• Caxton was not a language specialist or a professional writer, but a businessman who wanted to make a living by selling books

• In 1476, he set up a printing shop in the precincts of Westminster Abbey

• Caxton published over a hundred separate items, including popular prose works, such as Malory's Morte Darthur, and the work of the courtly poets – Chaucer (two editions of The Canterbury Tales), Gower, and Lydgate

• Caxton's printing house had no conscious standardizing policy

• But certain modernization of the orthography did occur: using g and th instead of the manuscript symbols 3 (“yogh”), þ (“thorn”), and ð (“eth”)

• Significant levels of standardization in printed books would be found only a century later

• Standardization of printed material led to the eventual development of a radically divergent written and spoken English 

• During the sixteenth century we see the publication of several important texts which were intended for use nationwide

• The printing of major literary authors by Caxton was followed by the age of printed Bibles and the "golden" literary age of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period

• The language of the Bibles and the dramas would become privileged and influential

• Thus, the rise of a standard language in the sixteenth century both facilitated and was facilitated by the expansion of a national literature

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