be another and longer debate in parliament de statu regni, during which
the king replaced some of his previous statutes which had been found
unclear, so that the first statutes of Westminster were followed by ‘the
statutes of Westminster the second’.^142 Before the end of the century, the
chancery clerks felt the need to keep their own roll of the growing body
of statutes, the early part of which was written up retrospectively. As it
survives, it begins with ‘the supplementations to the law’ made at
Gloucester in 1278 rather than the statutes of 1275, but it is likely that
the first membranes of the roll have been lost.^143
It took time for the Commons to learn to petition for new laws and
for the king to realize that he could harness their collective concern.
Many of the detailed amendments of the law in the one-hundred-
odd chapters of the two Statutes of Westminster look to have been
responses to the individual complaints about royal and baronial officials
collected by the ‘hundred rolls’ enquiry. Measures were ordered against
bad coroners (I: 10); wrongful distraint (I: 16, 23, II: 2, 36, 37);
disseisin, maintenance of law-suits and extortion by officials, and their
forcing of the poor and decrepit to serve on juries (I: 9, 19, 23–6, 28,
30, 32, 33, 38; II: 42, 44, 49); magnates and their bailiffs who com-
pelled people to plead cases of breach of covenant and trespass before
them, which were outside their jurisdiction (I: 35, II: 43): and false
accusations of felony and false imprisonment (II: 12, 13). Other
chapters regulating procedure and extending remedies in civil cases may
have been the result of individual petitions to king and council in
parliament, for example: the protection of wards against the wasting of
their inheritances by guardians (I: 21, 22, 48, II: 14, 15); the extension
of the action of novel disseisin to allow the recovery of goods as well as
tenements (I: 37); the restriction of essoining—the delaying of suits by
excuses for non-appearance (I: 43–5, II: 17, 27); the proscription of
collusive suits in which the tenants defaulted to allow land to pass into
‘the dead hand’ of a church, thus depriving overlords of their dues and
contravening the Statute of Mortmain of 1279 (II: 32); and require-
ments that litigants deliver their writs to the court within a specefied
time from the beginning of the eyre (not waiting till their adversaries
had left), and that sheriffs acknowledge the receipt of writs on which
they must take action (II: 10, 39).^144
Statute-making 187(^142) SRi. 26, 45, 51, 55, 71; the chronicle of Thomas Wykes in Annales Monastici, ed.
Luard, iv. 263, 304.
(^143) The statute roll is Public Record Office C74/1; analysed by H. G. Richardson and
G. O. Sayles, ‘The Early Statutes’, Law Quarterly Review, April and October 1934, 201–3;
209–17.
(^144) Sayles, Functions of the Medieval Parliament, 141; the numbering of the clauses of the
Statutes of Westminster is that given in EHD iii. 397–410, 428–57; cf. T. F. T. Plucknett, The
Legislation of Edward I(Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1949).