‘Britain mourns a monster – because he was a king’. These were the opening words of Polly Toynbee's reflection on Richard III's interment in Leicester cathedral on 26 March 2015. How could it be, she asked, that thousands – 20,000, by all accounts – came to Leicester to humble themselves before the bones of this ‘child-murdering tyrant’? It is a question which need not detain us here, except to suggest that perhaps the media frenzy and popular interest surrounding the discovery of Richard's remains in 2012, and his reburial three years later, was in part the product of a perfect combination of royal intrigue, historical notoriety and murder most foul. So who did kill the Princes in the Tower? On the basis of probability the Princes were killed on the orders of Richard III, but in the absence of definitive proof scholars have sensibly tended to focus on the point that Richard III was believed to have had his nephews killed.

For contemporaries, however, it was not necessarily Richard's infanticide which informed their view that the king was a tyrant. Just over forty years ago Tony Pollard wrote an article entitled ‘The Tyranny of Richard III’, in which he focused exclusively on Richard's use of his affinity to understand why the king sat on the throne for barely two years. It was how the king governed the shires, rather than what happened in the Tower, which did most to turn late fifteenth-century public opinion against him. Pollard showed how Richard's ‘plantation’ policy violated the accepted norms of late medieval kingship and ultimately led to his downfall in 1485. Subsequent work on the reign of Richard III owed much to Pollard's characteristically incisive and erudite contribution to the subject. But the question of the king's (mis)management of local government, his relationship with particular regions and the use (or misuse) of his royal affinity finds resonance in other reigns and is of particular relevance in understanding the phenomenon of ‘failed kingship’. In what follows I draw out the broader context of Richard III's retaining policy before moving on to consider in detail the circumstances of Richard II's retaining policy, for it is Richard II who is generally considered to have ‘invented’ the phenomenon of the extended royal affinity.

On the 16 September 2017, thirty-three people gathered in the Huntingdon Room at the Centre for Medieval Studies in the University of York. Thirty-two of those people knew that the workshop entitled Political Culture in Late Medieval England was a celebration of the sixtieth birthday of Professor Mark Ormrod, the culmination of years of secret planning to bring together his doctoral students and the researchers who had assisted him on an array of funded projects. Nine of those individuals presented scholarly papers at the workshop, and then, once the academic portion of the day was complete, the audience viewed a series of congratulatory video messages from a number of Mark's friends and colleagues, before enjoying a grand celebratory feast.

This volume serves as a record of that event, bringing together papers presented at that workshop with additional pieces, all written by Mark Ormrod’s students and former research assistants. Since our primary aim in putting together this volume is to celebrate Mark's birthday and to highlight his outstanding contribution to the field through PhD supervision and research projects, we have chosen not to include a list of his extensive publications in this book: we anticipate that such a list will be forthcoming when Mark’s contribution to the discipline is further celebrated and recognised.

The volume reflects the vibrancy and range of the honorand's own illustrious research on the structures, personalities and culture of rulership of late medieval England. It encompasses political, administrative, Church and social history, focussing upon three main themes: monarchy, state and political culture. For the first, it explores the history of emotion by considering Edward III's reactions to the deaths of his kinfolk and close associates, emphasising the practicality of the king's responses. It also investigates cases of political defamation in the fourteenth century, highlighting how non-elite subjects engaged in discourse about kingship and monarchy. The workings of the ‘state’ are examined through studies of a Yorkshire tax collector caught in the act of defrauding the exchequer, of the function and jurisdiction of the Court of Chivalry in the late fourteenth century, of the power dynamics underpinning statute-making in the early fifteenth-century parliament, and of the working practices of the privy seal clerk, Thomas Hoccleve.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE parliamentary Commons and the crown has long fascinated scholars of late medieval England: a huge corpus of work now exists, published over the past hundred years or so, which explores the many different facets of this political dynamic. But in one important area – legislation – our understanding of the principles which shaped the interactions between MPs and the royal executive remains, arguably, underdeveloped. While particular statutes or programmes of legislation, especially those dating to the fourteenth century, have attracted the attention of more modern scholars, we continue to rely for the most part on older work, and older assumptions, for our understanding of the legislative process in more general terms. This present discussion revisits some of these earlier themes and reassesses the principles which underpinned negotiations between the crown and political community over new legislation. My particular concern is to establish the rules which governed the relationship between common petitions and statutes: that is, between the suggestions for legislation put forward by the Commons in the form of written supplications, on the one hand, and the formal, solemn declarations of new statutory law issued by the crown, often in response to these supplications, on the other hand. It is an inquiry which combines a close reading of the parliamentary records (i.e. the parliament roll and statute roll) with a consideration of the broader constitutional principles which demarcated how legislative power came to be shared between the king and the wider political community. At the heart of my investigation is the question of whether we see the late medieval legislative process as a competitive or cooperative (indeed corporative) undertaking between all those who had a part to play in forging new statutory law.

This is a subject inspired by Mark Ormrod's huge contribution to the study of the late medieval English parliament, and my own special debt to his work in this field. Mark Ormrod's contributions have been instrumental not only in enhancing the accessibility of the records of the medieval parliament – notably in his work on the PROME and ‘Medieval Petitions’ projects – but also, with the publication of numerous incisive essays on taxation, legislation, common petitions and parliamentary record-keeping (amongst other subjects), in helping us better understand how parliament worked.

When was surrendering a castle an acceptable and honourable course of action? Was surrendering a castle ever an acceptable and honourable undertaking? These were questions which generated considerable debate in the course of the Hundred Years War, but never more intensely than in the 1370s, when the combination of a decline in English military fortunes and the absence of a fully functioning king dramatically intensified public concern over the loss of strategically important and prestigious fortresses. Our intention is to explore the political ramifications of surrendering, focussing initially on the trial in October 1377 of Jean de Jauche, lord of Gommegnies, and William Weston for the loss, respectively, of the castles of Ardres and Audruicq in the Calais Pale, before broadening our discussion to consider wider conceptual and normative contexts. We want to consider what drove the captains of castles to seek terms with their besiegers, how much licence these men were given by the crown unilaterally to negotiate in this way, why decisions taken ‘in the field’ became so highly charged politically, and how far the actions of these men accorded with contemporary views on the proper conduct of garrison commanders. The topic provides a suitable platform for the conjoining of our own respective research areas, but it also neatly dovetails with two of the central strands of Chris Given-Wilson's pioneering and hugely influential work on prisoners of war and the parliament rolls of late medieval England. It is an age-old truism that politics and warfare are two sides of the same coin and that each responds to, and influences, the course of the other: what happened in the 1370s brings into especially sharp focus the full extent of this symbiosis.

The surrender of Ardres and Audruicq

Perhaps because the parliament of October 1377 was notable in so many other ways – it was the first of Richard II's reign and marked a decisive shift in political climate following the turbulent last years of Edward III's rule – the detailed account of the trial of Jean de Jauche, lord of Gommegnies, and William Weston has never received detailed scrutiny. Ardres and Audruicq had been lost only a matter of weeks before parliament met.

There are inherent complications involved in discerning how the English, French and Latin languages were used to facilitate legal process in late medieval England. These problems relate, for the most part, to the vernacular languages – English and French – for reasons that will become clear in due course. Latin is more straightforward. This is because it was employed principally as a language of the formal written record and its impact is plain to see in the reams of legal records held in The National Archives and in print. Latin was used to compile the main records of the royal courts – the plea rolls – from their very first appearance in the mid-1190s. It was also used in the writs which initiated legal proceedings (‘original’ writs) and in the writs subsequently issued to control these proceedings (‘judicial’ writs). It predominated in other branches of central government, particularly within the main administrative offices of the royal bureaucracy: the exchequer and the chancery. The status Latin enjoyed as the foremost language of the legal written record remained undiminished throughout the Middle Ages and it was not until 1731 that it was finally replaced by English. It occupied this position because it was considered a prestige language and a universal language of learning and culture. It was also understood to be the most effective language to convey meaning with precision and exactitude, and to preserve this meaning for posterity. Some of the earliest law manuals, written by Glanvill, Bracton and Hengham, were written in Latin for these reasons. French, and to a much lesser extent English, could also be used for the written record, but it was their employment as spoken languages which has, above all, created complications for historians. A key point to note is that the language chosen to record what was said in court did not always indicate the language that had actually been verbalised. This is what makes measuring the respective shares of English and French in the oral/aural legal culture of late medieval England so problematic. In what follows, I explore how historians have approached this particular conundrum. I also consider more generally how languages were used and how a trilingual legal culture determined the way contemporaries both experienced and accessed late medieval law.

Geoffrey Chaucer lived and wrote his poetry during a period of unprecedented political instability in late medieval England. Parliamentary crises, baronial rebellion, popular revolt, disastrous foreign war, weak government, authoritarian rule and, finally, outright deposition made the years between c.1370 and c.1400 both momentous and dangerous times to witness. Chaucer was not immune to these events and his career as a servant of the crown can be seen to have suffered. Yet, political commentary – overt or indirect – is curiously absent from his work. Scholars have traditionally explained this in terms of his keen and calculated sense of self-preservation, but I suggest that Chaucer was displaying an ambiguous and detached political stance that was commonplace amongst his contemporaries. Scholarly attention on the polarised nature of the late fourteenth-century polity ignores the fact that most people looked on the political conflicts of these years with deep anxiety, mixed with a determination to remain steadfastly neutral. In this, Chaucer – the man and his work – was wholly representative of his age.

In the course of the first half of the fifteenth century a decisive shift occurred in the language used to write petitions addressed to the king, his ministers and the Lords and Commons in parliament. In 1420 almost all such supplications were drafted in French, long associated as the language par excellence of petitioning. Over the next twenty years, however, English began to be used with increasing regularity. Elsewhere I have estimated that the scales tipped decisively in favour of the English language in the late 1430s, and specifically between 1435 and 1437. From this point onwards it was the predominant language, while the use of French diminished. By the middle of the century, English was chosen as a matter of course. This change is to be found in each of the three main series of petitions, or bills, held in The National Archives: SC 8 (Special Collections: Ancient Petitions); C 1 (Court of Chancery: Early Proceedings); and E 28 (Exchequer, Treasury of the Receipt: Council and Privy Seal Records). In seeking to explain why the language of petitioning changed across the period, I have emphasised the complexity of the dynamics which underlay shifting contemporary attitudes to language, as well as the importance of placing the records in their proper administrative context. Ultimately, the linguistic conservatism of the clerks, scriveners or attorneys who were employed to write petitions, and which had hitherto acted as a seemingly unassailable bulwark against the spread of the vernacular, faltered in the second quarter of the fifteenth century as a result of a number of converging factors: the flourishing of English in a literary context; its broader acceptance as a bone fide language of the court; its adoption in some bureaucratic contexts, notably in letters issued under the signet seal; the laicisation of the writing classes; the onset of Henry VI's majority rule; and the increasingly inward-looking stance of the English political classes, brought about by their defeat in the Hundred Years War and the consequent severing of ties to the Continent.

In a volume of essays addressing the themes of rhetoric and persuasion in petitionary discourse, it seems especially apposite to consider how lexical choice, and in particular the use of English, shaped the tone and content of petitions, as well as the rhetorical possibilities available to those who drafted them.