ton was a prominent mercer in London in the fourteenth century (see his will dated 1354 in Athenæum for 25 Dec. 1880), and it has been suggested that he was Caxton's grandfather on the ground that Caxton was afterwards apprenticed to his trade. The argument is of little value, however, because the manufacture of cloth was the leading Kentish industry in the fifteenth century, and well-to-do parents invariably endeavoured to apprentice their sons to London mercers. In 1474 one Oliver Causton was buried at the church of St. Margaret's, Westminster, and in 1478 one William Caxton. The great printer was settled in Westminster at the latter date, and the William Caxton then buried may have been his father; but nothing is known for certain. His parents, whatever their names and condition, gave Caxton some education. ‘I am bounden to pray,’ he writes in the prologue to his ‘Charles the Grete’ (1485), ‘for my fader and moder's souls that in my youthe sent me to schoole, by which by the suffraunce of God I gete my living, I hope truly.’ On 24 June 1438, according to the extant accounts of the Mercers' Company, Caxton was apprenticed to Robert Large, a mercer of high reputation in the city of London. Assuming that he was sixteen years old on becoming an apprentice—it is not likely that he would be older—Caxton would have been born in 1422. Caxton, writing about 1474 (prologue to the Recuyell), speaks of himself as an old man. M. J. P. A. Madden and others therefore insist that Caxton could not then have been less than sixty years old, and suggest the date 1411 as the year of his birth, but many considerations conflict with this inference. Caxton's master, Large, was sheriff in 1430 and lord mayor in 1439–40; he lived in a great house in the Old Jewry, and showed the esteem in which he held Caxton, who was still in his indentures at the time of his death (24 April 1441), by bequeathing him twenty marks. Very soon after his master's death the young apprentice left England for Bruges, where the English mercers had a large commercial connection, and he ‘contynued for the space of xxx. yere’ in the Low Countries. Caxton's apprenticeship lasted till 1446, when he went into business for himself at Bruges. In 1450 he became surety in behalf of another English merchant for the payment of 110l.—a sign of some prosperity—and in 1453 he paid a brief visit to London to formally enter the livery of the Mercers' Company, a proof, in spite of the absence of direct documentary evidence, that he had already become a freeman of the guild. On 16 April 1462 Edward IV granted the Merchant Adventurers—an association of English merchants at home and abroad—a new charter for the better government of the English merchants settled in the Low Countries, and permission was given them to appoint a governor at Bruges. The members of the society were chiefly mercers, and their headquarters were at the hall of the Mercers' Company, London. Between 24 June 1462 and 24 June 1463 Caxton, according to entries in the Mercers' archives, was fulfilling the duties of the new office of governor, and before 16 Aug. 1465 he had been definitely appointed to it. His functions were highly responsible. With a small jury of fellow-merchants he decided all disputes among English merchants in the Low Countries; he regulated and personally overlooked the importation and exportation of merchandise, and he corresponded with the English government on commercial matters. At Bruges the English merchants had their own ‘house,’ in which Caxton resided. On 24 Oct. 1464 Caxton, together with Sir Richard Whitehill, was commissioned to renew a trading treaty between England and the Low Countries which was about to lapse. But the negotiations proved unsuccessful; the treaty was not renewed, and Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, excluded all English-made cloth from his dominions, while the English government retaliated by prohibiting the importation of Flemish goods. The English merchants endeavoured to override these new laws by smuggling their merchandise into England, and the Earl of Warwick in 1466 ordered Caxton to enforce penalties against the offenders. Caxton appealed to the lord mayor of London and the Mercers' Company, but those authorities were unable to relieve him of his anxieties. The death of Duke Philip (15 June 1467) and the accession of Charles the Bold placed matters on a better footing. On 9 July 1468 Edward IV's sister, Margaret, married the new duke at Bruges, and in the following October Caxton, with two English envoys, was able to renew the old trading relations between the two countries.
Caxton appears to have found time for travelling and for literary pursuits in these busy years. He visited Utrecht in 1464, 1465, and 1467, and in March 1468–9 began to translate into English, as a preventive against idleness (he tells us), the popular mediæval romance, ‘Le Recueil des Histoires de Troye.’ Later in 1469 he was called on to arbitrate in a commercial dispute at Bruges between a Genoese and an English merchant, but temporary absence from Bruges prevented him from signing the final award (dated 12 May 1469). On 13 Aug. 1469 he received a gift of wine, honoris causa, apparently in
