Definition
Rastell refers to a family of early English legal printers and writers whose printed works hold particular significance in the history of English law. The name most commonly denotes one of two figures:
1. John Rastell (c. 1475–1536): English lawyer, printer, and playwright who produced some of the earliest printed English legal texts, including an early printed edition of the statutes and a legal dictionary known as the Exposiciones Terminorum, later called Les Termes de la Ley. This work is among the first law dictionaries in the English language and remained in use — in various revised editions — for well over a century.
2. William Rastell (1508–1565): Son of John Rastell, also a lawyer and printer, who continued his father's legal publishing work. William Rastell produced important collections of English statutes and reports and is closely associated with the development of reliable printed legal texts in the Tudor period.
In legal research and bibliography, "Rastell" without qualification most often refers to Les Termes de la Ley or to the editions of statutes associated with the Rastell printing house. When a source cites "Rastell" as authority for a legal definition, it is invoking this early lexicographic tradition.
Common Confusion
Rastell is sometimes confused with Fitzherbert or Brooke as an early legal authority, since all three names appear as shorthand citations in early modern English legal writing. The distinction is significant: Fitzherbert and Brooke are abridgment writers working with case material; Rastell is primarily a lexicographer and printer. A citation to "Rastell" is an appeal to definitional usage, not to judicial precedent or abridged case law.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering citations to "Rastell" in early modern English legal texts, treatises, or later dictionaries need to understand what they are actually being pointed toward. A bare citation to "Rastell" in a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century treatise almost certainly refers to Les Termes de la Ley rather than to a law report or statute collection, though the Rastell printing house produced both. The distinction matters because Les Termes de la Ley is a definitional authority — it tells you how a term was understood — not a primary legal authority in the sense of a case or enacted text.
Les Termes de la Ley went through numerous editions over roughly 150 years, with later editors adding, revising, and sometimes silently altering definitions. A researcher who encounters a definition attributed to "Rastell" should identify which edition is being cited; definitions in the 1527 first edition may differ from those in the 1671 or later editions that bear the same title under the Rastell name. Later legal dictionaries — including Jacob's Law Dictionary and Tomlin's — drew directly on Rastell, sometimes without attribution, meaning that Rastell's definitions propagated forward through the entire English lexicographic tradition.
For Law Mind corpus users, Rastell functions as a keystone source for pre-modern English legal vocabulary. When historical dictionary entries in this corpus offer definitions of early common law terms — tenure, villeinage, frankpledge, attaint, and similar concepts — the underlying source may trace directly to Rastell. Tracing a definition's lineage through later dictionaries back to Rastell helps researchers assess whether they are encountering a stable historical meaning or an accumulated gloss.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry at this location in the corpus does not provide a direct entry for Rastell by name — the surrounding entries (RAN, RANGE, RANGER) suggest the relevant entry may be absent, misalphabetized, or that the source material captured an adjacent page. This is itself informative: Rapalje & Lawrence (1883), as an American legal dictionary focused on practical common law and statutory terms, had limited reason to treat English legal bibliographers as headword entries. The Rastell name appears more naturally in English legal dictionaries and bibliographic works than in American practice-oriented references.
Earlier English dictionaries handled Rastell's legacy differently. Blount's Nomo-Lexicon (1670) and Jacob's Law Dictionary (various editions from 1729) both perpetuated Rastell's definitions, often without explicit acknowledgment. Tomlins and subsequent compilers continued this pattern. The result is that the entire English legal dictionary tradition from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries carries Rastell's vocabulary forward, making him an invisible foundation beneath many entries a researcher might encounter.
What historical dictionaries largely miss is the bibliographic complexity: they treat "Rastell" as a unified authority when in fact the text evolved across editors and editions. Modern legal historians — in particular those working on early English legal printing and the development of legal literacy — have substantially revised the picture of what the Rastell texts actually contained and how they changed over time.
Jurisdictional Note
Rastell's works are English in origin and pertain to English common law. Their relevance to American legal research is primarily historical and terminological — useful for tracing the original meaning of common law terms inherited by American jurisdictions, not as direct authority in American courts.