As Richard Tottel himself suggested in the preface he wrote to his 1556 edition of the Magna Carta, the standard of legal printing was inconsistent and mostly unsatisfactory when he was first awarded his privilege to print common law books in 1553.
The contribution Tottel made to improving the quality, accuracy and general ease-of-use of printed law books cannot be underestimated. His work on the Year Books, inserting regular divisions into terms, grouping reports into reigns, and applying consistent foliation made proper citation possible for the first time. The methods he used to structure books like the abridgements of Brooke and Fitzherbert made them more accessible and useful to a greater number and broader range of readers. He was also responsible for introducing an entirely new style of law reporting with Plowden’s Commentaries.
Tottel was clearly a very shrewd businessman motivated by profit and his commercial priorities are always conspicuous in the prefaces he wrote. However, his privilege was effectively a monopoly for life which suggests there were incentives other than financial behind the improvements he made to legal printing. Underpinning what he printed and how he printed it were humanist values relating to the importance of wider dissemination of the law.
Tottel’s output and also his association with humanist lawyers like William Rastell (1508-1564) suggest that he believed in the educative value of printing law and that the publication of legal texts could have a greater good beyond merely providing information for law practitioners and students. Rastell and his father, John Rastell (c. 1475-1536) worked as legal printers as well as legal writers. They understood legal printing to be a disclosure of the law, a means of revealing law which had previously been hidden from much of the population. Printed law led to wider knowledge of the law which had many benefits for the whole of society. Regardless of his success as a businessman, Tottel’s contribution to making the law more accessible in the 16th century was an important one.
Richard Tottel 