Increasing numbers of petitions were coming from local communities,
e.g. ‘the poor and middling people of the county of Norfolk’, or men
imprisoned in Canterbury and Maidstone gaols on what they said were
malicious indictments of homicide, and some of these were very likely
brought up by shire or borough representatives.^148 In the fourteenth
century the number of individual petitions fell away from a peak of 500
or so (from Scotland, Ireland, and Gascony as well as England) in the
Lent parliament of 1305.^149 The representatives of the commons in
parliament began to sense their collective influence in the political
struggles of Edward II’s reign, and to incorporate individual grievances
in petitions which they submitted to the king on behalf of the whole
community—effectively declaring them ‘true bills’ as juries did plaints
and bills of indictment before justices of trailbaston or custodes pacis.
The petition of ‘the Community of the people of his Realm’ to the king
in 1315 (A Nostre Seignur le Roi monstre la Communaute.. .’) against
the indiscriminate issue of commissions of oyer and terminer reads like
such a widespread grievance ‘avowed’ by the Commons as a group; as
do the complaints of ‘the Community of his land’ in the same year (A
Nostre Seignur... & a son Consail se pleint.. .) about the exorbitant
tolls at the Humber ferry, and the two-part petition of 1319 x 1322 of
‘the Community of his land of England’ (A nostre seygnur le roi & a
soen conseil pri la communalte) for a more liberal interpretation of
clauses of the forty-year-old Statutes of Gloucester and Westminster II,
the first part of this petition evoking the response that it had been
answered in two previous parliaments and the second part that ‘nothing
can be done without a change in the law’.^150
By the 1320s the Commons in parliament were acquiring an ‘agenda
for legislation’, petitioning repeatedly on a number of issues mainly con-
cerning the administration of justice.^151 The lords and justices continued
to advise the king on the answering of petitions, but after the deposition
of Edward II in 1327 and the accession of Edward III it is ‘the
Commonalty of the Realm in the present Parliament’, listed separately
from the prelates, earls, and barons, which submits petition after
petition (Prie la commune) ‘for the honour of God and Holy Church,
and for the enhancement of the state of the Realm’ or ‘the state of King
and Realm’, some directed against the fallen regime, some asking for the
Statute-making 189(^148) Ibid. i. 46 (no. 6), 49 (43), 51 (65, 67, 69, 72), 52 (83: the pauperesand mediocresof
Norfolk), 53 (91), 55 (112), 101 (16), 159 (5), 161 (11, 19, 21), 162 (29), 163 (33–5), 164
(44, 45, 50), 165 (55, 56), 166 (67: the prisoners in Kentish gaols), 167 (72).
(^149) R. G. Davies and J. H. Denton (eds.), The English Parliament in the Middle Ages
(Manchester UP, 1981), 49–52, 62–73, 168, 177–9.
(^150) RPi. 290 (8), 291 (10), and cf. 343 (23), 372 (13); Select Cases in the Court of King’s
Bench,iii, p. cxvi; Sayles, Functions of the Medieval Parliament, 46–53, 244, 262, 265, 319.
(^151) RP371 (no. 5); W. M. Ormrod, ‘Agenda for Legislation, 1322–c.1340’, EHR 105
(1990).