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W. Mark Ormrod, Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson (eds.),
Medieval Petitions: Grace and Grievance
254 pages.York Medieval Press
(in association with The Boydell Press) 2009.
£50/$95 (hardback) ISBN-13: 9781903153253


The seventeen thousand petitions that were transferred to the Tower of London in the early fourteenth century, when the Court of Chancery took over responsibility for keeping parliamentary records, have been described by one of their editors, Gwilym Dodd, as 'a haphazard and disorganised assortment of petitionary miscellanea, aptly known by its amorphous title Ancient Petitions because nothing more specific could accurately describe its varied contents' (chapter two, p.14). However, in 2003, a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council enabled a project which has now made the entire collection, hitherto inaccessible to most medievalists, available and fully searchable on the National Archives Website at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/ or http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline (SC8). This collection of essays, springing from the two conferences held by the directors in 2006, represents the culmination of the project, and contains a wealth of new research on this relatively unknown material.

Petitions, the editors claim, 'represent the authentic voice of the subjects of the medieval English state' (cited from http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/cms/research/petitions.html). They are requests made to the special grace of the sovereign by supplicants who felt that their claim would not be satisfactorily answered in the common courts. They provide insight into the ideological status of the king in the eyes of his subjects, and his role as the conduit of both justice and mercy. The petitions in the SC8 collection range from requests for temporary privileges (rights to levy tax for the repair of roads and bridges, for example, or exemption for religious houses from the duty of hospitality until they were out of debt) to individuals’ pleas for pardon, grants of land, remission of debt, and intervention in cases of personal grievance. Common petitions made by the House of Commons form the basis of much of the statutory legislation which survives in the British judicial system. Petitions represent fragments of common life, and demonstrate the ways in which people of all ranks, individually and socially, sought to avail themselves of the protection of the state. Their construction and phraseology reveal in detail the conventions and expectations of petitioning as a bureaucratic practice. And the responses they received say much about the character and policy of the sovereign to whom they were addressed. They are as interesting about life and writing in the provinces as in the hub of the court. The SC8 collection, vast and varied, is a mine of interrelations between groups in medieval society, from the king and counsellors, to clerks, lawyers, religious orders, guilds, town citizens, estate managers, individual pleaders, and criminals seeking grace.

It is not often that a book offers insight on such diverse and unstudied material, and Medieval Petitions: Grace and Grievance certainly steps up to the challenge of its scope. The early chapters discuss the origins of petitioning in the late Roman Empire, and the wider European context of petitioning the Pope, before subsequent essays home in on English petitions in the reigns of Edward I to Henry IV. This affords breadth, but at the expense sometimes of internal cohesion, and the book as a unit risks reading like a disparate assortment of somewhat unconnected articles. However this reflects the fact that the SC8 material itself is broad and disparate,, and it is a strength of the book that it attempts to provide detailed case studies within a thematic framework of a wider historical and geographical context. Guilhem Pépin's essay elucidates the differences in attitude and style between petitions from Edward I's Gascon and his English supplicants, and Anthony Musson questions the special intercessory ideology of queenship in the light of petitions addressed to the sovereign's consort, particularly during the regime of Mortimer and Isabella, when Edward III was still a minor and Edward II was in prison. David Crook's essay on the petition from the prisoners of Nottingham Gaol in 1330 concludes with fascinating speculation on he personal involvement of the detainee Sir Hugh de Eland, indicative of the insight that is made possible into the circumstances of individual petitioners from these sources. Simon J. Harris re-examines the reputation of the Despensers, in the light of the mass of petitions that ascribe to them personal responsibility for heinous injuries, and suggests that the word 'Despenser' had in fact become a rhetorical device intended to secure a favourable hearing from the new regime, rather than accurate reflection of their tyrannic rule. Gwilym Dodd's concluding essay, on an anomalous English petition from Thomas Paunfield on the subject of the manor of Chesterton, which abandons the conventional wording and structure of parliamentary petitions in an emotive, rhetorical, and lengthy appeal raises questions about the relationship of oral pleading in the vernacular to documentary French, at a time when the latter was the preserve of clerks and lawyers, and yet the former was chosen as the language capable of rhetorical expansiveness.

Medieval Petitions: Grace and Grievance is a useful introduction to a vast collection of material that sheds light on individuals, and on social expectations and pressures, in later-medieval England. The sources it introduces are widely various, scarcely known, and they promise much new and exciting insight into several aspects of medieval life, legal, social and biographical. It offers an excellent starting-point for scholars who are unfamiliar with petitionary material, an introduction to the contents of the readily searchable SC8 database, and to an ideologically complex form of writing that is at times both personal and formal, public and individual, monarchic and democratic.

Joanna Bellis, University of Cambridge


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