THE PILGRIMS’ PROGRESS: A TALE OF THE CAXTON PRIVATE LENDING LIBRARY & BOOK DEPOSITORY
Miss Haining, the latest custodian of the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository, had resigned herself to never understanding entirely the institution’s intricacies. It was some consolation to her that she was, in this matter, as in many others, following in a proud tradition of Caxton librarianship. At some critical juncture in their involvement with the Caxton, each of her predecessors had thrown up their hands in defeat when it came to comprehending its workings, dating back to William Caxton himself, the library’s somewhat unwilling founder, and therefore the first in a long line of baffled conservators.
On a basic level, the operation of the Caxton was easily explained. When a novel achieved a singular status with the reading public (generally after the death of its author), a first edition of the book in question, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, would appear on the Caxton’s doorstep, soon to be followed by the fictional character or characters responsible for its popularity. Now and again, due to some fault in the system, a character might arrive before the book, causing confusion or even mild shock for the librarian. Whatever the order of delivery, the physical environs of the Caxton—which, like a novel, were capable of containing multitudes—would already have conjured living quarters to accommodate them, always with a window through which could be glimpsed the world of their respective book, just in case a character should feel the urge to wander among the familiar. Funding for the library, involving the rounding up or down of fractions of pennies, was so ingrained in the systems of publishing that even the most scrupulous of accountants often failed to notice it. If they did, they never succeeded in establishing the cause, or the ultimate destination of the nubbins, and subsequently gave up—or, on occasion, went mad, and then gave up.
How Caxton came to establish the library that bore his name was one of the first stories passed down to their successors by departing librarians. Mr. Berger had shared it with Miss Haining over tea and scones, just as Mr. Gedeon had shared it with Mr. Berger some two decades earlier. It was a valuable introduction to what was to follow, since it was so improbable that everything else seemed marginally more acceptable by comparison.
As Miss Haining approached retirement, it had fallen to her to pass on the founding narrative of the Caxton to one Marjorie Dobbs, who had found her way to the library after having her purse pinched by the Artful Dodger. (The library had a way of choosing—or luring—replacement librarians. Some of Marjorie’s predecessors had variously arrived there on the trail of Anna Karenina, Robinson Crusoe, Hamlet, and on one particularly memorable and confusing occasion, an enormous white rabbit cursing a pocket watch.)
Here, then, as told by Miss Haining to Miss Dobbs, is the origin story of the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository.
Following the success of his first printing of The Canterbury Tales, William Caxton—writer, merchant, and, most importantly, printer of books—woke one morning in 1477 to find five individuals dressed as characters from that same work arguing among themselves in his yard in London’s Almonry, by Westminster, seemingly with no idea as to how they’d come to be there, or so they claimed. They were respectively dressed as the Knight, the Miller, the Wife of Bath, the Summoner, and the Nun’s Priest.
The popularity of his edition of Chaucer had taken William by surprise, albeit pleasantly. Discovering five ne’er-do-wells—or worse, four players and their bawd—loitering on his premises, apparently with some fixation on the text, was less welcome.
“Look,” said William, “is this some kind of joke?”
“I shouldn’t have thought so,” said the Knight. “And if it was, what kind of joke would it be?”
He looked genuinely perturbed, like one who laughed little and didn’t quite understand the concept of japery.
“We’re meant to be here,” said the Nun’s Priest. “We may not know the ‘how’ of it but the ‘why’ is clear enough.”
“Not to me it isn’t,” said William.
“The book,” explained the Summoner. “You offered life to the book, and so offered life to us.”
So sincerely did he speak that he gave William pause.
“You’re not telling me—”
“We are,” confirmed the Summoner.
“No, it can’t—”
“It can,” said the Wife of Bath.
“And it is,” concluded the Miller. “Now,” he added, to a murmur of agreement from the rest, “how about some breakfast?”
William gaped. He was an imaginative man—he could not have loved stories and been otherwise—but he was not a gullible one, or else he would have long since become a failure in business. He had a nose for dishonesty, and it wasn’t twitching. If the five people before him weren’t telling the truth, it wasn’t because they didn’t believe themselves to be. Furthermore, it was obvious from their stance that they weren’t going anywhere for the time being, or not before being fed.
William sent for a kitchen boy.
“Inform the kitchen that we will have guests for breakfast,” he told the boy. “And be so good as to wake Master Wynkyn from his rest.”
After the food had been served, followed by extensive questioning by William and his assistant, Wynkyn de Worde, it began to creep up on the printer that if these were not lunatics, there was a possibility, however unlikely, that they might actually be who they professed to be—five of Chaucer’s pilgrims. William didn’t want to accept it, for reason alone dictated that it couldn’t be so, but he felt a creeping sense of unease. He was a writer and printer. He gave physical form to stories. If a tale could assume length, breadth, and weight in the world, why not also the characters it contained?
William hurriedly ushered the pilgrims into an empty storage shed before anyone could begin asking awkward questions, not that he was short of further awkward questions of his own. Once the five were settled, with a trusted retainer watching the door, William and Wynkyn sat down over cheese and small beer to decide what was to be done with a group of fictional personages who had, it seemed, stepped off the page and into the real world. Wynkyn, like William, understood the power of books and had required surprisingly little convincing to fall into step with his master. For Wynkyn, there had always been a magic to the Caxton press—it gave material form to ideas and made tangible the intangible—and this latest development merely confirmed it.
The five pilgrims couldn’t be permitted to wander the streets of London, that much was clear, not least because they included the Knight, in full regalia; the Miller, complete with bagpipes; and the Wife of Bath, who had already felt up a stable boy before marking the cook as a candidate for husband number six. Given free rein in the city, they’d end up attracting the attention of a justice of the peace. From there, it would be a short hop to the Marshalsea or Bedlam, with a strong chance of William and Wynkyn joining them in one or the other.
“Then there’s the question of what happens should the rest of them arrive,” said Wynkyn.
“The rest?” William barely avoided choking on a piece of hard cheese. He hadn’t even considered that more of them might show up. “What are we supposed to do with thirty-one pilgrims?”
“I suppose we could direct them to the Archbishop of Canterbury,” offered Wynkyn. “I mean, Canterbury was always their destination.”
“Old Bourchier will have us arrested,” said William, glumly. “Or worse, burned at the stake for sorcery.”
Wynkyn paled and touched a hand to his neck. He hadn’t considered that. When it came to the pyre, the lucky ones were strangled to death before the fires got started, but the words “lucky” and “strangled” did not properly belong together in his mind.
“It’s hardly our fault they’re here,” said Wynkyn. “It’s not as if we deliberately conjured them up.”
“No, but we set them down on paper.”
“Geoffrey Chaucer did that. By rights, the blame should be laid at his grave.”
“Perhaps you could go about presenting that argument to the late poet, and thus add ‘consorting with spirits’ to our list of offenses,” said William. “God’s bones, I wonder how slowly the executioners can let a man burn.”
Still, he thought that Wynkyn had a point about Chaucer’s culpability, though it wasn’t one he fancied making while someone measured them up for the stake. Chaucer might have written The Canterbury Tales, but he hadn’t disseminated it. Initially, that had been the responsibility of the scribes who painstakingly copied it for distribution, but they hadn’t been able to reproduce it at the pace of the Caxton press. Nobody in England, and few elsewhere, had been capable of such replication until now. Why, William’s compositors and pressmen had already managed the previously unthinkable feat of printing hundreds of nearly identical copies of The Canterbury Tales in a fraction of the time it would have taken a scribe to create only part of a single copy, and at a similar fraction of the cost.
Now William understood. He might not have created the pilgrims, but he had popularized them, making them accessible beyond oral storytelling in a way that would have seemed fantastical to Chaucer less than a century earlier. And this was only the beginning: with more workers, and faster presses, a printer might be able to offer books not in the hundreds but the thousands. Johann Veldener, the creator of William’s typeface, had suggested as much to him the night before William left Flanders for England, and William had laughed in his face.
“But who will read all these books, Johann?” William asked. “There are only so many lettered men.”
Johann placed his hands on William’s, gripping them tightly.
“Soon, William, there will be more. Books will make men lettered.”
But even Johann had not anticipated what might happen as books became more accessible, and the characters became as real to readers as their own family and neighbors—and sometimes more beloved, too.
No, Johann, books will not alone make men lettered. They will give life to their characters.
“Bring me my coat,” William told Wynkyn. “We must talk with Richard.”
Richard Caxton was one of the Benedictine monks of Westminster Abbey, where he held the position of sacrist. He was a relative of William’s through complex layers of marriage that even the most committed of later Caxton librarians had never been able to trace with certainty. He had also admired William’s printing shop from its inception, unlike a vocal minority of his fellow clerics who believed that books should be for the elite, regarding the Caxton press as a threat to their position and, indeed, their scriptorium. Richard, by contrast, associated learning with civilization: the more learned the populace, the more civilized they might become, and the highest civilizing influence of all was the word of God. Richard still did not say it aloud, for fear of mockery or worse, but he envisaged a day when every household—or every household with a grasp of Latin—might have its own affordable copy of the Bible, and only presses like William’s could make that possible. Following a period of discord, Richard’s contingent at Westminster had prevailed, aided by the fact that the abbot, John Esteney, was one of William’s patrons and had facilitated the establishment of his press in the abbey’s precincts. The monks were now among William’s customers for liturgical works and letters of indulgence, which provided the shop with a welcome source of guaranteed income.
William and Wynkyn walked with Richard by Long Ditch and tried to explain, as best they could, how they came to be harboring five fictional characters in a shed, with the expectation of more to follow. Richard, naturally, proved skeptical at first, and was hardly less so when introduced to the pilgrims, believing himself to be the victim of an elaborate practical joke concocted either by the five themselves or by William, with or without the connivance of Wynkyn. Yet gradually, over two days of interrogation and exposure to their company, Richard, despite himself, began to come around to the same opinion as William. What swayed him was the five’s understanding that they were fictional characters, and therefore as bewildered as anyone else to discover themselves outside the book that had birthed them.
Any final doubts that Richard might have entertained were dispelled when, as he departed the shed on the second afternoon with William and Wynkyn, the Reeve materialized in the yard in front of them. One moment, the closed space was empty, the next, it was occupied by a thin, confused old man with closely cropped hair and a pinched, argumentative face. He was armed with a sword composed more of rust than clean metal.
“I warned you,” said Wynkyn to William.
“You wouldn’t be named Oswald, would you?” William asked the stranger.
“I am,” came the reply. “How did you know that?”
“Because I know your story,” William replied. “Now, I believe there are some people here with whom you might wish to renew acquaintance.”
Wynkyn, Richard, and William sat at William’s dining table. Small beer had been set aside in favor of red wine, more potent stuff being required to tackle the problem at hand.
“No one can find out the truth,” said Richard. “If they do, they’ll burn your shop to ash, and you and Wynkyn with it. As for the six—”
“Six and counting,” Wynkyn interrupted.
“Yes, thank you—six and counting—I can see no good end for them unless a place of sanctuary can be found.”
“Something strange has happened,” said William.
“We’re very aware of that,” said Richard. “We’d hardly be here otherwise.”
“No, something else strange. Yesterday, a copy of The Canterbury Tales, wrapped in brown paper and string, was left on the doorstep of the shop.”
“By whom?”
“Nobody knows. It was just lying there, addressed to me.”
“A dissatisfied customer, perhaps?” suggested Richard.
William bridled. While proud of his edition of Chaucer, he had been made aware of defects in the text on which he had based his version and had since come into possession of a superior manuscript. The errors—including a wrongly positioned Merchant’s tale, a missing exchange between the Franklin and the Squire, and most embarrassingly, the omission or transposition of lines throughout the Knight’s tale, distorting it horribly—galled William. Already, he was contemplating a second edition, illustrated throughout with woodcuts, once a thorough comparison of the two texts could be completed. The buyers of the first edition had, by and large, been understanding.
“We have no dissatisfied customers.” William shifted in his chair, physically modifying his position before doing so metaphorically. “Or when we do, we try to rectify any error that might have been made, for we have a reputation to uphold. But I can see no flaw in the volume. It’s perfect: even the naturally occurring irregularities in the binding are no longer detectable, and the pages are without blemish. I could tell from the first that it came from this shop, but it’s as though it has been elevated by hands more skilled than any I have known.”
“Why would someone return an improved copy of one of your publications to you?” asked Richard. “Other than as an object lesson, of course.”
That tug on the line again, but William did not rise to the bait.
“I cannot say,” he replied.
“What will you do with it?”
“Keep it, I suppose, in case whoever left it decides to seek its return.”
Wynkyn coughed.
“I have some questions,” he said.
“Out with them,” said Richard, with more bite than he’d intended. He liked the Alsatian, who had arrived in England some years earlier as William’s apprentice. Wynkyn shared Richard’s vision of cheaper editions that might help spread God’s word and was trying to persuade William to source his paper at home instead of from the Low Countries, which would cut costs. William, an artist, preferred the continental paper, but Richard thought that given time, Wynkyn might prove to be the better businessman.
Wynkyn was trying to choose his words carefully.
“I’m wary of appearing, um, blasphemous,” he said.
William and Richard exchanged a look.
“It would be best avoided,” said Richard, “but the door is closed, and what is said will stay between God and us.”
“Well,” continued Wynkyn, “my master has suggested that the appearance of the six pilgrims may have been caused by our making their parent volume more easily available. In working on the imagination of readers, we have, in turn, given physical life to those who previously existed only in manuscript reproductions. I have heard estimates of how many of those manuscripts there might be, and none has ever exceeded a hundred.”
“Go on.”
“The Canterbury Tales will hardly be the only such volume we print, so first of all, I’m wondering what further publications, if any, might precipitate a similar influx of characters? After all, the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, which my master printed in Bruges, did not result in Hector or Priam turning up at the door.”
“Thank the Lord,” said William. A bad situation might always be made worse. “Could it be that the heroes of the Trojan War were real, or likely so, while the pilgrims are not? Or they weren’t until they showed up here.”
“That would be my hope,” said Wynkyn.
“Your ‘hope’?” William didn’t like the sound of that. “Then why do I detect such a note of doubt?”
“This is where things become delicate.” Wynkyn looked like a man nominated to deliver bad news to a ruler not famed for his tolerance. “My master has spoken in the past of his intention to publish The Golden Legend, being, as we know, a collection of saints’ lives. Should we discover that only fictional characters may be lent flesh and blood by the public passions, that’s one thing. But were we to find that real figures, through the printed account of them, should similarly be given form—”
Richard grew noticeably worried, while William buried his face in his hands. The latter did not want to be responsible for an influx of holy men and women, many of whom had passed away under challenging circumstances and might diversely manifest as beheaded, dismembered, or pierced by a multiplicity of sharp objects.
“And,” Wynkyn went on, “we have also considered the profitability of certain books of hours, containing short extracts from the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments.” He paused meaningfully. “In English, rather than the less accessible Latin.”
William let out a low moan. Whatever the drawbacks of saints materializing in his place of business, he most certainly did not want to precipitate the Second Coming.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked. “If I refuse to print religious works, I’ll go out of business, or be accused of apostasy.”
“Thus,” said Wynkyn, “my tentative use of the word ‘hope.’ ”
“Look,” said Richard, “if the credence of the populace was alone sufficient to cause the Son of God to reappear, it would have happened already.”
“But we’ve never had printed books until now,” said Wynkyn, “or not in such numbers. And this is only the beginning. The world is going to change. It’s already changing. The arrival of the pilgrims is proof of that.”
“Nevertheless, the idea that a book produced by men might compel God’s son to manifest is—”
“Blasphemous?” William offered.
“I did warn you,” said Wynkyn. “Someone had to say it.”
Wynkyn had more to share but decided it might be politic to keep it to himself for fear of testing Richard’s patience. Wynkyn was a man of letters. He spent his days surrounded by blocks, each bearing a symbol, and from those symbols, an infinitude of ideas was capable of being expressed. The more lettered a man, the more complex those ideas became, and with complexity came doubt. Wynkyn believed in God, but prized faith over evidence. The former possessed a higher quality, a grace, because it required a capacity to imagine and accept something beyond the ordinary; it was, according to Hebrews, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
But when it came to forming and exploring ideas, doubt was always a fellow traveler. In fact, faith could not exist without it, because to reach that state of conviction required the overcoming of doubt. For a wise man, who reflected before acting, doubt was a necessary step on the path to conviction. Yet faith was not fixed. It wavered in times of trial or adversity, as when a loved one was taken before their time, in the face of war, plague, and famine, or when the innocent suffered. Wynkyn was familiar with the doctrine of original sin, but it didn’t mean he was prepared to accept it without question. Man, not God, was responsible for the formation of doctrine, and men were, in all things, fallible. God might try to guide them, but in Wynkyn’s experience, men sometimes misheard Him, or chose not to listen. To be informed, as the more uncompromising of clerics argued, that an infant had died of ague, or at the point of a spear, because they carried with them the taint of Adam’s act of disobedience, was difficult for Wynkyn to countenance. Likewise, to hear that such torment was God’s will, which was beyond human understanding, was less an answer than avoidance of the question, leaving unexamined the issue of the kind of God that would will misery on His creation.
But Wynkyn wasn’t about to question church doctrine openly. The punishments for heresy were more severe than those for blasphemy. One might blaspheme out of drunkenness or anger, but heresy required the exercise of reason. It was a willed offense. On the other hand, Wynkyn was in no hurry to engage in outright blasphemy either, being quite content to avoid branding, flogging, or the piercing of his tongue. Yet an alternative answer to the question of God’s nature could only be blasphemous: grave misfortune befell the deserving and undeserving alike because there was no God.
So Wynkyn had gone through periods of equivocation in his faith. Now, at his master’s table, he was experiencing another such crisis, one that, if disclosed aloud, even only in present company, might cause him to lose his position, which he loved, and, should Richard’s patience snap, his liberty, even his life. If God was not real, and Caxton’s shop commenced publishing multiple copies of the Bible, was there yet not a chance that, on some morning in the future, the printers might awake to discover in the yard a figure bearing a startling resemblance to the risen Christ? If God did not make man, man must have made God. But then, by bringing God into being, whether in the form of the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, would the Caxton press not simply have confirmed what everyone believed anyway? In that case, no harm would have been done—or not beyond changing the world, potentially for the better, although the First Coming hadn’t ended so well. Who was to say that a man preaching kindness and tolerance would be better received in present-day England than he had been in the Holy Land almost fifteen hundred years earlier? If he didn’t end up beaten to death in the street, he’d find a home in Bedlam with the six pilgrims.
If we become responsible for the Second Coming, Wynkyn decided, it had better be a spectacle to remember.
“Wynkyn, are you still with us?” asked Richard.
“Yes, sorry,” Wynkyn replied. Unfortunately.
“I was saying that I’d prefer to use the word ‘unlikely’ to describe the invocation of the Savior,” said Richard. “But let us assume for now that you, Wynkyn, are right about the impact of the printed word, and correct in imputing its powers of conjuration solely to those who might not otherwise have enjoyed a corporeal existence, aided by an unusual degree of renown caused by the proliferation of specific texts. We currently have only six pilgrims with whom to contend, not the full complement. Those under discussion are, I would hazard, among the more crowd-pleasing of Chaucer’s characters, by virtue of their personalities or the quality of the stories they told.
“In the sciences,” Richard went on, “what has occurred with The Canterbury Tales might be referred to as an unplanned experiment. I propose, therefore, that we undertake a planned one. We produce two pamphlets to be circulated as widely as possible within one mile of Westminster. The first pamphlet will concern a person known to be real, the other a person fanciful but with the potential to capture the imagination. We’ll then wait to see what happens. If both appear, we have a grave difficulty, but if only the unreal one is made manifest, we’ll better understand what’s happening.”
“What if neither of them appears?” asked Wynkyn.
Richard tugged at an earlobe.
“Then the pilgrims may be considered an anomaly—which would be a relief.”
From his tone, Wynkyn suspected Richard might be growing more conflicted about the affair than he was willing to concede. If handled properly, the ability to summon saints on demand would be good for the Church, and the Benedictines of Westminster in particular. They were comparatively few in number, and the abbey, though an enduring tribute to the glory of God, was not a site of pilgrimage. The monks currently didn’t even have enough funds to complete the construction of the West Towers, but if it became known that saints were popping up in the abbey’s precincts, the Benedictines could raise towers to their hearts’ content. Obviously, there was still the matter of avoiding the Second Coming, but should a middle ground be found—
“I have another question,” said Wynkyn.
“Wynkyn,” said Richard, summoning all his forbearance, “I begin to fear that Thomas Aquinas might have struggled to formulate so many questions as you.”
Wynkyn, though, was not intimidated. In his view, foolish questions did not exist; even if they did, it was better to pose them than remain silent and later reap regrets.
“Isn’t inventing a person potentially a breach of the Ninth Commandment?” asked Wynkyn. It was the politest way he could find of suggesting that Richard was intent upon deceiving a section of the populace. “After all, did not Aquinas himself state that it is unlawful to lie to deliver another from any danger whatsoever?”
Richard stared hard at Wynkyn.
“God preserve us,” he said, “from educated men.”
“Our press would be worthless were we otherwise,” replied Wynkyn.
“If easier to control. But that, Wynkyn, is a headache for another day. In answer to your question, Aquinas affirms that to lie is to speak deliberately against one’s own mind. I am in accordance with myself in the matter of the invented candidate, and so my conscience is at peace.”
Wynkyn thought that Richard might be wasted at Westminster, since such sophistry more appropriately belonged in Rome. Were Wynkyn a cardinal, he might already have advocated that Richard be measured for the relevant papal attire just to save time later.
For his part, Richard understood that what was real and what was true might not be one and the same, as the Church’s scholars had long speculated on the differences between the literal and the figurative. For example, Richard was not convinced that Saint Denis, founder of the See of Paris, following his execution by decapitation, had walked the seven miles from Montmartre to the Roman settlement of Catulliacus with his severed head in his hands, the head continuing to preach for the duration. Neither did he believe Saint George had slain an actual dragon. Yet both stories, while not in accordance with reality, contained truths: the former regarding the impossibility of silencing the word of God, and the latter—as Richard had preached on the saint’s most recent feast day—about standing up to evil, whether represented by Roman emperors or Satan himself. On a more practical level, Richard was one of those who knew that the charter of King Offa, dating from AD 785, which referred to “that terrible place which is known as Westminster”—terrible, that is, in the sense of inspiring holy awe—was a forgery authorized by Osbert of Clare, abbot of Westminster in the twelfth century, its purpose being to emphasize the abbey’s historical importance and thus secure its position, ensuring it became that which the charter had foretold. As far as Richard was concerned, absolute truth was for God alone. Man, by contrast, was obliged to mold truth to fit a fallen world.
“Producing so many pamphlets will be an expensive undertaking,” said William, returning the conversation to the pragmatic.
“Funds are scarce at present,” said Richard, “but I’ll speak with the abbot. He is fascinated by the potential of saints as exemplars, and retains a devotion, fittingly enough, to Saint Thomas of Canterbury.”
William looked uneasy. The current king, Edward IV, came from the Plantagenet House of York. Henry II, a Plantagenet, had precipitated Becket’s murder in 1170, and William wondered if it would be wise to remind Edward of his ancestor’s failings. As a monarch, Edward left much to be desired. His morals were poor, and he had a short temper. Most recently, he had ordered his brother George, Duke of Clarence, to be executed on charges of treason, so it could at least be said that he was keeping up a family custom—indeed, a royal one—of sporadic yet pragmatic homicide. Nevertheless, Edward’s wife, Elizabeth, enjoyed good relations with Abbot Esteney, who had consoled her on the death of her nine-month-old daughter, Margaret. Elizabeth might be prevailed upon to intercede if difficulties arose over a Becket pamphlet.
“There remains,” said Wynkyn, “the question of what to do with the pilgrims.”
“The abbey has more property within its precincts than it knows what to do with,” said Richard. “If my cousin William is willing, we could arrange for a dwelling to be rented at a favorable rate, where the pilgrims can be housed while we await the outcome of our experiment.”
William didn’t particularly want to add to his outgoings by renting another property, but it was better than keeping the pilgrims where they were. They were quite garrulous, and some of his employees were growing too curious about the visitors.
“Won’t they attract attention?” asked Wynkyn. “My master and I were concerned about being accused of sorcery were their true nature to be revealed.”
“Not if the building in question is distant from the abbey,” said Richard, “and they don’t go making a spectacle of themselves.”
“The Miller owns a set of bagpipes,” said William. “It’s hard not to make a spectacle of yourself with bagpipes.”
“Well, take them away from him. The others will certainly thank you for it. And accusations of sorcery, should they arise, can easily be dealt with by declaring the pilgrims gently, harmlessly mad, and requiring only Christian care. Just because we believe something doesn’t mean everyone else has to believe it too.”
William refilled their cups, and the three men raised them to the success of their venture. The following evening, the pilgrims were relocated to a house by Thieving Lane, the Miller protesting the temporary seizure of his bagpipes, and the Wife of Bath enquiring of Richard whether he had any single male relatives and how committed to celibacy the novices might be. Once the pilgrims were safely in place, Richard returned to his quarters, put on his night coat, and set to work on the first of the pamphlets.
John Esteney, the abbot of Westminster, was a scholarly man. If he had a weakness, it took the form of a vanity customary to his tribe: he was reluctant to admit his ignorance, particularly of areas where he was regarded as possessing specialist knowledge.
Thus, when Richard Caxton approached him with the idea of publishing two pamphlets on saints—to be shared among clerics and read aloud from the abbey’s pulpit—Esteney was most eager to write the Becket broadside. While the content of his sermons, in common with those of many learned preachers of his time, were often circulated among the faithful, this dissemination was primarily oral and prey to the vagaries of memory, bias, and even the listener’s position in the congregation. Caxton’s press assured Esteney of something approaching consistency of expression and communication regarding his ideas. He did, however, confess to being perturbed at Richard’s selection of the Venerable Cominatus of Skopelos as a suitable subject for the second pamphlet.
“Isn’t he a little, you know—”
“Obscure?” offered Richard.
“Indeed.”
“Of course, but that’s just the point.”
“Is it?” Esteney appeared confused. “Why?”
“It is said that, in Rome, he is being posited as a potential patron saint of obscurity.”
“Is he? I mean, the name is somewhat familiar,” said Esteney, backtracking, “but the nature of his possible heavenly advocacy must have slipped my mind.”
“It’s hardly surprising, Father Abbot, since Cominatus did almost nothing of note. He helped secure the remains of Bishop Riginos following his martyrdom by Julian the Apostate in 362, then vanished from the record for centuries. But by his intercession, several minor liturgical volumes, long believed lost, were discovered on the nearby islands of Skiathos and Alonissos in 765. Even if their contents were so abstruse as to be of virtually no interest, it was very nice to have them back. Prayers to him also revealed the location of two overgrown roads leading to a pair of unmarked tombs that may or may not have contained the bones of martyrs. At the same time, he is credited with aiding the recovery of the key to a vault believed to have contained important documents or artifacts. It didn’t, unfortunately, but it saved everyone from worrying about what might be inside. Cominatus is additionally set to become the patron saint of unsuccessful poets, which is most of them; composers of songs that are never sung; and playwrights who manage to write just a single play that is quickly forgotten. Even should he not achieve sainthood or the condition of the blessed, he would remain a useful addition to the Church’s spiritual reserves.”
The abbot raised an index finger.
“Which rather begs the question,” he said, “of why, venerable though his name may be, Cominatus merits a pamphlet.”
“Because,” said Richard, “most people are destined to live in obscurity. They may work hard and raise families, but these are noble achievements, not necessarily noteworthy ones. In all likelihood, history will fail to recall such men and women, and in a few generations even their descendants will have forgotten them. In that sense, Cominatus could become one of the most useful of saints, for it is with him that the masses will have most in common. He would be their saint.”
The abbot worried at his bottom lip.
“Look,” he said, “it’s not going to be a very long pamphlet, is it?”
“I should think that improbable,” said Richard. “Your meditations on Becket ought to be substantial, but my reflections on Cominatus can be slight. Still, together they but offer a lesson greater than the sum of their individual parts: that all, whether major or minor, have their place at the Lord’s table, and all will be remembered on the Last Day.”
“All right,” said the abbot, “but indicate to your cousin William that the Church would appreciate a favorable price.”
When he was not at the press, Wynkyn ensured that the pilgrims remained safe and well. He found them quickly becoming listless, even after only a few days in the new lodgings, and so offered to accompany them on a series of walks around the city once less cumbersome clothing had been arranged for the Knight. Regrettably, the first of these expeditions also proved to be the last. The pilgrims were not so much overwhelmed by London as disengaged from it, as though they had been invited to walk through a simulacrum of a world instead of the world itself, and all were relieved to return to the calm of Westminster.
Later, over a meal of bread and mortrews, Wynkyn discussed the day’s events with William.
“I thought they’d be happy to be out and about,” Wynkyn concluded. “Instead, they couldn’t wait to get back indoors.”
William removed a sprig of something unidentifiable from between his teeth and set it aside.
“Because it’s not their realm,” he said. “You might have taken them to Canterbury itself and they wouldn’t have been content. It’s not even that our London is too real for them. It may be that it’s not real enough.”
“So what is to be done?”
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” said William.
The abbot, mindful of economies, was restricting his ruminations on Becket to twelve pages. Richard, as instructed, was doing his best to fit his contemplation of Cominatus into two, with most of the text devoted to what the saint represented more than what he might actually have done, given that the latter, even in fictional form, was negligible.
But as he wrote, Richard grew increasingly engaged with the idea of Cominatus. His presentation to the abbot was not intended as entirely facetious. Why should there not be a patron of the insignificant and anonymous? It was all very well to hold up Saint Elmo as a model of Christian fortitude: tortured in prison, sealed in a spiked barrel and rolled down a hill, set on fire, imprisoned and tortured again, over and over, until eventually his intestines were removed and tied around a pole, putting an end to him; or Symeon the Stylite, who decided to spend his life on top of a series of increasingly tall pillars. But what did such examples offer the ordinary man? True, Saint Elmo was a reminder that, unless one was especially unfortunate, there was always someone worse off than oneself, but one only had to walk the streets of London to see that. As for Symeon the Stylite, Richard privately suspected that Symeon just didn’t like people very much and God provided a convenient excuse for getting away from them.
Cominatus, on the contrary, presented an instance of the everyday. He didn’t do much, and most of what he did wasn’t of any use, but he muddled along as best he could until he departed the world. His lifespan was unclear. His burial place remained unknown. Someone had probably mourned his passing, but he might also have been watched over only by a priest and a grave digger as he was consigned to the dirt. In fact, the more unremarkable the details, the more worthy of note Cominatus became, and Richard’s days were consumed by thoughts of him. He began to devise a picture of Cominatus in his mind: average height and average build; hair and beard untrimmed, but not to the point of neglect; eyes blue, complexion olive; features resigned but not hopeless.
When Richard was happy with his work, he shared it with the abbot. The abbot smiled.
“Now I understand,” he said, “and so will others.”
William and Wynkyn supervised the printing of the pamphlets once Richard and the abbot declared themselves content with the arrangement and lettering, which used a black-letter typeface with handwritten paragraph marks inserted in red ink. For the experiment to have purpose, the pamphlets needed a wide circulation, so Richard prevailed upon the abbot to loosen his purse strings. This required him to play upon Esteney’s ego, which itself might have been regarded as sinful manipulation of a good man, though Richard preferred to regard the fault more as the abbot’s than his own. It was also decided that each pamphlet should continue to be read at services throughout the following month, so that none of the unlettered might be deprived of these insights into two distinct ways of serving God by two very different men.
As the days and weeks passed, William’s sleep became increasingly disturbed. He came to fear the dawn, worried at what the morning might reveal. He had returned to the eyewitness account of Becket’s murder by Edward Grim, which recalled how a blow from one of the killers had caused the top of Becket’s skull to be “separated from his head, so that the blood turned white from the brain yet no less did the brain turn red from the blood.” Worse followed when a traitorous monk “scattered the brains with the blood across the floor.” This, William feared, was the image of Becket that lingered in the public imagination. If the saint did return, it was possible he might not do so in the fullest bloom of health. As for Cominatus, the picture painted of him by Richard was of a man so innocuous that even if he did materialize, there was a good chance no one would notice.
Meanwhile, so absorbed was Wynkyn with the press, and so tired was he at the conclusion of his labors, that four days passed without his finding time to visit the pilgrims. When he did, it was on Sunday after Mass, when he’d had to listen—again—to the stories of Becket and Cominatus. Interestingly, he’d begun to notice woodcuts of the latter being offered for sale, as well as trinkets featuring the saint’s image, even locks of the saint’s hair, cuttings from his finger- and toenails, and flakes of his skin “all the way from the Aegean.” Richard was advocating that Westminster should intervene to prevent the more extreme manifestations of profiteering and protect the Venerable Cominatus’s reputation, even if Wynkyn thought that both Richard and the abbot saw an opportunity to bolster the monastery’s coffers and didn’t want others drinking from the same trough, or not without paying a percentage for the privilege. The abbot had sent an emissary to the sacrist at Glastonbury Abbey to establish if, among its many relics—which included the complete skeletons of numerous holy men and women—there might be something relating to Cominatus with which the abbey was willing to part. The whole business, Wynkyn fretted, was getting out of hand.
He took a moment at the south transept to pause by the plain slab marking the grave of Geoffrey Chaucer. The poet had spent his final months at the abbey, living in a tenement in the garden of the Lady Chapel. The lease was granted to him for fifty-three years, but he died before the first year was out. Now, six figures who had sprung from his imagination were inhabiting a house not far from his resting place. So it was that Wynkyn and his master had unwittingly conspired with a dead man to usurp natural law. Once again, Wynkyn felt the first of the flames licking at the bare soles of his feet.
Such were his reflections as he left the abbey to walk to the pilgrims’ house. Only four people had keys: Wynkyn, William, Richard, and the Knight, regarded as the most trustworthy of the six. But when Wynkyn entered, only the Wife of Bath was present. She was seated by a window at the back of the house, absorbed in a piece of embroidery that, to Wynkyn, initially appeared to show a naked man pushing a wheelbarrow, until he realized the wheelbarrow was actually a woman and—
Oh dear.
“Where is everyone?” Wynkyn asked.
The Wife of Bath drew the needle through an area of particular intimacy and contemplated Wynkyn, as though trying to decide what she should or should not share with him.
“Gone,” she said at last.
“Gone where?”
The Wife of Bath indicated the door behind her, which led into a small yard that usually smelled strongly of the privy.
“Gone out.”
“But there’s nothing out there,” said Wynkyn.
“There is now.”
Wynkyn went to the door. His hand was on the latch when the Wife of Bath said, “I’d be careful if I were you.”
“Why?”
She returned to her embroidery by the pale light filtering through the panes of flattened cow horn.
“You’ll see,” she said.
Wynkyn opened the door.
And he saw.
What was already being spoken of as the “Cult of Cominatus” was gathering adherents beyond Westminster. Richard Caxton had heard mention of him across the river in Southwark and as far east as Cornhill and Aldgate. It wouldn’t be long before his name was carried beyond the walls, over St. Giles, Clerkenwell, Mile End, and The Moor. While the abbot awaited word from Glastonbury about the availability of relics, he had commissioned, to frustrate the profiteers, the striking of medals of both Saint Thomas and the Venerable Cominatus. The fact that Cominatus outsold Becket by three-to-one troubled Esteney only mildly, especially as Richard had advised his fellow monks to compliment the abbot on his Becket pamphlet at every opportunity and had arranged, at his own expense, for William to bind a presentation copy in stamped leather over wooden boards.
Yet, for all the talk of him, Cominatus had not materialized. While Richard appreciated that this might be for the best, he could not help but feel slightly disappointed. Perhaps, he concluded, he simply wasn’t a good enough writer. Not everyone could be a Chaucer.
The Wife of Bath had produced a bottle of sack, from which she poured Wynkyn a generous cup before replenishing her own. Wynkyn preferred French wine, but since the loss some two decades earlier of Gascony, the last of England’s wine-producing French provinces, Spanish wine was more common, not to mention cheaper. Then again, after what he’d just glimpsed, Wynkyn would have settled for the residue at the bottom of the lowliest tavern barrel as long as it contained alcohol.
Upon opening the door, Wynkyn had been greeted not by the sight of the yard and not by the odors of the street or the dung heap but by a vista of fields, with cattle grazing on the common ground and smoke rising from a pair of cottages. In the distance, surrounded by buildings, were the famed twin towers of Canterbury Cathedral, familiar to Wynkyn from engravings. He heard the calming buzz of bees and the yipping of an unseen dog. He thought he had never beheld a landscape so beautiful, so easeful. Even as he struggled to comprehend how he could be viewing it from the back of a house in Westminster, his left foot was already leaving the step. He wanted to walk on the grass. He wanted to find the dog and pat it. He wanted to enter the cathedral and pray at Becket’s shrine. But the Wife of Bath gripped his arm before he could do any of those things.
“Like I told you,” she said, “I wouldn’t. Well, I would, but you shouldn’t.”
“How can this be?” asked Wynkyn.
“Sit down and try, against your male instincts, to listen.”
Which was how Wynkyn came to be holding a cup of sack in a hand that, he was relieved to note, didn’t tremble, or not much.
The Wife of Bath pointed at the door through which Wynkyn had entered the house.
“Out there,” she said, “is your world.” She pointed to the back door. “But out there is our world, the world of the book, or that’s as best as I can figure it. We’ve been watching it take form since the day we arrived but didn’t want to say anything, not until we had some idea of what was happening.”
“You mean Chaucer’s book is changing the world?”
“The Bible changed the world,” said the Wife of Bath. “The Quran, too, whether you’re a Saracen or not.”
Wynkyn’s frame contorted in frustration.
“It’s not the same thing,” he said.
“Maybe not, but it’s a version of it. Surely, once a book is out in the world, and being read, the world is altered, for better or worse.”
Wynkyn took a deep draft of wine.
“We’re in so much trouble,” he said.
“Only if someone finds out.”
“How are they not going to find out? Kent is currently outside our back door, where it’s very much not supposed to be. There should be a yard, a wall, and a privy. Instead, we have fields, cottages, and Canterbury Cathedral.”
The Wife of Bath patted Wynkyn’s hand.
“But,” she said, “not everyone can see it.”
“What?”
“One of Richard’s trusted monks brought us fresh rushes and a bag of whelks the day before yesterday. The back door was open because the Reeve had gone to find honey. I saw what you saw, but the monk saw nothing at all, or not beyond the yard. He even asked me to close the door on account of how the privy stank. I’m sure if your master William came here, he’d see the fields and the cathedral, and it might be that Brother Richard would too though I wouldn’t bet on it. It was you and your master who printed The Canterbury Tales, not Richard. That’s why we found ourselves here, next to the printing press, and not somewhere down by Canterbury itself.”
Wynkyn looked to the closed door, which now marked a boundary between domains.
“Will the others come back?” he asked.
“They’ll return soon enough. It’s more restful here. It’s exhausting being part of that world all the time. You feel this urge to revert, to become what the book wants you to be. But in this house, we’re more at peace. The author’s hand doesn’t rest so heavily on us.”
Wynkyn finished his wine.
“I’ll have to inform William,” he said, “though it might be easier just to show him.”
The Wife of Bath returned to her embroidery.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “I have a pin to prick.”
That evening, Wynkyn returned to the pilgrims’ house with William. By then, the wandering pilgrims had reappeared and the sun was setting, casting a golden glow over the cottages, the fields, and the distant cathedral spires.
“We’re in so much trouble,” said William, unconsciously echoing Wynkyn’s words as he stood on the doorstep and took in the vista.
“It may be,” said Wynkyn, “that not everyone can see what we see.”
“Can we—? I mean, would we be able to—?”
“Go outside?” interrupted the Wife of Bath. “No, as I explained to Master Wynkyn, you don’t want to go getting lost in a book.”
While the Knight might have been the most senior and distinguished of the pilgrims, Wynkyn noted that, in day-to-day matters, all five deferred to the Wife of Bath. They probably didn’t have a lot of choice. Now William turned to face her.
“This is never going to end, is it?” he said.
So desolate did he look that the Wife of Bath was overcome by pity. She hugged William to her bosom, so that for a moment he resembled a man being smothered by pillows. When she consented to release him—which took longer than Wynkyn considered strictly necessary and seemed first to involve drawing William deeper into her folds—she had a tear in her eye, while William had to take a moment to recover his breath.
“Not unless you intend to uninvent the printing press,” said the Wife of Bath, “and that’s not going to happen. It may be that there won’t be many books like ours, but there’ll be a good deal of them, enough that you’ll need to plan for what’s to come. In the meantime, you don’t have to worry about us. What we need, we’ll find out there, and we’ll live between two worlds.”
Three months went by. Saint Thomas of Canterbury did not reveal himself, and neither did the Venerable Cominatus, despite depictions of him appearing regularly in places frequented by the commonest of the common folk.
Finally, William, Wynkyn, and Richard gathered again at William’s table, a flask of good French wine before them, thanks to Richard’s access to the abbey’s cellars.
“So what did we learn?” asked William.
“That one can invent a person,” replied Richard, “and even make others believe in the idea of him, to a degree. But to enchant a reader, to cause the line between what is actual and imagined to blur so that a character becomes almost as real to them as their own selves, a part of their lives—well, I don’t think that can be forced. It’s a combination of skill, luck—and magic, for want of a better word.”
“We can’t stop the act of printing,” said Wynkyn. “It’s in the world.”
“Or the worlds,” said Richard. He, too, had seen what lay beyond the back door of the pilgrims’ house. He had glimpsed it more faintly than William and Wynkyn, like an image painted on muslin and overlaid, but glimpsed it nonetheless.
“I’ve started work on a translation of The Golden Legend,” said William. “I’m going to include some Old Testament stories and begin, like de Voragine, with tales from the life of Christ, but I—like you, Richard—am no great storyteller, no Chaucer.”
“And that’s for the best,” said Richard. “Planning for the future, I’ve identified more properties that might be suited to our purposes, since they’re not technically owned by the abbey.”
“Then who does own them?” asked William.
“Curiously, you and I may. The deeds were deposited with the abbey’s muniments for safekeeping in the last century by one William de Causton, a mercer—a distant relative of ours, or so it seems. The deeds became confused, deliberately or otherwise, with the abbey’s holdings, and are now so enmeshed that disentangling them might require all parties to resort to law. It is the abbot’s proposal, then, that in return for the abbey informally accepting the likelihood of our ownership, we might accede to paying a nominal rent for the properties for so long as they are in use. That way, we can enjoy the protection of Westminster while avoiding any difficult questions. Should the properties be sold at a future date, a donation from the proceeds would be sufficient to satisfy the abbot.”
William looked to Wynkyn. “What do you think?”
“It’ll do,” said Wynkyn. “For now.”
And so the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository came into being, though a century would pass before that name was formally appended to it. The agreement with Westminster Abbey stood from 1477 until 1499, when construction in its precincts, and the advent of the laborers required to complete it, necessitated the library’s relocation. By then, William Caxton had been dead for eight years, and responsibility for both the care of the pilgrims and the running of the press—the latter soon to be moved to Fleet Street, birthing an entire industry—lay with Wynkyn de Worde.
The characters’ numbers were first swelled by the arrival of Robin Hood, following the publication early in the sixteenth century of Wynkyn’s A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode, and then by Sir Tryamour, after popular rival editions of the eponymous old Middle English romance were issued by Wynkyn and his main competitor, Richard Pynson. What the Wife of Bath foresaw had come to pass, and the influx of characters had begun in earnest.
Aided by Richard Caxton, Wynkyn secured new premises near the old Caxton family lands at Enfield. A guardian was appointed in the form of one of Wynkyn’s more bookish single male relatives, and thus Henry de Worde is regarded as the Caxton’s first official librarian.
Richard Caxton died in 1504, still the sacrist at Westminster Abbey, and loyal to the characters to his very end. One of his most beloved possessions was a fine altar cloth of white damask, decorated with gold flowers and the arms of St. Edward the Confessor, which had been gifted to him by the Wife of Bath. Upon his death, it was bequeathed to the monastery.
One odd postscript remains to the tale of the founding of the Caxton Public Lending Library & Book Depository, discovered among Richard’s papers after his death. In April 1479, while walking along the banks of Clowson Stream, Richard heard a voice calling. He turned to see a man seated by the water, diverted by ducks and the possibilities of pigeons. He was of average height and build, with hair and beard untrimmed, though not to the point of neglect. His eyes were blue, his complexion olive, and his features were resigned but not hopeless. He was dressed in what looked like an old sack, tied with rope at the waist.
“I think you dropped something,” he said.
Richard saw a square of plain cloth caught on a bush.
“It’s not mine,” he replied.
Richard was irritated by the distraction, having taken time alone to consider how best to adjudicate an unfortunate falling-out between two of his assistants—the matricularius, the monastery’s timekeeper, and the revestiarius, who looked after the vestments—over a dozen misplaced cinctures.
“Never mind,” said the man. “Probably not very important anyway.”
“No, probably not.”
“Still, you never know, do you? Little things matter. Sometimes, they’re all we have.”
He stood, wiped some stray blades of grass from his robe, and wished Richard a good day.
Richard walked on for a time. The matricularius was the problem, he thought. He was too quick to point the finger of—
Richard looked back, but the stranger had vanished, contentedly lost to the ordinary.