1485

1485 is the year William Caxton completed the first printed edition of Le Morte Darthur at Westminster. The date marks both the work’s entry into print and the beginning of a long, uneven transmission in which later editions altered, modernized, and sometimes misrepresented the text they claimed to reproduce.

The First Edition

Caxton’s colophon records that the book was finished at Westminster on the last day of July in 1485. It describes a work encompassing the birth, life, and deeds of King Arthur, the adventures of his knights of the Round Table, their quests for the Sangreal, and their sorrowful deaths and departure from the world. Caxton says that he divided Malory’s English book into twenty-one books and chapters before printing it.

The first edition had no title page: its preface began at the top of the first page. Only two copies are known. Both are folios printed in black letter with wide margins, and the editor describes them as among the finest examples of Caxton’s printing. Their survival makes the edition’s physical form unusually important to the recovery of the original text.

Copies and Textual Recovery

The two surviving copies have distinct histories. The Osterley copy, now associated with Mrs. Abby E. Pope, was complete and bore the handwritten name Oxford on its first leaf. It had passed through the Harleian Library and the bookseller Osborne before Bryan Fairfax acquired it for £5 5s.; Fairfax later sold his library to Mr. Child, an ancestor of the Earl of Jersey. At the Osterley library sale in 1885, the copy was bought for £1,950.

The Althorp copy, now in the collection of Earl Spencer, was purchased at Mr. Lloyd’s sale in 1816 for £320. It lacked eleven leaves. Mr. Whittaker supplied facsimiles from the Osterley copy, but those replacement leaves contained numerous errors when compared with the original. Consequently, a text based on the Althorp copy alone could not automatically be treated as a faultless representation of Caxton’s printing.

Reprints and Editorial Changes

The early reprint history began with two editions by Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton’s chief workman and successor, in 1498 and 1529. One copy of each is known. The 1498 edition, which survives at Althorp, reprints Caxton’s preface but places it after the table of contents; it also includes woodcuts and differs from Caxton in spelling and occasionally in wording. It contains a passage near the end beginning “Oh ye mighty and pompous lords,” which is absent from Caxton’s edition and appears in later printings. The 1529 copy, held by the British Museum, lacks its title, preface, and part of the contents.

William Copland reprinted the book in 1557 under a title describing King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table as noble and valiant. Its title page carried a woodcut of St. George and the Dragon. Thomas East later issued an undated folio and quarto, probably around 1585. The final black-letter edition appeared under William Stansby’s name in 1634. It included a woodcut of the Round Table with Arthur at the center, but had departed substantially from Caxton: it remodelled the preface, divided the book into three parts, modernized spelling and vocabulary, and introduced extensive variations and additions. The editor estimates that the changes in this edition exceeded twenty thousand, and suggests that some may have arisen through printing from memory rather than sustained reference to the copy text.

Two popular modernized editions appeared in 1816, followed in 1817 by Southey’s edition, which claimed to reproduce Caxton with scrupulous exactness. That claim was compromised by the missing leaves in its Althorp source. The replacement passages differed from Caxton’s text and included the long “O ye myghty and pompous lordes” interpolation. In one passage, the editor counted thirty-five differences in spelling and punctuation within eleven lines, alongside words and a sentence absent from Caxton; across the seventeen supplied pages, wording as well as spelling diverged. Although Southey noted one small supplement from a later edition, he did not disclose that these seventeen pages were also supplied from outside his Caxton copy. For fifty years, scholars treated the interpolations as genuine Caxton and quoted them accordingly.

The Date’s Editorial Significance

The discrepancy was identified in 1867, when the editor collated Earl Spencer’s copy with Southey’s edition and then checked the disputed passages against the Osterley text. Comparison showed that, apart from the first thirty-six lines of one chapter, the interpolations derived principally from Wynkyn de Worde’s 1498 edition, with occasional spelling changes and small alterations. The comparison also distinguished that source from later printings: the same chapters contained substantially more differences from the 1529, Copland, and East editions, and still greater differences from the 1634 edition, except for the thirty-six lines supplied from that edition.

The later scholarly response underscores why 1485 matters beyond simple dating. In 1889, 1890, and 1891, H. Oskar Sommer edited a three-volume work intended to establish Caxton’s original text for scholars and students. Its first volume reproduced the Althorp copy line for line, word for word, and letter for letter, changing only black-letter type to Roman type; its second volume supplied collations, including comparisons with the Osterley original, and a bibliography, index, glossary, and essay on the language. Sommer’s edition itself reproduced errors in Whittaker’s facsimile leaves, which the collations made visible. The effort to return to the 1485 printing thus depended not on the date alone, but on comparing physical witnesses and tracing later editions’ layers of repair and revision.