Will the Editor of "NOTES AND QUERIES" now allow me to modify this
suggestion? The figures "4" and "7" are interlaced, it is true, but the
"4" decidedly precedes the other figure, and is followed by a point (.).
I thinly it not improbable that this cypher, therefore, is so far
enigmatic, that the figure "4" may stand for _fourteen hundred_ (the
century), and that the "7" is intended to read doubled, as
_seventy-seven_. In that case, the device, and such historical evidence
as we possess, combine in assigning the year 1477 for the time of the
erection of Caxton's press at Westminster, in the time of Abbot Esteney.
If _The Game and Play of the Chesse_ was printed at Westminster, it
would still be 1474. In the paragraph quoted by ARUN (Vol. ii., p. 122.)
from Mr. C. Knight's _Life of Caxton_, Stow is surely incorrectly
charged with naming Abbot Islip in this matter. Islip's name has been
introduced by the error of some subsequent writer; and this is perhaps
attributable to the extraordinary inadvertence of Dart, the historian of
the abbey, who in his _Lives of the Abbots of Westminster_ has
altogether omitted Esteney,--a circumstance which may have misled any
one hastily consulting his book.

JOHN GOUGH NICHOLS

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MISCELLANEOUS

NOTES ON BOOKS, SALES, CATALOGUES, ETC.

_The Fawkes's of York in the Sixteenth Century, including Notices of the