influence to bear upon England's tongue.[1] After 1460, the clipped inflections of Ludlow and Sandal must have become familiar in the ears of the ladies and knights that begirt Edward IV. and the Kingmaker at the Court of London. But it was abroad, more than at home, that change was at work. Caxton, a Kentish man, whose grandfather must have been born about the time that the Ayenbite of Inwit was compiled, lived long in London; and then about 1440 betook himself to the Low Countries, where he printed the first English book in 1471. We might have expected, from his birth and breeding, that he would have held fast to the old Southern forms and inflections, at least as much as Bishop Pecock did. But Caxton had come under another influence. In 1468 he had begun translating into English the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye; and in the same year King Edward's sister was given to Charles the Bold. The new Duchess took an interest in the work of her countryman, who had sickened of his task after writing five or six quires. In 1470, ‘she commanded me,’ says Caxton, ‘to shew the said five or six quires to her said grace. And when she had seen them, anon she found defaute in mine English, which she commanded me to amend.’ She bade him (he had a yearly fee from her) go on with his book; and this work, the first ever printed in our tongue, came out in 1471. It was ‘not
- ↑ Mr. Earle tells us (Philology of the English Tongue, p. 97) that ‘a French family settled in England and edited the English language;’ he means the Plantagenets. I suspect that the Queen's English owes more to a Lincolnshire monk, on whom I have bestowed some pains, than to all our Kings put together who have reigned since the year 901.
