ABSTRACT
The number of master printers fell from sixty or seventy in 1660 to thirty-five in 1668, partly from the Plague, and partly by the Great Fire in which many printers’ and booksellers’ establishments were destroyed. Roger L’Estrange recognized the connection between the poverty of the printers and the incentive to seditious printing: ‘One great evil is the multiplicity of private presses, and consequently of printers, who for want of public and warrantable employment, are forced to play the knaves in corners, or want bread.’ A newly bound apprentice was often required to go through a corresponding ordeal in order to be made a Cuz or Deacon, a kind of novitiate order of the Chapellonians. The workman who wished to introduce the new rule ‘purchased the solace’ by laying a penny on the imposing stone and asking the Father of the Chapel to call a Meeting.
