First printed Magna Carta in English, 1534 from the British Library
A total of eighteen different editions of the Magna Carta were printed in the sixteenth century. The first complete Latin text was printed in 1508 by Richard Pynson and the first English translation in 1534 by Robert Redman. As part of its Magna Carta exhibition in 2015, the British Library displayed these two early editions in a blog post, The First Edition and Translation of Magna Carta. This post also highlighted the significant impact printing technology had on the dissemination, use and popular awareness of the Magna Carta. Due to the sudden availability of printed editions, the range of legal invocations of Magna Carta rapidly multiplied in the sixteenth century. Thomas More, following his imprisonment in 1534 told the court that Henry VIII’s reforms were ‘co[n]trary both to the ancient Lawes, & Statutes of our owne Realme not the[n] repealled, as they might well see in Magna Carta’.
Richard Tottel printed all but one of the Magna Carta editions produced in the second half of the sixteenth century. The first appeared in 1556 only a few months after another printer on Fleet Street, Thomas Marshe printed an edition. Marshe’s edition was the first impression of the text since 1542 and its preface suggests that there was great demand for copies among law students, which may have been why Tottel also chose to produce one.
Magna Charta, cum statutis quæ antiqua vocantur, iam recens excusa, & summa fide emendata, iuxta vetusta exemplaria ad Parliamenti rotulos examinata: quibus accesserunt nonnulla nunc primum typis edita: apud Richardum Totelum.
1556 English Short Title Catalogue record
1576 English Short Title Catalogue record
1587 English Short Title Catalogue record
It is possible to view complete digitised copies of the 1576 edition and 1587 edition of Tottel’s Magna Carta.
The Riesenfeld Center at the University of Minnesota holds fourteen of the eighteen editions of the Magna Carta that were printed before 1600 including all three printed by Tottel and Thomas Marshe’s edition from 1556. They are exhibited here.
The preface Tottel wrote to his 1556 Magna Carta edition gives quite a revealing insight into his character and discerning business practices. H.J. Byrom quoted it in its entirety in his 1927 talk Richard Tottell – His Life and Work. Although Tottel was still only beginning his career in 1556, he used the preface to confidently praise the quality and reasonable prices of his own work, plainly insinuating that before he started printing the standard of legal books was very inferior:
“…sithence I took in hand to serve your uses, that imperfections have been supplied, the price so eased as the scarceness no more hindereth but that ye have them as cheap (notwithstanding the common dearth of the times) as when they were most plentiful, the print much pleasanter to the eye in the books of years than any that ye have been yet served with, paper and margin as good and as fair as the best, but much better and fairer than the most, no small number by me set forth newly in print were scant to be found in writing, I need not my self to report it.”
He also makes clear reference to Thomas Marshe’s impression of the Magna Carta, politely praising it –“…albeit it might seme superfluous and nedeless to have emprinted it now againe so sodeinly, being so lately done in so faire paper and letter by another…” before swiftly moving on to not-so-subtly draw attention to the superiority of his own edition with its “ chapiters of statutes truly divided and noted with their due nombers, the alphabeticall table justly ordred and quoted, the leaves not one falsly marked…”
The prefaces for the two subsequent editions are less flamboyant and focus more on detailing improvements and corrections from the previous edition. The preface to the 1587 edition pictured above makes reference to William Rastell’s Collection of all the statutes, explaining that Tottel has created a numbering system to cross reference between the two works.
Richard Tottel 