Museum possesses a few good examples of this stamp-work, but the finest
collections of them are in the Cathedral libraries at Durham and
Hereford. Any one, however, who is interested in this work can easily
acquaint himself with it by consulting the unique collection of rubbings
carefully taken by Mr. Weale and deposited in the National Art Library
at the South Kensington Museum. In these rubbings, as in no other way,
the history of English binding can be studied from the earliest
Winchester books to the charming Oxford bindings executed by Thomas
Hunt, the English partner of the Cologne printer, Rood, about 1481.

During the first half of this period the English leather binders were
the finest in Europe; during the second, the Germans pressed them hard,
and when the large panel stamps, three or four inches square and more,
were introduced in Holland and France, the English adaptations of them
were distinctly inferior to the originals. The earliest English bindings
with gold tooling were, of course, also imitative. The use of gold
reached this country but slowly, as the first known English binding, in
which it occurs, is on a book printed in 1541, by which time the art had
been common in Italy for a generation. The English bindings found on
books bound for Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Mary I., all of which are
roughly assigned to Berthelet as the Royal binder, resemble the current
Italian designs of the day, with sufficient differences to make it
probable that they were produced by Englishmen. We know, however,
that until the close of the century there were occasional complaints
of the presence of foreign binders in London, and it is probable that
the Grolieresque bindings executed for Wotton were foreign rather than
English. Where, however, we find work on English books distinctly unlike
anything in France or Italy, it is reasonable to assign it to a native
school, and such a school seems to have grown up about 1570, in the
workshop of John Day, the helper of Archbishop Parker in so many of his