The title page of a Year Book of Henry VII printed by Tottel in 1585
The Year Books are the earliest law reports of England. They form a continuous series from 1268 to 1535, covering the reigns of King Edward I to Henry VIII. Substantial numbers of manuscripts circulated during the later medieval period containing reports of pleas heard before the Common Bench. Printed editions of the Year Books were first issued by William de Machlinia between 1481 and 1482. The first printed Year Book of Henry VI is thought to be the earliest law book printed in England along with Littleton’s Tenures. Year Books dominated legal printing in England for the first half century after the arrival of printing technology and by 1560 all years had been printed.
Due to his privilege, Richard Tottel’s printing house produced the majority of sixteenth century printed Year Books. The largest number were published between the years 1556 and 1572. There are about 225 known editions of separate years or groups of years that are attributed to him. Records for the majority of them can be found in the English Short Title Catalogue by searching under Tottel’s name. Tottel is credited with improving the general standard of printed Year Books by including more precise citations and providing standard foliation to make locating cases and cross-referencing easier for readers. Examples of how he did this are exhibited in the Tarlton Law Library’s exhibition Imprinted at the Signe of the Hand and Starre: Richard Tottell and Sixteenth Century Legal Citation.
Printing the Year Books was very profitable for Tottel but by the end of his life the demand for them had declined. This was due amongst other reasons to the popularity of Plowden’s Commentaries, and the abridgements of Brooke and Fitzherbert which made the material contained in the Year Books more accessible.
Title page of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer
featuring the same woodblock title-page compartment as some of Tottel’s Year Books
For many impressions of the Year Books he printed such as that of Henry VII pictured above and the Tarlton Law Library’s Edward III, Tottel used a title-page woodblock compartment he had inherited from his father-in-law, Richard Grafton who had used it for the famous early edition of the Book of Common Prayer. It is plate 110. in
The Boston University school of law has created an online database which indexes all year book reports printed in the chronological series for all years between 1268 and 1535, and many of the year book reports printed only in alphabetical abridgements.
Richard Tottel 