Thomas Bayly Howell FRS was an English lawyer and writer who edited and lent his name to Howell's State Trials.
Occupation
barrister, plantation owner, lawyer
Born
September 6, 1767
Died
April 13, 1815
Overview
Thomas Bayly Howell FRS (6 September 1767 – 13 April 1815) was an English lawyer and writer who edited and lent his name to Howell's State Trials.
Life
Thomas Bayly Howell was born in Jamaica. His family returned to England in 1770 to settle at Prinknash Park near Gloucester. Howell studied at Christ Church, Oxford but did not graduate, instead moving on to Lincoln's Inn and being called to the bar in 1790.
In 1808, William Cobbett asked Howell to edit a new edition of the State Trials, a work aspiring to aggregate all the important cases on public law in England. Former compilations of the subject were published by Thomas Salmon, Sollom Emlyn and Francis Hargrave over the previous century. Howell worked on the project from 1809 to 1814, his son, Thomas Jones Howell taking over from him. A modern edition of the State Trials was edited by Donald Thomas and published in two volumes in 1972.
Honours
Fellow of the Royal Society, (1804)
Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries
