A collection of essays on the theme of ‘Expectations of the Law in the Middle Ages’ is an appropriate occasion to reconsider the place of the private petition in the late medieval English parliament the highest court in the land. The story of how private petitions first emerged and subsequently flourished, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, is well rehearsed in modern scholarship and might usefully be summarised before proceeding further. Regular petitioning first appeared at some point in the 1270s when Edward I invited his subjects to submit their complaints to parliament where he promised to provide a remedy. This new procedure had initially been conceived as a way of keeping a check on the king's local officials and agents; but such was its popularity that petitioners soon flocked to parliament bringing with them a whole range of different grievances and requests for favour. By the 1290s, the volume of business was such that the crown appointed special clerks to administer or ‘receive’ the petitions (i.e. the receivers), and special panels made up of judges and magnates (i.e. the auditors) to hear and determine them. This took some pressure off the king and council who had other matters to attend to at parliament besides simply the hearing of petitions. Henceforth, only those cases that specially required the king's grace were dealt with by the king himself. It was a measure of the importance attached to petitioning that royal clerks were assigned to enrol the petitions once they had been dealt with by the auditors or the king and council. These rolls of petitions constitute the vast bulk of volume one of the eighteenth-century printed parliament rolls the Rotuli Parliamentorum which covers the reigns of Edward I and Edward II.

The following discussion focuses on the period after this ‘golden age’ of private petitioning; namely, the period from about the 1330s until the end of the fourteenth century. Historians have long recognised that by the beginning of Edward III's reign, the private petition was in a state of decline. This coincided with, and was probably, in part, caused by, the emergence of the common petition. These were petitions that parliamentary clerks had singled out as containing issues pertaining to the common interest or welfare of the kingdom.