Most fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century books which explicitly recommend themselves to women are directed to those who claim or aspire to gentility. Some of the books itemized in the will of Anne Andrew of Suffolk, England, are her best massbook and second massbook, which she left, respectively, to the altar of St Blaise in Wetherden church, and to her son, Andrew, respectively. Although she had access to various potential sources of books, Beatrice Lynne's single personal record is left, entirely typically, in a devotional manuscript which was to be passed by another woman to a community of female religious. Within the precinct at Aldgate, books on secular subjects seem to have been available. A manuscript copy of William Caxton's editions of The Game of the Chesse and The Cordyall, made in 1484 by Dominus Grace, came into the possession of Dame Margaret Woodward.

Schools open to the public may also have originated in Saxon times. In the medieval period-English universities, students often needed remedial instruction in elementary Latin grammar, while advanced Latin grammar formed part of the undergraduate course. Once pupils had mastered basic Latin, they continued their studies with texts in Latin itself. The difficult task of compiling an English dictionary with Latin equivalents was accomplished by a Dominican recluse of King's Lynn, who completed the work, called Promptorium parvulorum, in 1440. In the great lay households, boys and girls of the nobility and gentry were trained for lay careers rather than ecclesiastical ones, with greater emphasis on the vernacular than on Latin. When printed books became available in England, from English presses or through importation, large possibilities existed for selling educational books to noble households, and schools in towns and religious houses. Printers other than William Caxton sought to exploit the market in school text-books.

Any study of the late medieval history of the book in Britain must eventually turn to London where, from the fifteenth century onwards, the book trade made the City dominant in national book commerce. In City of London archives, the first mention of the trade is in 1403, when various book craftsmen sought to form a common fraternity. Migration to Paternoster Row or to streets and lanes nearby continued steadily throughout the fifteenth century; as many as 136 stationers and book artisans, at various times, established business premises and residence in the environs of St Paul's. As security for a book order or for craft services provided to a customer, some form of agrement or acorde was required by a stationer or by an artisan directly engaged by the customer. William Caxton's death, probably in the early spring or late winter of 1492, marks the beginning of a new phase in London's developing market for printed books.

Unlike manuscripts, which were produced in England and Scotland as well as on the Continent, no printed books were produced on native soil before William Caxton set up his shop in Westminster in 1476. This chapter treats England and Scotland separately in the discussion of the importation of books. They were separate countries, had different foreign alliances, different trade routes and looked to different intellectual centres. The imported books themselves underline these differences. If the individual centres of printing for patterns of importation to England are examined, Venice emerges as the leading supplier of books, followed by Paris, Basel, Cologne, Lyons, Strasbourg and Nuremberg. For Scotland, Venice dominates in both importation and production in the 1480s, but in the 1490s is almost on a par with Paris. There is no dramatic leap in the 1490s, but rather a sharp, then steady, rise in imports from France and Germany after 1500.