A Collection of Entrees - 1596

A collection of entrees [entries]: of declarations, barres, replications, reioinders, issues, verdits, iudgements, executions, proces, continuances, essoines and diuers other matters : newly amended and much enlarged with many good presidents of latter time ... : and first an epistle, with certaine instructions necessary to be read for the redy finding of the matters in this booke

William Rastell, Rastal

London : In aedibus Iane Yetsweirt, 1596.

Bound in fine modern leather with red leather spine label. Collated.  [iv], 704 [i.e. 1408] pages. Text in parallel columns. Folio, 32 cm.  Engraved title. Floriated initials.  Text of pleadings in Latin, "notes and referments" in Law French.  Title creased. Generally good internally. Pleadings. 

William Rastell (1508-1565) was a Tudor-era English judge and printer.   A staunch Catholic, he became a justice of the Queen's bench during the reign of Queen Mary.   His father James Rastell had written the influential Exposiciones Terminorum Legum Anglorum (Termes de la Ley).  William published a number of law books that advanced the development of English common law. 

The 1st edition was published in 1566.  In the American context, later editions of Rastell's work were part of early Virginia legal libraries and was used to bring the colonies law more in line with England's.  Refs: George Thorpe and John Pory to Edwin Sandys, 15 and 16 May 1621, in Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London (4 vols.; Washington, D.C., 1906-35), 3:447; William S. Powell, "Books in the Virginia Colony before 1624," William and Mary Quarterly (cited hereafter as WMQ), 3d ser., 5 (1948): 177-84.

See: Holdsworth, William, A History of English Law, Vols. 4 and 5. Methuen, 1952. ESTC S121759.

This is an oversized or heavy book, that requires additional postage for international delivery outside the US.