Merchant's mark in the context of Holy Trinity Church, Bradford-on-Avon

Titulus (Latin "inscription" or "label", the plural tituli is also used in English) is a term used for the labels or captions naming figures or subjects in art, which were commonly added in classical and medieval art, and remain conventional in Eastern Orthodox icons. In particular the term describes the conventional inscriptions on stone that listed the honours of an individual or that identified boundaries in the Roman Empire. A titulus pictus is a merchant's mark or other commercial inscription.

The sense of "title", as in "book title", in modern English derives from this artistic sense, just as the legal sense derives from plainer inscriptions of record.

William Caxton (c. 1422 – c. 1491) was an English merchant, diplomat and writer. He is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England in 1476, and as a printer to be the first English retailer of printed books.

His parentage and date of birth are not known for certain, but he may have been born between 1415 and 1424, perhaps in the Weald or wood land of Kent, perhaps in Hadlow or Tenterden. In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a wealthy London silk mercer.

William Greville (died 1 October 1401) (alias Grevel, Graville, Grevill, etc.), of Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire and a Citizen of the City of London, was a prominent wool-merchant and is the ancestor of the present Greville Earls of Warwick. The Latin inscription on his ledger stone in Chipping Campden Church, which he rebuilt at his own expense, describes him as flos mercatorum lanar(iorum) tocius (totius) Angli(a)e, "the flower of the wool-merchants of all England". This language is reminiscent of that used to describe certain prominent knights such as Edward, the Black Prince (d.1376) who was described by Froissart (d. circa 1405) as la fleur de toutte chevalerie dou monde ("the flower of all chivalry of the world") and was likely intended to suggest a degree of equivalence between mercantile and martial activities". He was amongst the richest and most influential wool merchants of his era and was the leading purchaser of wool from the Cotswold Hills.