er printer or bookseller in future, while the
officers of the Company were instructed to carry out strict search for
all prohibited books.

On the other hand, while thus retaining a tight rein on the printing
trade, the Queen, no doubt for monetary considerations, granted special
patents for the sole printing of certain classes of books to individual
master printers, and threatened pains and penalties upon any other
member of the craft who should print any such books. In this way all the
best-paying work in the trade became the property of some dozen or so of
printers. Master Tottell was allowed the sole printing of Law Books,
Master Jugge the sole printing of Bibles, James Roberts and Richard
Watkins the sole printing of Almanacs; Thomas Vautrollier, a stranger,
was allowed to print all Latin books except the Grammars, which were
given to Thomas Marsh, and John Day had received the right of printing
and selling the _A B C and Litell Catechism_, a book largely bought for
schools, and which Christopher Barker, in his Complaint, declared was
once 'the onelye reliefe of the porest sort of that Company.' On every
side the best work was seized and monopolised. Nor did the evil cease
there. These patents were invariably granted for life with reversion to
a successor, and they were bought and sold freely. Hence the poorer
members of the Company daily found it harder to live. There was very
little light literature, and what there was had few readers. Their
appeals for redress of grievances, whether addressed to the State or to
the Company, which pretended to look after their welfare, were alike in
vain, and at length they rose in open revolt. Half a dozen of them,
headed by Roger Ward and John Wolf, boldly printed the books owned by
the patentees. Roger Ward seized upon this _A B C_ of Day's, and at a
secret press, with type supplied to him by a workman of Thomas Purfoot,
printed many thousand copies of the work with Day's mark. Hence the
proceedings in the Star Chamber. They did very little good. Ward defied
imprisonment; and the agitators would undoubtedly have gained more than
they did, and might even have saved the art of printing from falling
into the hopeless state it afterwards reached, had it not been for the
desertion of John Wolf, who, after declaring that he would work a
reformation in the printing trade similar to that which Luther had
worked in religion, quietly allowed himself to be bought over, and died
in eminen