Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Rastell, John (d.1536)
RASTELL, JOHN (d. 1536), printer and lawyer, is stated by Bale to have been born in London, and by Wood to have been educated at Oxford. He was trained as a lawyer, entered Lincoln's Inn, had for a time an excellent practice, and appeared frequently as counsel against the companies of London. He also interested himself in politics, and represented Dunheved, Cornwall, in the parliament which, sitting from 1529 to 1536, legalised the protestant reformation. As a printer he seems to have begun some time before 1516, as in the preface to his edition of the ‘Liber Assisarum’ he announces his intention of issuing Fitzherbert's ‘Great Abridgement,’ a large folio in three volumes, printed probably in partnership with Wynkyn de Worde in that year; in both cases Rastell acted as editor as well as printer. In 1520 he moved his printing office to the ‘Mermaid,’ a house situated ‘at Pollis gate next to Chepesyde,’ and belonging to the masters of the ‘Bridgehous.’ A lawsuit about this house, heard in 1534–5, throws a good deal of light on Rastell's later life. He appears not to have attended closely to his business, but to have passed much of his time at his house in the country, leaving his workmen to attend to the printing. The majority of the books he issued were legal; but besides these are some of great interest, such as ‘The Mery Gestys of the Widow Edith,’ 1525; ‘The Hundred Mery Talys,’ 1526; ‘Necromantia,’ n.d.; and others.
In 1530 Rastell began to take part in the religious controversies of the time, defending the Roman doctrine of purgatory in his work ‘A New Boke of Purgatory’ (Brit. Mus.). This was answered by John Frith so convincingly as to induce Rastell to become a protestant. Rastell's best-known work was ‘The Pastyme of the People, or the Chronicles of Divers Realms and most especially of the Realm of England, briefly compiled and imprinted in Cheapside by John Rastell,’ 1530, 4to. Copies are in the British Museum and John Rylands Library, Manchester, and in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow; a fourth copy, pieced and made up, is also in the British Museum (Grenville) Library. It was reprinted by Dibdin in 1811 (cf. Notes and Queries, 8th ser. i. 308–9). The numerous woodcuts that adorn it seem to have been by Rastell himself (Redgrave, Dict. of Artists).
The last few years of Rastell's life were the reverse of happy. In his letters to Cromwell, written in 1536, he speaks of himself as an old man who had lost almost all his business as well as all his friends, and as oppressed by poverty, ‘for wher before I gate by the law in pleading in Westminster Hall forty marks a year, that was twenty nobles a term at least, and printed every year two or three hundred ream of paper, which was more yearly profit to me than the gains that I got by the law, I assure you I get not now forty shillings a year by the law, nor I printed not a hundred ream of paper this two year’ (Ellis, Orig. Letters, 3rd ser. ii. 309). In 1536 he attacked the practice of paying tithes, and perhaps for his opinions expressed on this occasion, as well as on account of the suspicion attaching to him as the friend and brother-in-law of Sir Thomas More, he was thrown into prison. In spite of his petitions to Cromwell, he was not released, and he probably died in prison in the same year (Letters and Papers Hen. VIII, x. No. 248, xi. No. 1487). His will proves that he had become poor, for he leaves to his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John More [q. v.] and sister of Sir Thomas More, only the house he had settled upon her on her marriage. His son William [q. v.] is separately noticed.
Besides the works mentioned above, Rastell compiled ‘Exposiciones Terminorum Legum Anglorum,’ 1527 (Brit. Mus.), which has also been attributed to his son, who published an English translation in 1567, of which further editions appeared in 1579, 1602, 1641, and 1667. Rastell also wrote a moral play, entitled ‘A new Interlude and a Mery of the Nature of the IIII Elements’ [1519], 8vo. The only copy known to be extant is in the British Museum, and that is imperfect; it was edited for the Percy Society in 1848 by Halliwell-Phillipps, who describes it as ‘the only dramatic piece extant in which science is attempted to be made popular through the medium of theatrical representation.’ Dibdin gave the date as 1510, but that is probably too early, and 1519, the date given in manuscript in the British Museum copy, is more likely to be correct. Halliwell-Phillipps considered Rastell's authorship as doubtful, but the ‘Interlude,’ in which ‘Nature Naturate’ appears as the second of the dramatis personæ, is obviously identical with the ‘Natura Naturata’ which Wood attributes to Rastell, and calls ‘a large and ingenious comedy.’ Wood and Pits also mention several other works by Rastell which are not known to be extant.
[Preface to Dibdin's reprint of the Pastyme, 1811; Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, passim; Pits, De Script. Angl.; Wood's Athenæ Oxon. i. 101–2; Foxe's Actes and Mon. v. 9, 11; Strype's Works, index; Tanner's Bibl. Brit.-Hib.; Engl. Cyclop.; Ellis's Orig. Letters, 3rd ser. ii. 308–12; Ames's Typogr. Antiq. ed. Herbert, i. 326 sqq.; Bibliographica, pt. viii.; More's Life of Sir Thomas More, 1746, p. 110; Hutton's Life of More, pp. 5, 106.]