CAXTON influenced the English language and its literature greatly, not merely by introducing the printing press to England, but by his own style as a writer. Obliged to translate from the French for his own press, he had to choose between “old and homely” English, which he found “more like Dutch,” and the courtly language of the time, which was more like French. He compromised by using an English vocabulary which shows a close relation to the literary English of the age of Queen Anne. Caxton was born in the “Weald” of Kent. After serving as a mercer’s apprentice in London, he established himself in business in Bruges and became governor of the English “Association of Merchant Adventurers.” While in “the Low Countries,” he translated from the French the “Recueil des Histoires de Troye,” and learned to set type in order to supply the large demand for it. In 1476 he left Bruges and established his press in England, where he printed at (Westminster) Woodville’s “Dictes and Notable, Wise Sayings of the Philosophers,” the first book ever printed in England. Caxton died in 1491. He says of his own style: “I learned mine English in Kent, in the Weald, where I doubt not is spoken as broad and rude English as in any place of England.” But his constant work as a translator made him master of a much better English than the average of his time, in or out of Kent.