Pynson and his four successors

Although England acquired twelve new printers in 1529–34, nine of them in the London area, the most important change in the printing population was the death of Richard Pynson. During 1528 he had lost his wife Joan. He paid for a knell to be rung for her in St Dunstan's, but there is no record of funeral expenses there, and in his will he would ask to be buried in St Clement Danes ‘next my wife’. That presumably means a wife he married before moving to London, and if she were not the late Joan he would perhaps have identified her more precisely. So the Joan who died in 1528 was probably the same Joan with whom he had leased the St Andrew Cross in 1508, and the same wife who had been with him when their party was ambushed in April 1500.

It was not until 18 November 1529 that Pynson made his will, so although his health may have deteriorated during the year there is no obvious reason why his employees’ output should have declined along with it. But 1529 became the first year since 1491 in which he produced no known books bearing a date, and STC assigns to it only four very small items. If we ignore the question marks in STC's conjectured dates, Pynson's presses are credited with nearly 1,600 surviving edition-sheets in 1525–8 (nearly 400 a year, although his earlier career average was under 300) but only five in 1529. Furthermore, well over half the books assigned to 1525–8 (sixty-one items containing 975 edition-sheets) are dated only conjecturally – and if we add 1529 and divide by five years instead of four we get a more realistic average of a little under 320 edition-sheets. So despite the absence of any books actually dated 1529, the printing house seems likely to have been as busy as usual until very late in the year.