Setting the Type for English Law

In England, the printing of the law began in the 1480s with a relatively unknown printer, W. de Machlinia. It eventually became the domain of celebrated printers like Richard Pynson and John Rastell, the brother­ in­law of Thomas More. ¹²³ Their first law books were printed in Latin and French, as the vernacular was not yet the official language of English law. In 1485 the first published copy of Parliament's laws appeared in English, and in the subsequent half­century of the early Tudor reign (1485­1535), the laws of the British empire underwent "Englishing and printing." ¹²⁴ By 1534, Robert Redman published The Great Boke of Statutes and The Boke of Magna Carta, which put pre­Tudor statutes dating as far back as 1225 into typographic form. ¹²⁵

After the age of the Year Books, English decisional law was harnessed in the print era by reporters such as James Dyer (1537­1582), ¹²⁶ Edmund Plowden (1550­1580), ¹²⁷ Edward Coke (1572­1616) ¹²⁸ and James Burrow (1756­1772). ¹²⁹ Similarly, typography more effectively systematized English decisional and statutory law in the great treatises of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, such as St. Germain's Dialogues between a Doctor of Divinity and a Student of the Common Law (1523 and 1530), ¹³⁰ Coke's four Institutes (1628­1642), ¹³¹ and Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765). ¹³² Interestingly, even Bracton's thirteenth century chirographic form of the Note Book did not enjoy the authoritative status that it later attained once printed in 1569. ¹³³

Setting the body of English law in type placed more legislation, detailed codes, statutes, case reporters, and treatises in the hands of more lawyers and judges, encouraged more litigation, and carried more legal octavo volumes to more parts of the kingdom. In other words, print increased reliance on the fixed rules of the published law, attacking the fluid memory of the oral way and the comparatively flexible rules of custom. ¹³⁴

This nascent reformation of law paralleled the Reformation in religion. The invention of the Gutenberg printing press contributed to the demise of Catholicism in Martin Luther's time: "Printing brought renewed emphasis on the book and the rise of the Reformation." ¹³⁵ As depicted by historian A.G. Dickens, "Lutheranism was from the first the child of the printed book, and through this vehicle Luther was able to make exact, standardized and ineradicable impressions upon the mind of Europe." ¹³⁶ Likewise, sixteenth century English law was the child of the printed book.