In Italy the first place which appears to have become a great centre of the paper-making industry was Fabriano in the mar quisate of Ancona, where mills were first set up in 1276, and which rose into importance on the decline of the manufacture in Spain. The earliest known water-marks in paper from this factory are of the years 1293 and 1294. In 1340 a factory was established at Padua ; another arose later at Treviso ; and others followed in the territories of Florence, Bologna, Parma, Milan, Venice and other districts. From the factories of northern Italy the wants of southern Germany were supplied as late as the 15th century. But in Germany also factories were rapidly founded. The earliest are said to have been set up between Cologne and Mainz, and in Mainz itself about 1320. At Nuremberg Ulman Stromer estab lished a mill in 1390, with the aid of Italian workmen. Other places of early manufacture were Ratisbon and Augsburg. Western Germany, as well as the Netherlands and England, is said to have obtained paper at first from France and Burgundy through the markets of Bruges, Antwerp and Cologne. France owed the establishment of her first paper-mills to Spain, whence we are told the art of paper-making was introduced, as early as the year 1189, into the district of Herault.
In the second half of the 14th century the use of paper for all literary purposes had become well established in all western Europe ; and in the course of the 15th century it gradually super seded vellum. In mss. of this latter period it is not unusual to find a mixture of vellum and paper, a vellum sheet forming the outer, or the outer and inner, leaves of a quire while the rest are of paper.
Paper in England.—With regard to the early use of paper in England, there is evidence that at the beginning of the 14th century it was a not uncommon material, particularly for registers and accounts. Under the year 1310, the records of Merton col lege, Oxford, show that paper was purchased "pro registro." The college register referred to, which was probably used for entering the books that the fellows borrowed from the library, has perished. There is, however, in the British Museum a paper ms. (Add. 31, 223), written in England, of even earlier date than the one recorded in the Merton archives. This is a register of the hustings court of Lyme Regis, the entries in which begin in the year 1309. The paper, of a rough manufacture, is similar to the kind which was used in Spain.
The knowledge, however, which we have of the history of paper-making in England is extremely scanty. The first maker whose name is known is John Tate, who is said to have set up a mill in Hertford early in the i6th century and Sir John Spilman, Queen Elizabeth's jeweller, erected a paper-mill at Dartford, and in 1589 obtained a licence for ten years to make all sorts of white writing-paper and to gather, for the purpose, all manner of linen rags, scrolls or scraps of parchment, old fishing nets, etc. (Dunkin, Hist. of Dartford, 305; Harl ms. 2296, f. 124 b). But it is incredible that no paper was made in the country before the time of the Tudors. The comparatively cheap rates at which
it was sold in the 15th century in inland towns suggest that there was at that time a native industry in this commodity.
As far as the prices have been observed at which different kinds of paper were sold in England, it has been found that in 1355 1356 the price of a quire of small folio paper was 5d, both in Oxford and London. In the 15th century the average price seems to have ranged from 3d. to 4d. for the quire, and from 3s. 4d. to 4s. for the ream. At the beginning of the i6th century the price fell to 2d. or 3d. the quire, and to 3s. or 3s. 6d. the ream ; but in the second half of the century, owing to the debase ment of the coinage, it rose, in common with all other corn modities, to nearly 4d. the quire, and to rather more than 5s. the ream. The relatively higher price of the ream in this last period, as compared with that of the quire, seems to imply a more ex tensive use of the material which enabled the trader to dispose of broken bulk more quickly than formerly, and so to sell by the quire at a comparatively cheap rate.
Brown paper appears in entries of 157o-1571, and was sold in bundles at 2S. to 2S. 4d. Blotting paper is apparently of even earlier date, being mentioned under the year 1465. It was a coarse, grey, unsized paper, fragments of which have been found among the leaves of I5th-century accounts, where it had been left after being used for blotting. Early in the i6th century blotting-paper must have been in ordinary use, for it is referred to in W. Norman's Vulgaria, 1519 (p. 8o b) : "Blottyng papyr serveth to drye weete wryttynge, lest there be made blottis or blurris", and early in the next century "charta bibula" is men tioned in the Pinacotheca (i. 175) of Nicius Erythraeus. It is remarkable that, in spite of the comparatively early date of this invention, sand should have been used so long as an absorbent.
Paper in America.—The early printers of colonial America imported their paper from Europe, chiefly from the Continent. The first paper-mill was built in 1690 at Germantown, Pa., result ing from the combination of the needs of the Philadelphia printer, William Bradford, and the arrival of an ambitious German paper maker, William Rittenhouse. Two other mills were established in Pennsylvania in 1710 and 1729, one in Elizabethtown, N. J., in 1728, and the first in Massachusetts at Milton in the same year. Virginia's first paper-mill was built at Williamsburg in 1744 by its first newspaper publisher, William Parks. The first in New York was built at Hempstead, Long Island in 1768. With imports cut off during the Revolutionary War and increased needs for news papers, broadsides, pamphlets, records, correspondence, etc., an acute paper famine developed. Under these conditions additional mills sprang into existence and there were probably 8o or 90 when the war ended. Paper manufacturing was protected in the first tariff. In 1810 there were more than 200 mills in operation, making about $2,000,000 worth of products.