Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu/183

Rh of the many, and literature and the literary arts had been so refined that they were in decay. Nothing seems to have been done to pave the way for the introduction of xylographic printing by attempts to educate the people.

The intellectual development of France resembled that of Italy and Spain—it was a development of the literature of the church, and of effeminate tastes among the wealthy, but from these the people derived no benefit. France was then passing through the horrors of what French historians call the "Hundred Years' War" with England, during which her population decreased at an alarming rate, and many of her arts and industries were irreparably injured. The princes and nobles were waging against each other a war of treason and assassination; the peasantry, on whom feudal laws pressed more severely than they did on any other people, broke out in the insurrection of the Jacquerie. In 1407, the pope laid the kingdom under interdict, and the withdrawal of the ministrations of the church were added to the horrors of civil and servile war and the miseries of foreign invasion. It was not a time for cultivating the arts of peace. There is, therefore, no block-book of the fifteenth century in the French language, and there is no reason to believe that any block-book printer ever attempted to establish his business on French territory.

Of all the states of Western Europe, England seems to have been most unfitted for the reception of printing. There were a few ecclesiastics who saw the importance of books, and who tried to found libraries, but the greater part of the clergy were very ignorant. They would not learn, nor would they allow common people to be taught. It was unlawful, even as late as 1412, for laborers, farmers and mechanics to send their children to school. A great opportunity for popular education was presented in Wickliffe's translation of the Bible, which could have been made an effective means for diffusing the knowledge of letters among a religious people. But in 1415 it was enacted that they who read the Scriptures in the mother tongue should be hanged for treason, and burned for heresy.