They are also mostly in French and differ from bills in eyre only in being
more generally the plaints of tenants-in-chief, or in relating to the
baronial liberties which King Edward ordered at a parliament at
Gloucester in that same year of 1278 to be investigated by the justices
in eyre. The pleynteof the Countess of Warwick to king and council
was that the justices of Common Pleas had wrongly allowed an
adjournment to her opponent in a lawsuit for lands in Essex; the querela
of the men of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, that the sheriff of Kent
infringed their rights as inhabitants of a hundred which was ancient
demesne land of the king; and the prayer of Guner widow of John
Wyger that she be granted her dower by Edward as guardian of her
deceased husband’s heir, since the king could not be sued by his own
writ.^117
For the mass of bills which came to it at parliament time the king’s
council would simply act as a clearing house, if it could not divert
the stream before it reached Westminster at all. Alongside the first of
Philip III’s établissementsfor the parlementof Paris issued in January
1278, which ordered that ‘for the shortening of parliaments care should
be taken not to retain cases in them which could or ought to be taken
before the baillis’,^118 may be set both chapter 8 of the statute of
Edward’s parliament at midsummer 1278 which provided that com-
plaints of trespass seeking damages of less than 40s. should be heard by
the sheriffs, and the edict of 1280 which lamented the harassment of the
king’s parliaments by a multitude of petitions which could be submitted,
and for the future must be submitted, directly to the chancellor, justices,
or exchequer. Petitions which needed royal decision should come before
the king only by the hands of the chancellor and other principal
ministers, so that the king and council could ‘attend to the great busi-
ness of his kingdom and of his foreign lands without being burdened by
other matters’.^119 Nevertheless, arrangements had continually to be
refined for the reception, ‘auditing’, and ‘trial’ of petitions brought to
parliament. The answering of petitions remained the core of parlia-
ment’s business, and files and rolls of petitions the basis of its records.
If the king called a parliament for a different purpose, such as in 1332
arranging for the keeping of the peace while he went on crusade, he
might send the commons away at the end of the first week with an
assurance that he meant to have another parliament soon to answer ‘the
petitions of the people’.^120
180 New High Courts and Reform of the Regime
(^117) Sayles, Functions of the Medieval Parliament, 21; RPi. 2, 4, 6, 7 (nos. 7, 14, 23, 31).
(^118) Langlois, Textes, 95 (1).
(^119) SRi. 45–50; R. C. Palmer, The County Courts of Medieval England 1150–1350
(Princeton UP, 1982), 235 ff.; Calendar of Close Rolls, 1279–88, 56–7; Sayles, Functions of
the Medieval Parliament, 172.
(^120) Sayles, Functions of the Medieval Parliament, 24, 39–40, 47, 51, 195–6, 206, 209,