of the exchequer or to the chancellor for a remedy.^124 The judges in the
lower court might be reluctant to give a decision, however, when ‘they
were not adequately advised about the right and estate of the lord king’
in the matter, and a bishop of Norwich once asked for the errors he
alleged in a judgment given in the court of common pleas and reaffirmed
in king’s bench to be examined by the triers of petitions in parliament,
since he could get redress nowhere else.^125 To the barons of the
exchequer went petitions about wardships, liberties, the collection of
taxes and payments due to or from the king. But in 1329 they
stubbornly refused to hear a plea sent them from parliament, since it
was against the common law for it to adjudicate about freehold
property, and eventually the council had to order the transference of the
record of the case to chancery.^126
Bills of complaint began to be directed by petitioners straight to
king’s bench, and in the fourteenth century the new courts of chivalry
and admiralty were created to deal with petitions arising from the war
with France. The most potent new jurisdiction to develop at the centre
was, however, the court of chancery. In the course of time bills
concerning the breaches of trust and contract which the common law
courts had not learned to handle would be submitted directly to the
chancellor, who was expected, as invariably a churchman, to be con-
cerned with matters of good faith and conscience. But from the begin-
ning his expertise as an originator of writs and commissions and a
keeper of records made him the central figure in the management of
‘parliamentary’ petitions.^127 For example, in 1293 a petition concerning
a tenement allegedly given by a mother to her son in return for sus-
tenance during her lifetime and now in dispute was sent to chancery for
the parties to ‘come to an agreement if they can, and if they cannot they
should return to the next parliament’.^128 Parties and witnesses could be
summoned to chancery, or evidence taken in the localities be returned
there.
The administration of justice in the country was transformed by one
common response to petitions in parliament, advice to the petitioners
182 New High Courts and Reform of the Regime
(^124) RPi. 38 (no. 35); Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench, ii, p. lxix, iii, pp. xxxii, lvi,
176, 180–90, 191 ff.; Jolliffe, ‘Some Factors in the Beginnings of Parliament’, 103 ff., 108 ff.,
113; H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, ‘Parliaments and Great Councils in Medieval
England’, repr. from The Law Quarterly Review, 77 (1961), in the same authors’ The English
Parliament in the Middle Ages(London 1981), article 26, p. 4.
(^125) Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench, ii, p. lxxi; v, pp. clii–cliii; vii, p. 52.
(^126) Ibid. v, p. lxxxv; cf. Sayles, Functions of the Medieval Parliament, 210, 219, 221–4, 235,
253.
(^127) Sayles, Functions of the Medieval Parliament, 350, 374, 400; Select Cases in the Court
of Kings Bench, ii, pp. cxli–cxlii, 166–8; v, pp. xv, lxvii ff., lxxi–lxxiii, 35; Harding, The Law
Courts of Medieval England, 98 ff.
(^128) Sayles, Functions of the Medieval Parliament, 212–13.