This volume contains previously unpublished fourteenth-century parliamentary common petitions, the basis for much of the royal legislation of the period.

Introduction : Medieval petitions and strategies of persuasion / Thomas W. Smith, Helen Killick -- Blood, brains and bay-windows : the use of English in fifteenth-century parliamentary petitions / Gwilyn Dodd -- Petitoners for royal pardon in fourteenth-century England / Helen Lacey -- The scribes of petitions in late-medieval England / Helen Killick -- Patterns of supplication and litigation strategies : petitioning the crown in the fourteenth century / Petitions of conflict : the bishop of Durham and forfeitures of war, 1317-1333 / Matthew Phillips -- A tale of two abbots : petitions for the recovery of churches in England by the abbots of Jedburgh and Arbroath in 1328 / Shelagh Sneddon -- 'By force and arms' : lay invasion, the writ "de vi laica amovenda" and the tensions of state and church in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries / Philippa M. Hoskin -- The papacy, petitioners and benefices in thirteenth-century England / Thomas W. Smith -- Playing the system : marriage litigation in the fourteenth century / Frederik Pedersen -- Killer clergy : how did clerics justify homicide in petitions to the Apostolic penitentary in the Late Middle Ages? / Kirsi Salonen.

Between 1780 and 1918, over one million petitions from across the four nations were sent to the House of Commons. A Nation of Petitioners is the first study of this nineteenth-century heyday of petitioning in the United Kingdom. It explores how ordinary men and women engaged with politics in an era of democratisation, but not democracy, and restores their voices and actions to the story of UK political culture. Drawing on more than a million petitions, as well as archives of leading politicians, institutions, and pressure groups, Henry J. Miller demonstrates the centrality of petitions and petitioning to mass campaigning, representation, collective action, and forging collective identities at the local and national level. From the early nineteenth century, the massive growth of petitions underpinned and reshaped the popular authority of the UK state, including Parliament, the monarchy, and government. Challenging accounts that have stressed disciplinary or exclusionary processes in the evolution of popular politics, A Nation of Petitioners conclusively establishes the importance of the mass participation of ordinary people through petitions.

This book deals with one of the most pervasive ways by which people have addressed authority throughout history: petitioning. The book explores traditional practices and institutions, as well as the transformation of petitions as vehicles of popular politics. The ability or the right to petition was also a crucial element for the development and operation of early modern empires, playing a major role on the negotiated patterns of the Atlantic World. This book shows how petitions were used in Europe, America and Africa, by the governors and the governed, by the rich and the poor, by the colonists and the colonised and by the liberal and the reactionary groups. Broken down into three thematic parts, encompassing both in chronological and geographical scope, the book deepens our understanding of petitioning and its relation with ideas of consent and subjecthood, nationality and citizenship, political participation and democracy. This book provides a rare comparative platform for the study of a subject that has been receiving growing interest.

New approaches to the political culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, considering its complex relation to monarchy and state.

This Palgrave Pivot provides the first ever comprehensive consideration of the part played by women in the workings and business of the English Parliament in the later Middle Ages. Breaking new ground, this book considers all aspects of women’s access to the highest court of medieval England. Women were active supplicants to the Crown in Parliament, and sometimes appeared there in person to prosecute cases or make political demands. It explores the positions of women of varying rank, from queens to peasants, vis-à-vis this male institution, where they very occasionally appeared in person but were more usually represented by written petitions. A full analysis of these petitions and of the official records of parliament reveals that there were a number of issues on which women consistently pressed for changes in the law and its administration, and where the Commons and the Crown either championed or refused to support reform. Such is the concentration of petitions on the subjects of dower and rape that these may justifiably be termed ‘women’s issues’ in the medieval Parliament.

Explores networks of lawyers, legislators and litigators, and how they shape legal development in Britain and the world.