There are several ways to look at royal pardons in medieval England. From a doctrinal point of view, royal pardons played the necessary but precarious role of mediating between harsh common law homicide rules and the communities' sense of justice in cases of accident and self-defense. From a political point of view, pardons were strategic concessions by a king who could not keep order, or cynical revenue-raising devices flouting the need for punishment of wrongs, or opportunities to encourage patterns of deference and chains of patronage by which those close to the king could intercede on behalf of ordinary subjects. From a dramatic point of view, pardons were the mysterious, almost divine prerogative of mercy, the deus ex machina intervening just at the last moment to save an innocent prisoner, perhaps already on the gallows with a noose around his neck. Helen Lacey's book is an informative and entertaining survey of all these and many more aspects of royal pardons in fourteenth century England.

Naomi Hurnard's classic The King's Pardon for Homicide before A.D. 1307 (Oxford University Press, 1969) showed how the necessity and regular availability of pardons in cases of self-defense and accident retarded the development of a rational law of homicide. In Hurnard's view, nearly all other uses of the king's pardon were irredeemably “irrational and vicious.” In Douglas Hay's influential essay “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law” in Albion's Fatal Tree (1975), the persistence into the eighteenth century of “irrational” pardons helped to legitimize, mystify, and enhance royal authority while at the same time encouraging patterns of deference to well-connected social superiors. Building upon Hay's provocative insights, Lacey takes royal pardons seriously and finds ways to make sense of them in their own terms. Her book examines the pardoning process from multiple perspectives: those of wrongdoers desperately seeking pardons, victims of their crimes, the king himself, intercessors, moral and social critics, artists, poets, and political allies and opponents of the king.

For a legal profession who equipped themselves with form-books and practical guides of many kinds, the process of obtaining a pardon was always just outside the zone of openly shared legal knowledge. Pardons were often mentioned in the year books, treatises, parliament rolls, and statutes copied by lawyers, and a few model pardons were included in an early manuscript register of writs (87 Selden Society 101-2), but I know of no surviving text about how to obtain a pardon, no model form of a letter of supplication for the king's mercy.

This is one of the many matters that Lacey reconstructs from literary sources and record evidence, including petitions for pardons preserved in the National Archives. Lacey analyzed individual pardons numbering close to 40,000, all those enrolled between 1272 and 1398, as well as general pardons of which another 20,000 persons took advantage. In approximately 12% of pardons, the queen and other members of the royal family, royal household servants, dukes, duchesses, earls, countesses, bishops, abbots, and even foreign merchants can be identified as intercessors. Appendices list the names of those whom it would be valuable for a felon to know in fourteenth century England.

Drawing upon year books, treatises, parliament rolls, statutes, and chronicles, Lacey's book puts homicide pardons in the context of the entire pardoning system. In surviving petitions, pardons of debts to the king were sought more often than pardons for any crime. General pardons, commonly thought to be a later development, are shown by Lacey in the second half of her book to have begun in the fourteenth century. Political reconciliations began to take the form of group pardons, as did pardons for the purpose of military recruitment and remittances of judicial and feudal fines no longer worth collecting. Parliaments took an interest in such group pardons, criticizing some kinds and advocating others. In 1376, Edward III celebrated the 50th year of his reign by issuing the first general pardon not only of debts to the king but also of some felonies, inspired both by the jubilee grace of Leviticus 25:2 and by Popes Boniface VIII's and Clement VI's absolutions at 50 year intervals. Richard II issued general pardons in 1381 after the Peasants' Revolt and in 1398 after his suppression of the Lords Appellant. This part of Lacey's book switches to a close focus on the step-by-step political machinations of the 1376, 1381, and 1398 episodes.

If you obeyed the king, your obedience reinforced the king's authority. If you opposed the king, his pardon of your disobedience could also affirm the king's authority. Royal pardons played important, enigmatic roles in English law, politics, and culture in the fourteenth century, roles well portrayed in Lacey's fine book.