Born in Coventry, he is vaguely reported by Anthony à Wood to have been "educated for a time in grammaticals and philosophicals" at Oxford.
he announced the forthcoming publication of Sir Anthony Fitzherbert's Abbreviamentum librorum legum Anglorum, dated 1516.
Rastell had married Elizabeth, sister of Sir Thomas More, with whose Catholic theology and political views he was initially in sympathy.
[1] Separated from his Catholic friends, Rastell does not seem to have been fully trusted by the opposite party, for in a letter to Thomas Cromwell, written probably in 1536, he says that he had spent his time in upholding the king's cause and opposing the pope, with the result that he had lost both his printing business and his legal practice, and was reduced to poverty.
[3] Rastell's best-known work is The Pastyme of People, the Chronycles of dyvers Realmys and most specially of the Realme of England (1529), a chronicle dealing with English history from the earliest times to the reign of Richard III, edited by Thomas Frognall Dibdin in 1811.
This interlude was printed in William Carew Hazlitt's edition of Dodsley's Old English Plays, by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps for the Percy Soc.
[6] See also an article[7] by Henry R. Plomer, who unearthed in the Record Office an account of a lawsuit (1534–35) in connection with Rastell's premises at the "Mermaid".
For the books issued from his press see a catalogue by Robert Proctor, in Handlists of English Printers (Bibliographical Soc., 1896).