Texts and the City: William Caxton, Richard Hill, and Metropolitan Conjury

Abstract

ABSTRACT Shortly after William Caxton had established his printer’s shop in Westminster, he described himself as a citizen and conjury—the latter a term he seems to have coined in order to describe how seriously he viewed his role and activities as a sworn member of the London Company of Mercers. A generation later, the London Grocer and copyist Richard Hill demonstrated an affinity with the Caxton view on metropolitan citizenship and mercantile values. The survival of a varied collection of Hill’s transcriptions in a single manuscript provides a range of evidence to support this conclusion. Across a thirty-year career as copyist, Hill retained an interest in preserving material he had begun transcribing as a London apprentice and young man. As his career progressed, he augmented his collection with songs, carols, and other miscellaneous informational, didactic, and polite reading materials. Such varied texts represented (for Caxton, Hill, and many of their contemporaries) the metropolitan mercantile tastes and values that Hill wished to preserve, as a citizen and conjury in his own right.