Introduction

The series Ancient Petitions (SC 8) is one of the most important, but also one of the most enigmatic, series of late medieval documents currently held by TNA. Numbering over 17,000 documents, it comprises, for the most part, petitions drafted by individuals or corporations (towns, religious houses, county communities, etc) wishing to mobilise the crown into providing redress. The petitions are a mixture of complaints and requests. The complaints tend to relate to injustices that could not be readily resolved through common law process; the requests were usually prompted by the supplicant's desire to obtain some form of royal favour, such as a grant, office or pardon. The majority of the petitions date to the period between the late thirteenth century and the mid-fifteenth century, with the heaviest numerical concentration lying in the first fifty years of this time span (the reigns of Edward I and II and the early years of Edward III). Most of the petitions are from English supplicants, but since the geographical scope of petitioning extended as far as the practical reach of English sovereign power there is also a sizeable minority of cases from the lands of Ireland, Wales and Gascony. Many different types of petition can found in SC 8, but the largest category comprises those petitions that aimed to secure the personal intervention of the king in order to change the circumstances or fortunes of the supplicant. As such, they are an invaluable resource for illuminating the workings, nature and scope of the exercise of royal grace in the late medieval period. They show not only the degree to which individual men and women, and local communities, looked directly to the king to intercede on their behalf; they also demonstrate, through the responses to these petitions, the extent to which the king was prepared to listen and respond to the pleas for assistance from his subjects. But the petitions in SC 8 offer much more than an insight into the political culture of late medieval England. In describing the reasons why the king's grace was being sought, they reveal a remarkable wealth of detail about local conditions in the late medieval period, and the challenges and difficulties that confronted the people and communities who lived there six or seven hundred years ago.