Beginning in the 1270s, petitioners presented thousands of requests for favor or redress within the context of parliament. Addressing themselves to the king and council, or later to the king, lords and commons, supplicants used the occasion of parliament to request justice and grace of all sorts, bringing their private concerns into the most public of medieval institutions. Gwilym Dodd offers a meticulous, insightful examination of these petitions and the role private petitioning played in the late medieval parliaments. The book builds upon Dodd's doctoral research at the University of York with Mark Ormrod and his work as the deputy director of the project “Medieval Petitions: A Catalogue of the ‘Ancient Petitions’ in the National Archives.” Unsurprisingly, then, Dodd displays an impressive mastery of these sources and their possibilities. He seeks to revive interest in the judicial functions of parliament—as opposed to its purely political and financial functions—and to argue that the judicial aspect cannot be treated as secondary in accounting for the development and survival of the institution. He concludes that parliament's function as an outlet for the satisfaction of private interests is what made it an indispensable, enduring part of the political and administrative structure of late medieval England. Private complaint, at least as much as the exchange of taxation for remedial legislation, shaped the nature and persistence of parliament.

This bare summary cannot begin to do justice to the insights and interventions made along the way. Indebted to the approach of H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles to parliament's history, the book nevertheless offers a number of correctives to their conclusions. Dodd begins by tracing the combination of pressures and incentives that prompted Edward I to invite such petitions during the 1270s and notes the importance of such a sudden and deliberate move in the growth of the late medieval state. He then identifies a hiatus in petitioning in the early years of Edward II's reign and allows that “judicial business was not a constant or continuous feature of parliament's activity. … Parliaments were most assuredly not of one kind only” (68). Parliament's political and judicial functions were at times incompatible; during crises and when time was short, the need to make the most of the king's availability meant that judicial business suffered. Dodd suggests that the presence of the king in the English parliament, and his absence in the French parlement, was at least as responsible for the differing developmental paths of these institutions as the presence or absence of representatives. While petitioning revived in the latter years of Edward II's reign, the numbers of petitions declined again under Edward III even as the apparatus of triers set up to adjudicate on private petitions expanded. In these years, too, the petitions stopped being recorded on the parliament rolls, which Dodd thinks has led some historians to overlook their continued significance. He points to some structural changes, most notably the emergence of an “administrative council” and the expansion of the chancellor's responsibilities, suggesting the importance of parliament and the private petition in fostering the emergence of Chancery as the main source of equitable jurisdiction. He argues, however, that the primary reason for the declining volume of petitions over the fourteenth century lay not in these structural developments but in a “reinvigorated kingship” (117) and improvements in the state of law and order. Proof comes from the content of the petitions themselves, now less concerned with low-level criminality. Dodd attends to the emergence of the common petitions as well, petitions ostensibly for the broader public good that came to serve as the basis for legislation. And this leads into a discussion of the increasing importance of the Commons. Over the fifteenth century, private petitioners more frequently addressed themselves to the Commons rather than to the king and council or to the Lords. By the reign of Henry VI, this formula had become standard. Even so, the Commons served merely as a clearing house, forwarding petitions to the appropriate persons and interceding but not directly making decisions themselves. This intercessory rather than determinative role, Dodd suggests, marked parliamentary petitioning in the fifteenth century as still being essentially medieval in character.

The central question in the first part of the book focused on the place occupied by private petitions in parliament; in the second part, Dodd redirects his attention to the petitions and petitioners themselves, asking who petitioned parliament and why. While it was not completely closed to the peasantry, petitioning remained primarily the preserve of landholders, churchmen, and merchants. In this section, Dodd examines the meanings attached by petitioners to “grace” and “justice,” noting their interchangeability. He looks at county petitions as possible expressions of local identities and examines church-state relationships through clerical petitions. He studiesor culture more generally might find in these petitions. The book as a whole will be required reading for historians of parliament and of late medieval kingship. Comfortably navigating both institutional and cultural history, Dodd demonstrates a deft mastery of his sources and provides a work that well repays the reading.