Note 11 — Chapter VIII
Reading edition
The historian Gibbon regrets that in the choice of authors Caxton “was reduced to comply with the vicious taste of his readers; to gratify the nobles with treatises on heraldry, hawking [Caxton printed nothing of the sort], and the game of Chess; and to amuse the popular credulity with romances of fabulous knights and legends of some fabulous saints. The father of printing expresses a laudable desire to elucidate the history of his country; but instead of publishing the Latin chronicle of Radulphus Higden [which very few could have read] he could only venture on the English version by John de Trevisa ... the world is not indebted to England for one first edition of a classic author!”