prelates, magnates, and free tenants of the rights and liberties of the
king, including the withdrawal of suit to county and hundred courts and
the courts and mills of royal manors; the ‘state’ of the lord king’s forests
and parks; the value of the king’s castles and of garrison duties in them;
the custody and value of the chattels of Jews; liberties (rights of juris-
diction) exercised by landlords without royal charters; churchmen who
had acquired fees held from the king, which thus ceased to owe the
normal inheritance dues, or who compelled laymen to plead cases
belonging to the crown in the church courts; and sheriffs and bailiffs
who had permitted encroachments on the king’s rights or extorted
money by favouring malefactors—these things at any time since the
eighteenth year of King Henry’s reign (1234).^22
plaints and the reform of the STATUS REGNIBut the most important aspect of the sworn inquest into the king’s rights
was paradoxically its power to reveal the grievances of the wider
populace, to whom it gave an alternative to the hazardous appeal of
felony and the expensive writ for bringing injuries before the king’s
courts. Bracton knew of the querela sine brevi, a civil action which
could be brought straight to the justices in eyre if there was no time to
get a writ from the chancery. More significant as a force for change were
the ‘plaints’ (querelae, querimonie) of the victims of violence or official
misconduct, which sometimes thrust themselves into the veredicta, the
written answers of the presenting juries to the articles of inquiry of the
eyre, and must have been their main source of information. Examples
are the complaints against Fawkes de Breauté and his men to the inquiry
of 1224; the report in the jury of the city of Canterbury’s veredictumat
the eyre of 1241 that ‘Hamo le Queller complains [queritur] that
Walkelin the Gaoler and others came to his house by night and broke
down his doors and wounded, beat and maltreated him’; and the
simple statement in a Shropshire veredictumbefore the eyre of 1256
that six men of Halesowen ‘complain of’ (queruntur de) the abbot of
Hales.^23
In France complaints were evoked on a far greater scale by the
inquiries against the rapidly growing corps of officials which was
required to govern the enormously expanded realm, and there the
Plaints and the reform of the status regni 155(^22) Annales Monastici, i. 337–9.
(^23) Select Cases of Procedure without Writ, 49–57, 67; A. Harding, ‘Plaints and Bills in the
History of English Law, mainly in the period 1250–1350’, Legal History Studies 1972, ed.
D. Jenkins (Cardiff: U. of Wales P., 1975), 66–8, 83; Roll of the Shropshire Eyre, 236–7; in
1236–7 Henry III mounted an inquiry into complaints of abuse by his officials at Bordeaux:
see Enquêtes administratives d’Alfonse de Poitiers, p. xxi.