century commissions of the peace were issued with increasing frequency
to a growing number of gentry in each shire, and the duty of hearing
complaints was more often accompanied by the power to try those
accused. The government experimented with levels of commissions
of oyer and terminer, using trailbaston visitations as a drastic and
unpopular last resort, sometimes giving jurisdiction in the counties only
to magnates. But after 1361 gentry custodes pacisalways received full
powers of oyer and terminer in criminal cases, under the supervision
only of the circuit justices of assize, and can rightly be called ‘justices of
the peace’.^137 One influence in the establishment of the JPs, the effective
rulers of the English counties until the nineteenth century, were the
petitions of the commons in parliament such as that of 1344 asking that
the ‘new inquiries’ they themselves had asked for in the previous year
should be abandoned, because the outrageous fines and ransoms
imposed in them were more to the destruction than the amendment of
the people: the king should remember that fines and amercements
profited the lords of franchises rather than the royal treasury, and
appoint half a dozen custodes pacisin each county to punish offences
reasonably according to their gravity. If the series of parliamentary
petitions, statutes, and judicial commissions are taken together, local
justice and not taxation is seen to be the first great subject of political
discussion between the king and the people at large.^138
The replacement of the criminal jurisdiction of the eyre by justices
drawn from the same gentry class that sent the county representatives
to parliament was a final product of the ‘bill revolution’. A clerkly
administrative culture using Latin documents gave way before the more
political style of the French-speaking aristocracy. The plaints and bills
produced by litigation became a great new means of political commu-
nication flowing now from localities to government. The contrast with
the developments surrounding the French parlement was that other
central courts existed in England to mop up the ordinary run of plaints,
and parliament was left the space to treat exceptional grievances as
political issues. Elected knights of the shire and burgesses, irrelevant to
parliaments in which the king’s council dealt with the petitions of indi-
vidual subjects, learnt to support and press petitions they recognized as
of general concern. So in 1372 they would seek an ordinance to dis-
qualify ‘men of law’ from election as knights of the shire in parliament,
because they put forward petitions in the name of the commons which
Petitioning parliament for justice 185(^137) A. Harding, ‘The Origins and Early History of the Keeper of the Peace’ TRHS, 5th
ser. 10 (1960); id., ‘The Revolt against the Justices’, in The English Rising of 1381, ed.
R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston (Cambridge UP, 1984), 169, 171, 173; A. Musson, Public Order
and Law Enforcement: The Local Administration of Criminal Justice 1294–1350(Wood-
bridge, 1996), esp. 50–1.
(^138) RPii. 201 (no. 11), 228 (15), 238 (13) etc.