PETITION OF THE UNIVERSITY TO JAMES I, 1621
This committee, however, by reason of "several and distracted imployments" had no time to discuss the case and, acting on its recommendation, the King himself directed that the university printer might continue to sell his Grammars without the let or disturbance of any person whomsoever.
But a trade dispute of long standing was not settled, even in the seventeenth century, by a royal injunction. The leading London booksellers combined to keep the Cambridge edition of Lily's Grammar ("though sold at the cheapest price") out of the market and by intimidation compelled other booksellers to follow their lead; the university retaliated by a grace of the Senate which forbade Cambridge booksellers to deal with the hostile London group and ordered all members of the university "who should desire any author, of whatsoever language, or any composition of his own, to be printed, wheresoever he should live in England," to offer his work to the university printer in the first instance and further, if he should become a schoolmaster, "to use the books printed in the university which may be for the profit of his boys, and not suffer others than those printed in the university in his school, whilst the same books should be printed and sold here at a moderate and fair price by the royal authority." That the university authorities became impatient of the continual disputes both between Cambridge printers themselves and between the Cambridge printers and the London stationers is shown by the appointment in 1622 of a syndicate to examine "what charters orders and decrees have heretofore been granted and made concerning the government of the University presses and the printers and the stationers and how they have been observed and when broken and by whom."[32]
