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. 12. Jun. 1556.

      First Tottell edition, which differs in some readings of the text from those of Pynson [first 1508?] and Berthelet [first 1531], and ‘is enlarged by the addition of “certain Statutes, with other needful things taken out of old Copies examined by the Rolls,” printed at the end of the first part’ (Sweet & Maxwell); a second edition (dated 1556 but later), is distinguished by the misprint ‘Jnn’ for ‘Jun’ in the imprint.Tottell’s Preface ‘To Gentelmen studious of the lawes of Englande’ explains the virtues of this edition: ‘albeit it might seme superfluous & nedelesse to have emprinted it now againe so sodeinly, being so lately done in so faire paper & letter by an other [Thomas Marsh]: yet whe[n] ye shal wey how in sondry places much here is added out of bokes of good credit, as examined by y[e] roules of p[ar]liam[en]t, how eche where the truth eve[n] of the best printes is overmatched by their faultes not fewe not a litle reformed, the light of pointing adjoined, ye chapiters of statutes truly divided, & noted with their due nombers, the alphabeticall table justly ordred & quoted, the leaves not one falsly marked … I hope your wisedo[m]s wil sone espie that nether I have newe pri[n]ted it for your causeless, nor ye shal bye it of me frutelesse.’ In April 1553 Tottell had won the right to print for seven years ‘almaner bokes of oure temporall lawe called the Common lawe’, a patent he renewed in May 1556. Here he boasts of ‘How unperfit the bokes of the lawes of England were before, what price the scarcenes had raised, the most part mervellously mangled, & no smal part no wher to be gotte…’; his publications, in contrast, have reduced prices and use ‘print much pleasa[n]ter to the eye … paper & margins as good & as fayre as the best, but much better and fayrer then the most’. Beale S 16 and S 24 (‘Secunda pars’); STC 9277.5; Sweet and Maxwell, I, 350. See also H. J. Byrom, ‘Richard Tottell – his life and work’, The Library, VIII, 199-232 (1927). [Colophon:] Londini in ædibus Richardi Tottelli, Anno do. 1556.