proceedings of which are recorded in the ‘Hundred Rolls’, five Essex
townships independently presented the offence of a hundred bailiff,
Richard Brown, against Petronilla of Asheldham; in a separate entry
Petronilla complained (queritur), surely in writing, of how Brown broke
into her house by night demanding money, bound her and her husband
so tightly as to draw blood, and carried off a long list of goods worth
in total four pounds.^112 Returning in 1289 from a long absence in
France, Edward I would appoint special auditores querelarum of
injuries and wrongs unjustly inflicted upon the people while he was
away, those committed ‘by his justices’ as well as by his ‘sheriffs or any
of his ministers or bailiffs’.^113 In the same year of 1298 in which his
enemy Philip IV was listening to the complaints of the people of the
Toulousain, Edward would commission a lawyer and a local knight on
each of a number of circuits throughout England ‘to hear and determine
all manner of grievances done to his people in his name’ on account of
the war.^114
Occasionally from 1261, and generally from 1278, when the justices
in eyre were given permanent powers to hear trespasses on complaint,
special membranes of plaints, headed querelae de transgressionibusor
rotuli de quereliswere included in eyre rolls, usually among the crown
pleas (i.e. criminal cases).^115 The first surviving written bills to the
justices in eyre, which date from 1286, are found to correspond to com-
plaints in the rotuli de querelisof the eyre rolls, and they are in French,
the vernacular of the litigants and their legal advisers in the country, not
the professional Latin of chancery clerks or Westminster lawyers. Some-
times they are rambling and ungrammatical, but mostly they are terse
and business-like descriptions of trespasses, e.g.: ‘John Burdun of
Edingale [Staffs.] complains [sey pleynt] to the Justices of our lord the
King... that Robert Fox of Tean on the Thursday next before
the Ascension in the twentieth year of our lord King Edward came in the
high road in Edingale wrongfully and with force and arms against the
peace and did beat him and grievously wound him to his damage of
forty shillings, so that he hardly escaped death; and he prays you [the
justices] that for God’s sake and your own souls’ sake that this may be
inquired of by a good jury.’^116 To such complaints may be compared the
first known bills to parliament: the sixty-five presented to king and
council in 1278, which are preserved in a seventeenth-century copy.
Petitioning parliament for justice 179(^112) Rotuli Hundredorum, 2 vols. (London: Record Commission, 1812–18), i. 136–7; H. M.
Cam, The Hundred and the Hundred Rolls(London, 1930), 39–40, 42–3, 258.
(^113) Sayles, Functions of the Medieval Parliament, 195–7.
(^114) A Lincolnshire Assize Roll for 1298, ed. W. S. Thomson. Lincolnshire Record Society,
36 (1944).
(^115) Harding, ‘Plaints and Bills in the History of English Law’, 75.
(^116) Select Bills in Eyre(1292–1333), ed. W. C. Bolland, Selden Soc. 30 (London, 1914), 71.