King's justice: raising a grievance in medieval England

What Lettice feared most, however, was John’s ability to manipulate people in high places and get immunity from prosecution by royal pardon. Immediately after her ordeal in the moat, Lettice wrote to the lords of parliament, then sitting at Gloucester, asking their assurance that John be brought to account for his crimes.

Lettice’s colourful story survives today among the 17,000 ‘Ancient Petitions’ in the National Archives, a series of documents that provides an immensely rich resource for the social history of later medieval England.

Many of the documents in the Ancient Petitions were written because their narrators could not have justice by the normal routes in the king’s courts and had to appeal to a higher source of authority. This involved approaching the king and his council, usually at the time that parliament was sitting.

The origins of petitioning lie in the efforts made by Edward I at the end of the 13th century to turn parliament into a forum for the resolution of such grievances. By the later 14th century it was common for petitioners to address their complaints to the lords and/or the commons in parliament in the hope that private quarrels might be taken up as matters of public concern.

Because the issues at stake were often ones for which the common law made no provision, petitioners appealed to principles of natural justice. This meant that they were not constrained by normal legal formulae and often supplied a great deal of incidental detail that is lost from the official record of the courts.

One of the remarkable things about petitions is their social range: almost all classes and conditions of men – and, as Lettice demonstrates, women – are represented here. Yet, inevitably, the costs and logistics associated with submitting a petition gave the advantage to more prosperous people. Petitioners who presented themselves as ‘poor’ were often observing a rhetorical convention rather than telling the truth about their economic capacity.

But there are also many indications that petitions could be used by little people as recourse against the great. In an early case of enclosure (c1414), the peasant tenants of Darlton and Ragnall in Nottinghamshire complained that Sir Richard Stanhope was taking over common pastures in their villages and depriving them of the wherewithal to pay their dues to the king.

In other cases, claims of destitution seem quite real. In an interesting play on the antagonisms that were to provoke Edward I to expel the Jews from England in 1290, Walter of Reading complained that he had been unjustly accused of a murder carried out by a member of the Oxford Jewish community called Isaac. Walter, who was out of the country fulfilling his Christian duties by making pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, expressed his frustration at the fact that he had been outlawed for the alleged offence and that his wife and children had been thus reduced to beggary.

Almost all classes and conditions of men and women are represented here

In 1322, Constance Halliday of Pontefract similarly reported that, as a result of the recent disgrace and execution of the Earl of Lancaster, she was unable to collect the considerable debts owed by the earl’s men to her late husband, and that she and her 15 children had been left to starve. Such stories provide vivid reminders of the local and personal reverberations of great social forces and political events during the Middle Ages.

Petitions also provide striking testimony to the material conditions of everyday life. Fierce weather was the cause of many a mishap. The people of Cockermouth in Cumberland reported that all three bridges in the town had been destroyed by a great flood suffered at Christmas 1304. A few years earlier, the Franciscan friars of Bury St Edmunds had expressed their concern that, as a result of the proposed removal of the town’s courthouse, people would take refuge from bad weather in the friary church, where the resulting commotion of humans and horses would endanger divine service. Fire was also a major hazard: in 1348 the people of Tamworth (Staffordshire) made a special plea for reduction of taxes as a result of a very serious conflagration that had destroyed much of the town.

That the economic infrastructure depended so much on the forces of nature is emphasised by a petition from the inhabitants of Lincolnshire complaining that, as a result of the recent destruction of two important water mills, the people of the county town were now dependent on windmills to grind corn. If there was no wind, they said, there was no bread.

It is the hair-raising tales of criminality conjured up by beleaguered petitioners that inevitably prompt much interest in the Ancient Petitions. Late medieval society was convinced that the law was driven by money, and that the servants and retainers of great men were able to use their lords’ patronage as cover for frequent petty tyrannies committed against lesser folk. In 1481 one petitioner claimed that all the many allegations of robbery and extortion against John Abrey of South Weston in Oxfordshire would come to nothing so long as Abrey wore the green and white livery of Edward IV’s son, the Prince of Wales.

At times of major political discord it is clear that the retainers of rebellious lords could seriously undermine the rule of law. In 1322 Maline of Doncaster complained that Lord Mowbray, who had supported the Earl of Lancaster’s recent rebellion against Edward II, had gathered his men from North Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire and sent them in warlike fashion to seize the person and goods of Maline’s brother, the vicar of Rossington. They then held the luckless priest to ransom at Hucknall outside Nottingham for the very considerable sum of £200.

It may be more than coincidence that the case of the vicar of Rossington occurred in an area that is now particularly associated with the Robin Hood legends and at a time of great civil strife when the principles of natural justice contained in those legends were a matter of acute public debate. A century later, when the outlaw tales had entered popular consciousness across much of England, they even entered into the rhetoric of petitioning. In 1439 the tenants of Scropton in Derbyshire petitioned the crown about the activities of Peter Venables, a gentleman of Aston, who, with a band of criminals, had gone “into the woods like Robin Hood and his men”. We can imagine these words as actually spoken by the outraged men of Scropton in their conversations with the lawyer hired to compile the petition, and being used to good effect by him in the document compiled for consideration by the House of Commons.

Petitions therefore do more than provide a worm’s-eye view of medieval life; they burst the bounds of legal convention and speak to us in a language of natural justice that is still recognisable – and relevant – today.

Mark Ormrod was a professor of history at the University of York, and an editor of Fourteenth-Century England (Boydell)