In early 1817 the “Ultra-royalist” Poet Laureate of England, Robert Southey, opened a newspaper and saw an advertisement for a radical play he had written in his “Ultra-jacobin” youth back in late 1794 (the phrases are William Hazlitt’s). “By whose roguery it has got to the press I do not know,” Southey told John Murray. Southey directed his lawyers to initiate a suit in the Court of Chancery requesting an injunction against the publishers on the grounds that “the author has a property in an unpublished work.” But because he had not established his property in the work, the injunction was denied. Furthermore, the Lord Chancellor indicated that his decision was informed by the precedent “that a person cannot recover in damages for a work which is, in its nature calculated to do injury to the public.” The absence of copyright then produced an artificially rapid tranching down in price, flooding the market with cheap editions of the play, while the high-profile affirmation of the precedent provided a certain degree of legal cover for publishers of radical piracies and paved the way for a mass market in radical print. How the play came to be published, however, has remained a mystery. New evidence reveals much of the roguery by which Wat Tyler got to the press and deepens our understanding of political culture, religious Dissent, and publishing practices during the Romantic era.