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An important leaf from William Caxton's Polychronicon, this being from Liber Quintus, f. ccxlix. The leaf is notable for featuring what it surely one of the earliest printed mentions of Muhammad in English and precedes the first printing of the Qur'an by fifty years as well as its first printing in English by 165 years.

The text begins with an account of the Prophet Muhammad's (Mahomet) life as a travelling merchant, "ofte in the company of lewes and of crysten men" from whom he learned their "manners, vsages and custommes." Higden then asserts that Muhammad combined the various tenets of Christian and Jewish faiths with "wytchecraft and nygromancy," as well as astrology to create his own religious "errour." He then claims this as the reason for which the Saracens, similarly to the Jews, are circumcised and denied "swynyssh flesh" and, per Christian baptism, wash their "lymmes in water."

We read of how Muhammad used "spyces" gained through witchcradt and "fayre wordes" in order to seduce Cadygan, the widow queen of Corozonia. By marrying her, he became ruler of that province. The eastward expansion of his empire is described and how he "toke to the maner of spekynge of trewe prophetes, appreciating the rhetoric and "fals lawe" were more useful that the "dedes of Armes." Muslim laws are then explained such as the prohibition of pork as "swyne come of camels dirt after [Noah's] flood and therefore clene men shold eschewe it"; he "ordeyned that a man shold haue as many wyues and concubynes as he myght sustene with his catel"; and that his followers "vse sobreness of mete and drynk", notably, the "drynkyn of wyn" is forbidden. Punishments are also outlined for adultery (death by stoning), fornication (80 lashes) and theft (beatings for the first and second offences, the hands cut off for the third).

Muhammad worshipped "one myghty god creatour", recognised that Moses and John were prophets and that Christ was "gretter and grettest of all prophetes." Higden notes that this is stated " in his booke that hete Alkaron [Qur'an]" and that each year Muslims are required to go on a pilgrimmage to "goddes hows" in "matha [Mecca]" built by Abraham for "his childeren ismaelytes."

Born in Kent, William Caxton (1415x24 -1492) was England's first printer. He moved to London in the mid-1430s where he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a cloth merchant. After Large's death, he may have moved to Bruges in the mid-1440s, and had certainly settled there by 1460. In 1465 he was appointed governor of the English nation in Bruges and probably remained so until he emigrated to Cologne in 1471. He set about translating Levefre's Recuyell of the Histories of Troy and published it in 1473-74, which became the first book printed in English. He returned to England shortly thereafter and established a press at Westminster in 1476. His edition of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was the first book printed in England.