dle Age was
dying, Church and State were slowly disintegrating under the new
intellectual influences that were working secretly under ground. In
England the civil wars of the Red and White Roses were breaking up the
old feudal society by decimating and impoverishing the baronage, thus
preparing the way for the centralized monarchy of the Tudors. Toward the
close of that century, and early in the next, happened the four great
events, or series of events, which freed and widened men's minds, and,
in a succession of shocks, overthrew the mediaeval system of life and
thought. These were the invention of printing, the Renaissance, or
revival of classical learning, the discovery of America, and the
Protestant Reformation.

William Caxton, the first English printer, learned the art in Cologne.
In 1476 he set up his press and sign, a red pole, in the Almonry at
Westminster. Just before the introduction of printing the demand for MS.
copies had grown very active, stimulated, perhaps, by the coming into
general use of linen paper instead of the more costly parchment. The
scriptoria of the monasteries were the places where the transcribing and
illuminating of MSS. went on, professional copyists resorting to
Westminster Abbey, for example, to make their copies of books belonging
to the monastic library. Caxton's choice of a spot was, therefore,
significant. His new art for multiplying copies began to supersede the
old method of transcription at the very head-quarters of the MS. makers.
The first book that bears his Westminster imprint was the _Dictes and
Sayings of the Philosophers_, translated from the French by Anthony
Woodville, Lord Rivers, a brother-in-law of Edward IV. The list of books
printed by Caxton is interesting, as showing the taste of the time,
since he naturally selected what was most in demand. The list shows that
manuals of devotion and chivalry were still in chief request, books like
the _Order of Chivalry_, _Faits of Arms_, and the _Golden Legend_, which
last Caxton translated himself, as well as _Reynard the Fox_, and a
French version of the _Aeneid_. He also printed, with continuations of
his own, revisions of several early chronicles, and editions of Chaucer,
Gower, and Lydgate. A translation of _Cicero on Friendship_, made
directly from the Latin, by Thomas Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, was
printed by Caxton, but no edition of a classical author in the original.
The new learning of the Renaissance had not, as