its behalf. Nor must it be supposed that no supervision of the proceedings of the company was exercised by the High Commission itself. We find that body writing to the Company to uphold a patent in 1560.[1] It was upon its motion in 1566 that the Privy Council made a Star Chamber order calling attention to irregularities which had taken place, and directing the master and wardens to search for the offenders.[2] And its authority, concurrent with that of the Privy Council itself, to license books, is confirmed by a letter of the Council to the company in 1570.[3] So much for the period before 1586. Another thing which Lambe and Kingston do not tell us, and which the register, if it can be trusted, does, is that the effective change introduced by the Star Chamber of that year was only one of degree and not of kind. It is true that an increasing number of books came, after one set-back, to be submitted to correctors; that the clerk begins to lay emphasis in his wording upon entrance rather than upon licence; that there are some hints that the direct responsibility of the wardens was for a kind of 'allowance' distinct from and supplementary to that of censorship. But it does not appear to be true that, then or at any later time, they wholly refused to enter any book except after taking cognizance of an authority beyond their own.
In fact the register, from the very beginning, was not purely, or perhaps even primarily, one of allowances. It had two other functions, even more important from the point of view of the internal economy of the Company. It was a fee-book, subsidiary to the annual accounts of the wardens, and showing the details of sums which they had to return in those accounts.[4] And it was a register of copyrights. A stationerCommissioners for cawses ecclesyastical there at London'.]
- ↑ ii. 62.
- ↑ i. 322.
- ↑ v. lxxvi, 'we do will and commande yowe that from hence forthe yowe suffer neither booke ballett nor any other matter to be published . . . until the same be first seene and allowed either by us of her M^{tes} pryvie Counsell or by thee [sic
- ↑ The fee seems at first to have been 4d. for 'entraunce' (i. 94), with a further sum for books above a certain size at the rate of 'euery iij leves a pannye' (i. 97); plays ran from 4d. to 12d. But from about 1582 plays and most other books are charged a uniform fee of 6d., and only ballads and other trifles escape with 4d. Payments were sometimes in arrear; often there is no note of fee to a title; and in some of these cases the words 'neuer printed' have been added. On the other hand, the receipt of fees is sometimes recorded, and the title remains unentered; at the end of the entries for 1585-6 (ii. 448) is a memorandum that one of the wardens 'brought in about iiij^s moore which he had receved for copies yat were not brought to be entred into the book this yere'. A similar item is in the wardens' accounts for 1592-3 (i. 559). Fees were charged for entries of transferred as well as of new copies.
