The St Albans Press was the third printing press set up in England, in 1479. It was situated in the Abbey Gateway, St Albans, a part of the Benedictine Monastery of St Albans. The name of the printer is unknown, only referred to by Wynkyn de Worde in a reprinting of one of the St Albans books as 'Sometime schoolmaster'.[1] He has sometimes been identified as John Marchall, master of St Albans School; however, a passage written by Worde in 1497 implies that the printer was deceased, and Marchall is known to have lived until 1501. Recent research has produced the name John Haule as a possible candidate for the Schoolmaster Printer.[2] He presented the school with its first printed textbook, the Elegantiolae, which was the first book printed at the press, and he was a printer, probably in St Albans in 1479.
However, the historian Nicholas Orme, in his “Medieval Schools, From Roman Britain to Renaissance England”, states, “Books were also acquired by schools and institutions. One of the earliest known is a Priscian Major [the first sixteen books of Priscian's Latin grammar, the Institutiones grammaticae] given to St Albans school by John Haule, apparently before 1310." Orme was citing the register of the abbots of St Albans: “Item, Johannes Haule praedictis Scolis dedit Priscianum magnum.”[3][4][5]
Lotte Hellinga[6] has suggested that “there were several people working successively at the abbey.” Printing was done in St Albans in two distinct phases, probably by two printers or teams of printers. During the first phase, from 1479 to 1481, they printed six books in Latin for grammar school and university students, with a high standard of typesetting and printing. Then there was an interval of five years, after which printing resumed in 1486. During the second phase, they printed two books in English for a more general audience, with a lower standard of technical skill.
One possible candidate for the Schoolmaster Printer is William Waren.[7] In 1480, in a feoffment or property conveyance in Watford, about five miles away, he was called Master William Waryn, schoolmaster.[8] He was identified as William Waren, Master of Grammar and warden of the Grammar School of St Albans in a case in Common Pleas recorded from 1486 to 1489. He was the plaintiff against the Abbot of St Albans for a debt of £36 (equivalent to £34,704 in 2023). William Waren was awarded Master of Grammar at Cambridge in 1468-9. In his will, written in February and proven in March 1489/90, he requests to be buried in the nave of the Abbey church.
There was another printer active in St Albans in the 1530s.[9] In cases in Common Pleas in 1535, he is recorded as Richard Baugh, of St Albans, printer, and as Richard Baugh alias Waters, of St Albans, stationer.