Early in the reign of Edward III the king's ‘poor prisoners of the gaol of Nottingham’ composed a petition to the king and his council, asking, in the name of God and for the soul of the king's father, Edward II, for the appointment of justices to deliver them from the gaol by the common law. They claimed that there were more than eighty of them, all of whom were dying because of hunger and privation. They complained that ‘in the whole of this eyre no common delivery has been made for more than half a year’. Apparently as an afterthought, because that part of the petition is written in a different, larger hand, the petitioners requested that Richard de Willoughby and Richard de Whatton be appointed as justices to make the delivery. When the petition had been considered, the resulting action endorsed on the petition was to the effect that justices should be assigned to deliver this and other gaols throughout England.

As usual, the petition was not dated, but the reference to an eyre provides, at first sight, the means of dating it quite closely. The last Nottinghamshire eyre began at Nottingham castle on 13 November 1329, the first to be held in one of two circuits begun in the East Midlands. The circuits were meant to revive the eyre as a judicial means of dealing with an unusually high level of crime, which was perceived to be particularly virulent in that region, where the Folville and Coterel gangs were active. Petitions had been presented in Parliament asking for action to be taken about violent crime, and the revival of eyres represented at least in part an attempt to enforce the provisions of the statute of Northampton of 1328. A speech to that effect was given by Chief Justice William de Herle at the beginning of the eyre, following a similar speech by his counterpart Geoffrey Scrope at the first eyre in the other circuit, which began a week earlier at Northampton. The last of the regular series of eyres in English counties, in two circuits, had been suspended in June 1294 because of the outbreak of war with France, and was never resumed, although a few isolated eyres had been held for particular reasons in particular counties between 1299 and 1321. The previous eyre in Nottinghamshire before 1329 had been as long ago as 1280.