The Christian history of London, particularly in Reformation times, is so closely associated with the publication of Bibles that we cannot ignore the introduction of printing into England by William Caxton. Caxton began his career as an apprentice to a cloth dealer in London and was sent to Bruges by his employer. In 1446 he set up his own business and became a leader in the English business community in Bruges. He travelled widely, developed a literary interest and began translating books into English. During this period, in 1456, the first printed book, the 42-line Bible, was produced in Mainz by Johann Gutenberg. Soon printing presses were springing up all over Europe.
Caxton finished his first translation in 1471 and decided to learn the new skill of printing in order to produce his own books. He set up a press in Bruges and in 1476 returned to Britain and set up the same press at the almonry (head of Tothill Street) near the Abbey at Westminster. His first printed book was the Sayings Of the Philosophers, followed by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Malory’s King Arthur (1485). In fourteen years he printed 18,000 folio pages, making up eighty separate books in English.
Because of the law against heresy passed by Parliament in 1401 and the so-called ‘constitutions of Clarendon’ adopted by a synod in 1408 declaring it heresy for anyone to ‘translate on his own authority any text of holy scripture in the English tongue’, no Bible in English (except a few Wyclifite versions that had escaped the flames) was available in Caxton’s time. However, in 1483 he published the Golden Legend which contains fourteen lives of Old Testament characters translated by himself. Certain other of his books also contain Scripture or paraphrases of the Bible from Latin and European languages. Caxton, therefore, is technically the first person to print the Bible in English. Ironically, perhaps, the first complete English translation of the New Testament, William Tyndale’s version, was printed abroad—in Cologne, Germany (in 1525).