and also enprynted by one somtyme scole mayster of Saynt Albons" (as stated by Wynkyn de Worde in the colophon here) in 1485. In fact, according to Lotte Hellinga (William Caxton and Early Printing in England, 2010) the romantic notion of a school-master pulling sheets off a press may be misleading, and whilst he may have begun a history as recorded by John Bale in his Illustrium maioris scriptorum...summarium (1548) it was probably completed and then printed by someone else after his death. The text is an expansion of the first English chronicle in print, produced by Caxton in 1480, with histories of the Popes and ecclesiastical matters interpolated. Like Caxton's edition, it is a continuation of the historical narrative known as the Brut (after the hero Brutus, supposed descendent of Aeneas and the epic founder of Britain), the collective term for the series of medieval chronicles originally written in Anglo-Norman and subsequently translated into Latin and English, whereupon -- with the rise of common literacy -- they gained a wide readership in manuscript and print, forming a central work in the culture of late medieval England.

LITERATURE:

[Saint Albans Chronicle:] STC 9996; ISTC ic00482000; Duff 102; Goff C482

[Higden:] STC 13440b; Duff 114

PROVENANCE:

Robert Spetchley Esq., of Spetchley Park, Worcestershire (1794-1874), armorial bookplate

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