Atkyns was descended from an old Gloucestershire family that for upwards of a century leased from the dean and chapter of Gloucester the manor of Tuffley, two miles south-south-east from the cathedral city.
Thence, at the age of fourteen, he proceeded to Balliol College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner, where he remained two years, probably without taking a degree, as he afterwards informs us "that he was not so well grounded as he ought to have been to read a Greek or Latin author with pleasure."
Several members of his family on his father's side having already distinguished themselves in the study of the law, it was resolved to send him to Lincoln's Inn, where several of them "had anciently been and some of them there; but receiving some disgust at his entrance" he was recalled thence and sent to travel abroad with the only son of Lord Arundel of Wardour, who was about his own age.
[1] After the Restoration, he was made Deputy Lieutenant for Gloucestershire, and was also reappointed to an agency for the crown connected in some way with printing, a post which he appears to have held originally as early as 1631, as he had already involved himself "in several great and chargeable suites against the Company of Stationers at the cost of more than £1,000."
As to "the Record and MS. in Lambeth House", one fatal objection to the story of Caxton and Corsellis contained in it is, that the former has not made the slightest allusion to it even in his Polychronicon, which is brought down to the end of the reign of Henry VI.
Again, Dr. Ducarel, the librarian at Lambeth, one of the greatest antiquarians of his time, and who made complete indexes to the registers and manuscripts under his care, after fruitless research for the record alluded to by Atkyns, declared its existence to be a myth, and the whole story of Corsellis "a mere fable."
Whether Atkyns was the inventor of it, or a dupe of others, cannot now be determined; but one thing is clear, that he was an interested person, and had it not been from a private motive he would not have advanced such a story, which has in almost every sentence a ring of falsehood and improbability.