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By Root 1897 0

to England. This worker, whose name was Frederick Corsellis, had then given rise to a community of printers as Crown servants, producing books to royal command. In short, printing was originally an appendage of royal power. But as the numbers of printers had grown, Atkyns related, they had sought to cast off the Crown. At this point "the Body forgot the Head," and, becoming "free," the trade had begun to print whatever generated a profit. The result had been an era of"virtiginous" political upheavals only now coming to a close. And at the same time the trade had coalesced to form its own institution, the Stationers' Company with the duty of policing print. This, in the new political language of his time, Atkyns denounced as a fundamental conflict of "interests." 25 "Executive Power" had been given to the very people who could offend, "and whose Interest it is to do so." Stationers, in short, became at once plaintiffs, defendants, constables, and judges. A corporation like this, Atkyns concluded, had taken upon itself the role of a "PetitState." As such, it was fundamentally incompatible with a national monarchy. And that was ultimately why the "paper-pellets" that the trade had issued had grown ever more numerous and poisoned-and profitablewhile the policing of them had become ever less stringent, until they became "as dangerous as Bullets." By the eve of the civil war, the grandees of the trade had become impresarios of sedition.

Atkyns consequently saw licensing as a relatively futile exercise, because it did not attend to the real problem. He urged Charles II to take a different course. The true history of the book demonstrated the need for a renewed alliance between royalty, gentility, and craft. The king must create a class of patentees with oversight of major cultural fields. They would then ally themselves with the printers against the booksellers.26 It would be in these men's interest to suppress books that might rival theirs. The case was analogous, he said, to the contemporary practice of assigning royal land to patentees. Such men did not own the land they oversaw. They therefore continued to act to prevent locals poaching royal deer. "Just so is it by inclosingPriitting"Atkyns explained: patentees in this field too would prevent poaching, in this case of knowledge, precisely because they were not owners. Interest would harmonize with honor to underwrite sound conduct.27 This pioneered an analogy between literary and literal fields that would reverberate for centuries -usually to very different effect. And all that stood in the way of this system, as Atkyns saw it, was the register. So it was the register that attracted his bitterest assaults. He complained to the Privy Council that in its entries "a private propertie is pretended to be gained," and pointed out that that pretence expressly defied royal power. If permitted to remain in being, he insinuated, the register would allow the booksellers to alter the laws themselves, "and cast them into a new Modell of their own Invention." Before long, "the good old Lawes by which Men hold their Lives and Estates, should utterly be lost and forgotten, and new Laws fram'd to fit the Humours of a new Invented Goverunent."

It is notable thatAtkyns's argument was in principle averygeneral one. Its ambit was by no means restricted to the book trade. He himself claimed that if it failed then patents for inventions as well as patents for books would fall to the ground. Less speculatively, his complaints applied equally to many otherkinds of commercial life, since crafts were generally organized into corporations similar to the Stationers' Company. And indeed, one can readily find parallel contentions being made in different crafts at this time-a moment when old guilds were declining and the future constitutions of trades were in the balance. Atkyns himself drew a parallel with a brewers' company. Such a company, he pointed out, might well insist on its own internal regime, and this too would be illegitimate in principle. But in practice it would be far less damaging than