The reign of Edward I is the earliest period for which there survive original petitions submitted to Parliament. Our evidence suggests that it is also the first period when the king's subjects submitted petitions for consideration at sessions of the king's Parliament on anything like a regular basis, and that the beginnings of this practice go back to the very first Parliament of Edward’s reign, that of Easter 1275. A substantial number of surviving original petitions belonging to the reign can be identified as having been submitted to particular Parliaments either on the basis of their enrolment, generally only in summary form, on rolls recording petitions heard and answered in those Parliaments, or through other, more indirect evidence. What is, however, unclear and will remain unclear until more work is done on the corpus of surviving petitions from the reign, and perhaps even after that, is whether all the surviving petitions that we now have are connected with sessions of Parliament. There is also a substantial body of surviving evidence that summarises, or in some cases provides full transcripts of, petitions that no longer survive and, in most cases, also connects these petitions with particular sessions of Parliament.

In a previous paper I tried to ask and to answer some of the more obvious questions about the petitions that were submitted to Parliament in the reign of Edward I: about the language and the formal characteristics of such petitions and how they were actually dealt with at sessions of Parliament. Here I want to try and provide at least preliminary answers to a different, and perhaps even more significant, set of questions about petitions and Parliament. What was it that petitioners who submitted petitions to Parlia ment were asking for? Why did petitioning seem to them the appropriate means of obtaining it? My raw material in seeking answers to these questions is not the total body of surviving original petitions that date or may date from Edward I's reign, but the major part of the more manageable, and partially overlapping, body of petitions, whether known at first or at second hand, which I worked on for the first two volumes of the printed edition of PROME and which are edited there.