28 Facts About William Caxton

William Caxton is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England in 1476, and as a printer to be the first English retailer of printed books.

Shortly after Large's death, Caxton moved to Bruges, Belgium, a wealthy cultured city in which he was settled by 1450.

On his return to England, heavy demand for his translation prompted William Caxton to set up a press at Westminster in 1476.

William Caxton was the first to translate Aesop's Fables in 1484.

William Caxton was not an adequate translator, and under pressure to publish as much as possible as quickly as possible, he sometimes simply transferred French words into English; but because of the success of his translations, he is credited with helping to promote the Chancery English that he used to the status of standard dialect throughout England.

In 2002, William Caxton was named among the 100 Greatest Britons in a BBC poll.

However, the charters used as evidence there are for the manor of Little Wratting in Suffolk; in one charter, this William Caxton is referred to as "otherwise called Causton saddler".

William Caxton was one of the defendants in a case in the Court of Common Pleas in Easter term 1420: Kent.

William Caxton would have been 14 at the date of apprenticeship, but masters often paid the fees late.

Oral tradition in Tonbridge claims that William Caxton was born there; the same with Tenterden.

William Caxton's trade brought him into contact with Burgundy and it was thus that he became a member of the household of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, the third wife of Charles the Bold and sister of two kings of England: Edward IV and Richard III.

William Caxton wasted no time in setting up a printing press in Bruges in collaboration with a Fleming, Colard Mansion, and the first book to be printed in English was produced in 1473: Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye was a translation by Caxton himself.

William Caxton's translation had become popular in the Burgundian court, and requests for copies of it were the stimulus for him to set up a press.

William Caxton produced the first translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses in English.

William Caxton produced chivalric romances, the most important of which was Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur ; classical works; and English and Roman histories.

William Caxton was supported by members of the nobility and the gentry.

In 1820, a memorial tablet to William Caxton was provided in St Margaret's by the Roxburghe Club and its President, Earl Spencer.

In November 1954, a memorial to William Caxton was unveiled in Westminster Abbey by JJ Astor, chairman of the Press Council.

Near this place William Caxton set up the first printing press in England.

William Caxton printed 80 percent of his works in the English language.

William Caxton translated a large number of works into English and performed much of the translation and the editing work himself.

William Caxton is credited with printing as many as 108 books, 87 of which were different titles, including the first English translation of Aesop's Fables.

William Caxton's major guiding principle in translating was an honest desire to provide the most linguistically exact replication of foreign language texts into English, but the hurried publishing schedule and his inadequate skill as a translator often led to wholesale transference of French words into English and to numerous misunderstandings.

William Caxton was a technician, rather than a writer, and he often faced dilemmas concerning language standardisation in the books that he printed.

William Caxton wrote about that subject in the preface to his Eneydos.

William Caxton is credited with standardising the English language through printing by homogenising regional dialects and largely adopting the London dialect.

William Caxton went into a house and asked the "good wyf" if he could buy some "egges".

William Caxton replied that she could not speak French, which annoyed him, as he could not speak French.