15th September 1507: Establishment of Scotland’s First Printing Press
(The devices of Walter Chepman and Androw Myllar, Scotland’s first printers)
On this day 512 years ago, King James IV granted a charter under the privy seal to the partnership of Walter Chepman and Andrew Myllar. This is the earliest record of Scotland’s first known printing press, established around the same time by Chepman and Myllar, in the Southgait of Edinburgh. Although the press was destined to be short-lived, in its brief career it printed several notable books, including poems by Dunbar, Henryson, and Lydgate, and also the Aberdeen Breviary, the Scottish liturgy compiled by William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen. Several of Chepman and Myllar’s prints have survived (some in very fragmentary states) and constitute an important source for the history of Scottish literary culture.
The king’s charter, granted at Edinburgh on 15th September 1507, served as a general notice to his officers and lieges not to hinder “our lovittis servitouris” Walter Chepman and Androw Myllar, who had, “at our instance and request, for our plesour, the honour and profitt of our realme and liegis, takin on thame to furnis and bring hame ane prent with al stuf belangand tharto and expert men to use the samyn”. The two men who benefited from the charter- Walter Chepman and Androw Myllar, were both burgesses of Edinburgh but had quite different backgrounds. Walter Chepman was a wealthy merchant and property owner, who had connections with the royal court (among other things, he received livery for the king’s wedding in 1503) and had even been employed as a clerk by the influential royal secretary Patrick Paniter. He traded in wool, cloth, wood and various other items, but had little obvious experience of the print trade, so his role in the partnership was probably to provide the capital and business expertise.
Chepman’s partner Androw Myllar is a little more obscure, but we can be reasonably certain that he had some experience of printing and the book trade. He and his wife are mentioned in the Treasurer’s Accounts as having provided books for the king on several occasions, and when his wife was handling the business in Scotland, Myllar, like many other Scots traders, was probably abroad, organising imports and making business connections on the continent. This gave him the perfect opportunity to witness the development of printing in the Low Countries and France, and his name has been associated with two books printed in Rouen in Normandy- Joannes de Garlandia's “Multorum Vocabulorum Equiuocorum”, in 1505, and the “Expositio Sequentiarum” in 1506. It is clear from a colophon in the former of these books that Myllar had some role in the printing or commissioning of the book, but it is unlikely that he printed it himself. Nevertheless it seems probable that it was in France that Myllar learnt the tools of the trade and acquired the press and ‘”expert men to use the samyn” which were brought to Scotland in 1507. Certainly the printers’ devices used by Chepman and Myllar on their books (see above) show French influence- Walter Chepman’s, with its wild man and woman beneath an oak tree, framing a shield bearing his initials, is very similar to that of the mark of Philippe Pigouchet, a printer of Paris. Androw Myllar’s meanwhile, behind the small shield bearing his initials and a merchants’ mark, includes a miller carrying grain to a mill as a punning allusion on his name (a device very popular in France) and two shields bearing the fleur-de-lis.
(The Cowgate in darker days- the dilapidated turreted building was Cardinal Beaton’s House, a survivor of the early sixteenth century which sat at the bottom of Blackfriars’ Wynd until the 1870s. In 1509, when Chepman and Myllar’s press was in business nearby, it was owned by the Archbishop of St Andrews).
The two men set up shop in a tenement belonging to Walter Chepman in the “Southgait”- or the Cowgate- of Edinburgh, at the corner of Blackfriars’ Wynd. Although in later centuries the Cowgate would become notorious for its slums, in the reign of King James IV it was a relatively new and fashionable address, where many prominent courtiers, nobles, and prelates had their town houses. It is clear from the privy seal charter which serves as the earliest evidence of the Southgait press that the fledgling printing business was not set up on a whim. The charter states that it was founded “for imprenting of the bukis of our lawis, actis of parliament, croniclis, mess bukis and portuus, efter the use of our realme, with additionis and legendis of Scottis sanctis now gaderit to be ekit thairto, and al utheris bukis that sal be sene necessare, and to sel the sammyn for competent pricis be our avis and discretioun, thair labouris and expens being considerit.” As well as this laudable yet broad call for the printing of Scottish legal, historical, and spiritual texts, one work in particular was singled out by the king’s charter, as it was “thocht expedient be us and our counsall that in tyme cuming mess bukis, manualis, matyne bukis, and portuus bukis efter our awin Scottis use (...) be usit generaly within al oure realme”. The work which was to answer this need was the book now known as the Aberdeen Breviary, “with legendis of Scottis sanctis as is now gaderit and ekit be ane reverend fader in God and our traist counsalour William, bishop of Abirdene”. For centuries the liturgy used in Scotland had been an amended version of the Sarum (Salisbury) use of England, with some native Scots influences and borrowings from the Low Countries. Now though, King James IV and his senior clergy were particularly anxious to develop a distinctively Scottish liturgy which would strengthen the ‘national’ church. To this end William Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen, the keeper of the Privy Seal, founder of the University of Aberdeen, and an important royal counsellor, had drawn together dozens of legends and feast days of Scottish saints- from the famous St Ninian and St Mungo to the more obscure St Mortlach- and developed a liturgy which emphasised Scottish styles of worship. As English and French publishers were unlikely to print breviaries solely for export to Scotland however, the bishop’s project required the resources of native printing press- and with the foundation of Chepman and Myllar’s Southgait press, this finally became possible.
It was to be a few years before the printing of the Breviary became a reality however. In the meantime, the Southgait press seems to have printed short pieces of a more popular nature, and we are fortunate that nine of these prints, produced c.1508, were rediscovered in the eighteenth century after years of obscurity (they are now in the care of the National Libraries of Scotland). These short blackletter prints include poems such as “The Golden Targe”, “The Two Married Women and the Widow”, and other works by the contemporary writer William Dunbar; “Orpheus and Eurydice” and “The Want of Wise Men” by Robert Henryson; “The Maying or Disport of Chaucer”, also known as the Complaint of the Black Knight and actually by the English poet John Lydgate (this piece is the earliest known printing, dated 4th April 1508); moral texts such as “The Porteous of Nobleness” and the “Buke of Gude Counsall to the King” (addressed to James II); and chivalric literature like “The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane” and “Sir Eglamore of Artois”. Some of these works are known only from the Chepman and Myllar prints, while others can be compared with manuscript collections to gain a deeper understanding of Scottish literary culture and wider European print culture during this period. Their existence also presents the possibility that the output of the Southgait press may have been larger still- a mutilated version of Blind Hary’s epic ‘The Wallace’ and a version of the “Gest of Robin Hood” have also been attributed to Chepman and Myllar, with other fragments. The survival of these early prints is therefore highly fortunate, and I recommend taking the time to browse some of the copies available online.
The Aberdeen Breviary was finally published in 1510, by which time the press already seems to have been under pressure. Competition from cheap imports was already a threat, and after Walter Chepman’s application to the privy council in January, merchants who had been breaking the rules set out in the previous privy seal charter were named and shamed, while it was declared that nobody should be permitted to take copies of the work that Chepman had printed, in an early example of copyright law. Androw Myllar meanwhile, was no longer in the picture; possibly he had died by 1510, and he was to have no part in the final printing of the Breviary later that year. The complete Breviary ran to 1554 pages, and was split into two volumes, the first being completed by 13th February 1510, and the second by 4th June. Four copies have survived of this initial edition, each one slightly unique, but the king and Bishop Elphinstone’s hopes of permanently replacing the Sarum use in Scotland were to be disappointed. The rite continued to be used until 1534, when England began using increasingly Protestant liturgies which were not suitable in Scotland, and even then the Scots turned to the revised Roman liturgy of Cardinal Quignonez rather than the Aberdeen Breviary. 1510 was also the end for the Southgait press, as it is not known to have produced any further books after the first run of the Aberdeen Breviary, although Walter Chepman remained active as a merchant. The exact reasons behind its disappearance are unclear, although possibly the cheap imports helped hasten its demise. Nevertheless both the Aberdeen Breviary and the Southgait press, each in their own way, made an important contribution to the literary culture of their day in Scotland, and have even greater historical significance as a result.
“Register of the Privy Seal of Scotland” ed. M. Livingstone
“Annals of Scottish Printing”, by R. Dickson and J. Edmond
“Glory and Honour”, Andrea Thomas
National Libraries of Scotland- various pages
