Regulating the Printing Press - Part 3

The Stationers Company and Industry Regulation

The Stationers Company and Industry Regulation 1557

On 4 May, 1557 the Stationers Guild received a Charter of Incorporation from Queen Mary^[1]. The basis for this has been a matter of some controversy.   At a session of the Convocation of Canterbury in March 1542 a book containing a Charter for the Company was debated and referred to the King. Blagden suggests that the terms of this document are not known but they may not have been very different from those of the Charter as granted. The move by the Stationers was rejected and it is suggested that the King considered that the powers that it sought were too wide.^[2]

Pursuant to the Charter of Incorporation granted by Mary the Stationers had considerable powers and there is some justification for the suggestion that initially it was seen that the Stationers could be utilised as an arm of the state in enforcing printing regulations.  The manner in which the Company acted after incorporation seems to suggest however the contrary.  The Stationers Company was a craft guild set up to look after the interests of its members.  This primary objective continued. Any secondary objective that might have been anticipated by the state that the Stationers Company would come to its aid in enforcing printing regulation and censorship was illusory. 

“The Stationers saw in the charter a means of protecting their craft from unregulated competition, the Crown saw in it the means of controlling the increasingly powerful printing press from which came so many seditious and heretical books; for despite a steady flow of Government proclamations, forbidden books continued to arrive in the country, whilst many were surreptitiously printed in England itself, often with a false foreign imprint.”^[3]

There were occasions from time to time, particularly during Elizabeth’s reign, when the Stationers  did assist in censorship activities.  It is arguable that  there was a hidden agenda for the Company in doing so. Those whom the Company were seeking in fact were printers who had not licensed their work through the Stationers ’s company itself.