In the late nineteenth century, the cataloguers in the Public Record Office (now The National Archives), created the artificial class SC8, a repository for more than 17,000 petitions, most of them from the late thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries, drawn from across the records of central government. This is not the only collection of medieval petitions in the Archives but it is the largest. Between 2003 and 2007, an AHRC project at the University of York, directed by Mark Ormrod, produced a searchable catalogue of SC8s and digitisation of the whole class, all of it available free online via the National Archives website. This volume of essays, drawn from two conferences held to publicise the project and its outcomes, gives some idea of the riches and possibilities of SC8s. As anyone who has studied any area of medieval political or governmental history knows, petitioning was a fundamental part of governing and of the relationship of rulers and ruled. The previous listing, dating to 1892, was wholly inadequate for proper searching of such a large class; now it can be done properly and this crucial source be fully exploited. One of the major benefits is that, as Gwilym Dodd shows – both here and in his book based on the petitions, Justice and grace – we can trace the location of the petitions before they were removed from their original archives. Other essays indicate some of the directions in which future research on the records might go. Two main areas emerge from the discussion: first, exploration of the petitioning system itself, from the standpoint of both the petitioners and the government, and, second, as with so many records of medieval English government, the enormous amount of information that they offer on the governed and their affairs; those who feature in the petitions, as the complainers or the complained about. Now that these records can be searched fully, their potential in this respect has been enormously increased. Readers of this Journal will want to know what in particular this volume and SC8s have to offer them. While there are two comparative essays focusing on Anglo-papal petitioning, the real interest lies in the content of the SC8s themselves. It is the laity who feature principally in the volume but it is clear that there is plenty here for ecclesiastical historians. For instance, the observation that, in the localities, great landowners could be both helpful intermediaries and the target of petitioners must surely apply equally to ecclesiastical corporations. More compelling still are the passing references which indicate the riches of these records: the petitions of great churchmen to the parliament that deposed Edward ii at one end of the scale and, at the other, the information that the most prominent prisoner in Nottingham gaol, who may have masterminded the prisoners' petition of c.1329–30, was a Nottinghamshire knight who subsequently successfully pleaded benefit of clergy. Now that it has been rendered so easy to access and to search, no-one with an interest in the English Church and clergy in this period should neglect this invaluable source.