The clearest connection between ‘parliamentary’ petitioning for
justice and the making of the first statutes appears in the chapters of the
Statutes of Westminster concerned with the framing of writs. Instead of
telling petitioners to try their luck with the chancellor, the king provided
by statute a new writ of entry sur disseisin, so that where a disseisor had
died a tenement could still be recovered from his heir (I: 47), and
extended remedy by the writ of novel disseisin, because it was ‘so
speedy’, to ‘more cases than before’, such as the recovery of rights to
take tolls or gather nuts in a wood (II: 25); he strengthened the writs for
obtaining a widow her dower (I: 49, II: 4), and provided a new writ to
reclaim lands of her inheritance lost by her husband ‘whom in his life-
time she could not gainsay’ (II: 3); and he ordained writs to prohibit
guardians from wasting their wards’ property, and to execute enrolled
contracts and bonds without the need of pleading (II: 14, 45). In this
respect, two chapters of Westminster II were of particular significance.
Chapter 1, De donis conditionalibus, provided writs to ensure that ‘con-
ditional gifts’ (entails of land to specific lines of heirs) descended as pre-
scribed and were not sold by the first donees—these in addition to ‘the
writ whereby the donor has his recovery when issue fails [which was
already] in common use in the chancery’. By c. 24 the chancery clerks
were instructed to frame a new writ on their own initiative ‘in a similar
case [to that covered by an existing writ] involving the same law and
requiring similar remedy’, and refer the matter to parliament only when
they could not agree.^145 In parliamentary placitaof 1290 and 1291 the
king’s councillors can be found ordering the rolls to be searched for
judgments ‘in a similar case’ (in consimili casu). The Statute of
Consultation, made in the same year after a petition from ‘many people’
(plures de populo), gave the chancellor and chief justice the power to
reconsider cases blocked in the church courts by royal writs of prohibi-
tion and authorize their resumption if the only remedy was found to be
an ecclesiastical one: a graphic illustration of the way statutes could
weld the courts of king and church into one system of justice.^146
The legal ordering of the realm by statute gained impetus in the
period when the bulk of ‘parliamentary’ petitions were from individuals
(many of these for favours, of course, not legislation). When some begin
to be attributed to ‘the community of England’, at first it is clearly the
lords who are meant, but a statute of 1293 supplementing the chapter
of Westminster II about appointing ‘sufficient’ people to juries was
granted on ‘the public and frequent complaint of middling people’.^147
188 New High Courts and Reform of the Regime
(^145) EHDiii. 428 for ‘of conditional gifts’, 443 for ‘in a similar case’.
(^146) RPi. 12 (no. 57), 13 (62), 32–3, 39b, 46 (1), 47 (28), 52 (81), 67b; cf. EHDiii. 464,
and Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench, iii, p. lxxiv for the Statute of Consultation.
(^147) RPi. 117a.