Thomas Pavier - Life and Work

Life and Work

Pavier came to the business of publishing in an unusual way: instead of serving the normal apprenticeship in the Stationers Company, he was one of several young men who transferred to the Stationers from the Drapers Company on 3 June 1600. Pavier had served an apprenticeship under William Barley, a draper who doubled as a bookseller. Pavier was able to set himself up in business that year; his shop was located at the sign of the Cat and Parrots, "over against Pope's Head Alley" in Cornhill.

Over the course of his quarter-century career, Pavier grew rich by publishing popular works of Puritan literature in multiple editions. At the start of his career, however, he worked at the lower end of the prestige scale in printed matter in his era: he primarily published ballads, chapbooks, pamphlets, and playbooks. One of his earliest products in the ballad line was The Fair Widow of Watling Street and Her Three Daughters (c. 1600). He followed this with many comparable works, with titles like The Lamentable Murthers of Sir John Fitz (1605), A Cruel Murther in Worcestershire (1605), The Fire in Shoreditch (1606), The Traitors' Downfall (1606), The Shepherd's Lamentation (1612), and The Burning of Tyverton (1612). He also published ballads by Thomas Deloney and Samuel Rowlands.

Pavier's firm prospered and he eventually rose to be his guild's Junior Warden in 1622, but Pavier never abandoned ballads. In the years 1612–20, when the Stationers Company limited ballad printing to only five of its members, Pavier was one of the five. In 1624 he was a member of the "Ballad Stock," a syndicate of stationers dedicated to the production of ballads in print.