John Rastell hailed from Coventry, where his father Thomas was a civic official who almost certainly knew Littleton, and he probably became a law student in the 1490s. At any rate, by 1502 – just after the records of the Middle Temple begin – he was an utter barrister of that inn, first mentioned in the same sentence as an equally celebrated Warwickshire barrister and legal author, Christopher St German. There are signs that he practised for a time at the bar, and in 1535 he reminisced in a letter to Cromwell that he had once gained twenty nobles a term ‘pledyng in Westminster Hall’. But he was to make his mark in other spheres.

In about 1506 he entered the service of the Warwickshire courtier Sir Edward Belknap, who may have helped to finance his setting up in business as a printer a few years later. Although his first publication was not legal, law printing was a sphere in which St German and other members of the Middle Temple were already engaged, and it is not too fanciful to suppose that Rastell fell under their influence. In 1513/14 he brought out the first printed edition of the fourteenth-century Liber Assisarum, using a distinctive gothic type imported from France which lacked the letters k and w. The preface which he signed – ‘Prologus Johannis Rastell in laudem legum An. 5 H. 8’ – revealed his commitment to legal education and writing.