Making Requests

Who sued in the Court of Requests? This a question so far unasked of the early Henrician period. To date, the most extensive discussion of this subject from the perspective of Requests itself is Stretton's study of women's litigation in the Elizabethan Requests. Adding considerable nuance to statements made elsewhere about the Requests jurisdiction, Stretton concludes that it was “not a court for the genuinely or habitually poor,” but that the masters of Requests were determined, where possible, to assist those truly in need. He defines many of the court's litigants in that period as the “temporarily poor”; they had been made poor by the actions of their opponents or by the bringing of previous suits at the common law, but might otherwise have been comfortably well-off.Footnote ³⁴

Following the example of Stretton's exploration of the path to litigation, it is possible to ascertain who could have used the early-Tudor Court of Requests by assessing evidence within the court's books and pleadings on the costs of litigation, the amounts disputed, and the court's efforts to financially assist its litigants. This analysis suggests that the resources required to make the move from localized action to the higher jurisdiction of Requests were such that the demography of litigants there was likely to have been practically more limited than contemporary ideals called for.

There is some evidence that society's poorest could access justice in the early sixteenth-century legal system. The de facto social and economic limit for such action was theoretically lowered by the potential for petitioners to be admitted to sue in forma pauperis (in the form of a pauper). Following on from various similar canon law provisions, a statute of in forma pauperis passed in the 1495 Parliament declared that “such persons as are poore,” who “be not of abilite ne pouer to sue according to the laues of this lond,” would from henceforth have access to original writs and legal counsel without charge when pursuing private cases before the king's justices.Footnote ³⁵ The statute applied the provisions to any “Courtes of Recorde where any suche suetis shalbe.”Footnote ³⁶

There is no explicit contemporary statement on whether Requests was or was not a court of record, it should be noted. At least one law reading from near the turn of the sixteenth century complicates any simple connection between the administration of common law or the “law of the land” and courts of record, and the corollary that equity or conscience courts were therefore not of record.Footnote ³⁷ Yet courts not of record seem to have been defined partly by their relative freedom from the maxims of the common law and their exemption from setting precedent for anyone other than the relevant parties through their judgments.Footnote ³⁸ Chancery was accepted as being not of record on these grounds by Christopher St German in the early 1530s, and given the similarities between the two in terms of procedure and jurisdiction, it seems probable that Requests was viewed in the same way.Footnote ³⁹ Regardless, as the main council proposed in 1509 to shift the facility of free counsel for poor people into the regular common law courts, it seems that by that time suits in forma pauperis had come to be associated with the controversial conciliar tribunals, perhaps including Requests, which the same proposals attempted to abolish.Footnote ⁴⁰

Admissions in forma pauperis to Requests are difficult to quantify with any certainty, as they are identifiable only by the notation of the word “pauper” on the dorse of the petition.Footnote ⁴¹ Amid the entire Henrician pleadings archive there are twenty-eight such admissions in forma pauperis so far discovered, with twenty-three dating from 1515 to 1525.Footnote ⁴² In comparison with the twenty-three in forma pauperis admissions in Requests, Guy found only two in Star Chamber for the whole of Thomas Wolsey's ascendancy between 1515 and 1529, while Metzger identified “two dozen” in Chancery in the same period.Footnote ⁴³ Of course, cases in each of these courts for which there are no extant petitions may well contain no other trace that process was offered for free. The possibility that requests and admissions in forma pauperis were otherwise made verbally cannot therefore be discounted.

Otherwise, the fact that the Court of Requests formally authorized admissions in forma pauperis through these notes, and that so few of them appear within the surviving archive, suggests that most petitioners to the court were not truly poor. Yet it also demonstrates that the court at least had a means for serving those considered to be poor, and that it perhaps acted on those means more often than the other discretionary justice courts did. Moreover, the councillors and masters of Requests sought to practically preserve the ideal that Requests was for a lower section of society, partly by excluding the better-off from suing there, although the threshold and measure for this remained markedly vague. Toward the end of Henry VIII's reign, an inventory of “orders and Rules” of the court produced by one of the first masters, Robert Dacres, stated that “all gentlemen which bringe Complaintes to the Kinges Grace” were “greatlie to the hinderaunce of poore mens causes” and should seek remedy at the common law. Frustratingly, the surviving manuscripts of Dacres's orders have only gaps where the thresholds for lands, goods, and chattels ought to have been entered.Footnote ⁴⁴ On a couple of occasions before the creation of these regulations, the councillors in Requests remitted those petitioners found to be not truly poor to the common law.Footnote ⁴⁵ In 1517, for example, they sent a case to the common law because “[the petitioner] ys a gent and possessed of lands and tenements to the yerely value of xl li.”Footnote ⁴⁶ This indicates that attempts to present as poor could be unsuccessful, and confirms that landed income partly formed the basis for conceptions of wealth in the court, although as ₤40 has been shown to be a monetary estimation of worth associated with the gentry in the sixteenth century, it is perhaps unlikely to represent the threshold between paupers and other suitors in Requests.Footnote ⁴⁷

The concentration of known admissions in forma pauperis to the court in the late 1510s coincided with the emergence of the royal household clergy as its principal administrators and judges. We might therefore look speculatively to the heritage of such provisions in Roman civil law and canon law for evidence of its application in the court. The church courts and the advocates employed there were certainly expected to serve the poor for free, and Richard Helmholz finds evidence of in forma pauperum admissions in the act books from London and York within the first decade of the sixteenth century, albeit infrequently.Footnote ⁴⁸ By the late sixteenth century, the threshold for suing in forma pauperis in the church courts was 40s in goods, and it is plausible that a similar limit may have applied in Requests.Footnote ⁴⁹ Otherwise, it may simply be the case that, as in the canon-law decretals on the same subject, a pauper from the perspective of any given court was someone who could not afford the costs of legal counsel and other aspects of procedure in that court.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the absence of firmer, more direct comparisons, then, it might be suggested that as the majority of the recorded admissions were signed off on by either John Veisy (dean of the Chapel Royal 1515–19, trained in civil law), John Clerk (dean 1519–23, a canonist), or John Stokesley (royal almoner, c.1521–23, a doctor of divinity) it is possible that the Requests administration of in forma pauperis provisions was performed with such civil and canon law concerns for relative costs in mind.

What were the costs paid by the vast majority of parties at Requests? The bills of petitioners’ costs extant in the court's archives, dating mostly to the later reign of Henry VIII, tell us that the drawing up and engrossing of a bill of complaint by the petitioner's counsel could cost approximately 3s 8d, perhaps approximately 1s more than in the fifteenth-century court of Common Pleas.Footnote ⁵¹ Privy seals for appearance, the main process issued by the court and that most frequently requested within petitions, required payment of somewhere between 6s 8d and 7s 4d.Footnote ⁵² A commission could cost as much as 6s 8d, even if “nothyng was don by the commissioners,” complained John Copinger in 1531.Footnote ⁵³ There was even a price for having final decisions recorded in the order book, if this was felt to be necessary. In the dispute between the girdler Alex Arnold and haberdasher William Marler in 1516, the arbitrators declared that “eyther of the parties shal pay for the makyng & engrosyng of thys our awarde xvi d of good and lawfull money,” therefore 2s 8d in total, or approximately 4 days’ worth of wages for skilled tradesmen.Footnote ⁵⁴

The most substantial and variable charges for litigation were those borne for travel and accommodation to sue to the court in the first place and to undertake a commission. Although the books suggest that the councillors in Requests increasingly sat for hearings at Westminster, and only occasionally at Greenwich, Windsor, and Woodstock, litigant accounts tell us that petitions were still exhibited on a day-to-day basis wherever the royal entourage might be. In a particularly extreme case from early 1518, John Hannibal from Canterbury in Kent said that he had “suyd unto yor noble grace at yor manor of Newhall& [was commanded] to gyve attendance at Wyndsore”; later, he “sued unto yor noble grace at yor manor of Wodstoke & twyse to Hampton Corte & v tymes to Grenewich for [his] remedy.”Footnote ⁵⁵

There is unfortunately no evidence for Hannibal's costs for following the court around in this manner, but in a case between Thomas and Joan Strachey and the Prior of Royston in Hertfordshire in 1518 the petitioners claimed that the “suyt at London,” which had involved travelling approximately 64 kilometres to the city with their chosen witnesses, had cost more than ₤40.Footnote ⁵⁶ Another suit in 1542 allegedly involved numerous trips and accommodation for men and horses, each ranging from 5s 2d to 12s.Footnote ⁵⁷ On average, petitioners submitting bills of expenses claimed to have paid ₤1–₤2 per term. Edmund White sued Thomas Bacon for seven terms in the court between 1538 and 1540, spending, he claimed, a total of £23, 14s, and 10d, or more than 2 years’ wages.Footnote ⁵⁸ An effort was generally made on the part of the council and the commissioners to have a result by the following return date, and a case length of approximately 6 months from pleading to order was typical for the 1510s and 1520s. Yet some, such as the case brought by the yeoman William Barney against merchants John Sturges and Gregory Cause over the manor of Martham in Norfolk, which remained in Requests for 6 years between 1517 and 1523, must have been particularly expensive over the long run. Costs for travel and access to the court had notable effects on the general profile of Requests litigants in the years 1515–25. Across all the catalogued petitions to Requests in the Henrician period, 10% of those with stated origin locations derived from Middlesex, with East Anglia and the Home Counties contributing approximately 4–5% each. Unsurprisingly, the northernmost counties provided fewer than ten cases each.Footnote ⁵⁹

The councillors sitting as judges could offset the costs associated with accessing the court by awarding compensation to the winning party, even in the absence of sanctioned in forma pauperis provision. Of the 130 final orders made in the years 1515–c. 1525, thirty-five saw recompense offered to either the petitioner or the respondent for their legal charges. On average, the value awarded was approximately ₤3 (60s), although by far the most typical amount given was a standard 40s, to be paid by the losing party. Nevertheless, recompense was only infrequent—present in just under a third of orders—and there was an evident discrepancy between fees that the court would oblige parties to reimburse (probably only the money owed to clerks and counsel) and those claimed by the parties in the aforementioned bills of costs. This is compounded by the fact that although the court generally gauged cases to have cost 40s, or ₤2, the median disputed value within the cases examined here was approximately ₤8 of goods, lands, or debts. Although some of the values stated in the final decrees entered between 1515 and 1525 were exceptionally high, including a £180 dowry and £218 for forty pieces of tin, well over half of the values given were under ₤10, and a few cases argued over amounts less than ₤1.Footnote ⁶⁰ With case costs potentially entering double figures in pounds, but recompense remaining relatively meager, the stakes in Requests could be quite high for petitioners. This is not to mention that those with a great enough income to afford a suit risked remittal elsewhere under the rules of the court.

Adding these figures to what we know of legal costs more widely indicates that those considered within the category of “pauper” in the early sixteenth century were probably as unable to sue in Requests and the other conciliar courts as they were in the common law or church courts without financial assistance. A few surviving Requests petitions dating to after the period of interest here stated that the petitioner was too poor to “sewe for redresse … in yor Chancery,” suggesting that Requests was at least perceived to be the less expensive of the two main courts of conscience.Footnote ⁶¹ Elsewhere, Guy's estimates for Star Chamber in c.1530 reveal that the cumulative total for that court's fees in a single case was likely to be approximately 40s, about the same as was estimated by the councillors in Requests for their own process.Footnote ⁶² Helmholz's brief consideration of fees for marriage litigation in the late-medieval Canterbury and Lichfield act books featured similar costs, between 25 and 55s.Footnote ⁶³ Meanwhile, common-law court fees inclusive of travel expenses, clerical costs, and fees for legal expertise have been shown by Eric Ives to be considerably higher than a standard Requests case, falling anywhere between £7 16s 7 ½ d and £58 4s 8d.Footnote ⁶⁴

Requests was, therefore, not drastically cheaper for the poor than other avenues for redress, particularly given the costs of following the attendant council. What was the benefit of suing in Requests, then? Of course, in some cases, turning to any of the conciliar courts of conscience was necessitated by case type, or else by the imposition of upper limits on case values at local and manorial courts.Footnote ⁶⁵ Otherwise, suits at the conciliar courts were often intended to supplement increasingly typical actions of trespass sued in the common-law courts or to appeal judgments made in manorial and urban courts, whether vexatiously or in order to prompt localized arbitration. For example, the case between William Hokemore and Devonshire landlord Sir Edward Pomeroy brought before Requests in 1518 was said to have already been heard by a jury of twelve men in an assize court in Exeter, the verdict of which was ignored by the accused.Footnote ⁶⁶ That petitioners navigated the problems of access and their associated fees for the potential remedies of Requests even in cases of apparently small value demonstrates, perhaps, the perceived benefits of its itinerant nature, its reasonably speedy process, and its operation under the royal privy and signet seals, which may have represented considerable leverage against obstinate but powerful local rivals.

We might also consider the general litigiousness of petitioners to Requests. Limited research suggests that they were often capable of affording and pursuing a suit there and in other central courts as well. A brief search of the catalogues for Chancery, Star Chamber, and Requests pleadings at The National Archives reveals that out of the ninety-six principal petitioners emerging from the sample of 100 petitions, at least seventeen at some point also sued different cases at the other discretionary courts, and that figure would likely be higher if the plea rolls of Common Pleas and King's Bench were also surveyed. For example, John Bonyfaunte of Devonshire, who sued Laurence Dobell at Requests in 1522, brought actions against the Mayor of Exeter as well as the shoemaker Robert Northway, among others, in Chancery at approximately the same time.Footnote ⁶⁷ Separate to a Requests suit, Anthony Complay sued for his wages from Geoffrey Lobbes and John Palmer in Star Chamber.Footnote ⁶⁸ Meanwhile, the widow Joan Sylvester used Requests not only to pursue Thomas Corby but also Robert Wright and his wife over lands in Bexley in Kent.Footnote ⁶⁹ At least twenty-nine petitioners from the same sample repeatedly submitted the same complaint, both in Requests itself and the other courts. William Barney exhibited his case against Sturges and Cause twice to Requests, in c. 1516 and then again in 1521, and once to Star Chamber, whereas a dispute between the Halswell family and Richard Strode over lands in Brixton, Devon, spilled into Requests, Chancery, and Star Chamber across several decades.Footnote ⁷⁰

Whereas Guy and others have characterized Requests as a court properly for the poor and incapable, then, we might alternatively observe that appealing to the councillors in Requests was often part of a strategic and considered use of the early sixteenth-century legal system by experienced and financially capable litigants. Whatever the case, the process of submitting a petition to the higher courts entailed a potentially long and costly journey to approach the council at Westminster or the surrounding area and limited opportunities for recompense, most likely excluding the truly poor in most instances.

Litigant Description and Self-Description

Although we may thus infer who could use Requests, the court's extensive records offer us more concrete evidence as to who did litigate there, allowing us to create something of a demographic picture of the court in the decade under investigation. In prior studies of the discretionary courts and their litigants, petitions have been some of the primary materials for such data; in the case of Star Chamber and the medieval Chancery this is because they are the only materials routinely available. For Requests, however, we can also use the relatively coherent, extensive, and clearly dated books of appearances and final orders. Created by the clerks and produced during sittings of the court, both the Latin entries recording the appearance of respondents and the English final decrees give the names and sometimes the occupational or status information for the petitioners and respondents.

In the 1,422 entries for the 1,287 individual cases recorded in the three Requests order books surviving for the period 1515–25, we find 1,393 individual petitioners and 1,615 respondents.Footnote ⁷¹ Many of the individual cases were given entries for multiple different stages of the process (including the initial appearance of the respondent, interlocutory order, and final decree), and many state more than one petitioner or respondent. The books are not entirely consistent in their recording of party statuses. In only forty-eight entries are the status of both petitioner and respondent stated. Far more often, the entries provide a descriptor for only one of the two parties: in 93 instances only the petitioner and in 349 only the respondent. This discrepancy is because of the predominance in the books of entries recording the respondents’ initial attendance upon a privy seal summons, in which the petitioner was often not named. Across those instances in which one or both of the parties are so described, we find forty-nine distinct status or occupational descriptors, ranging from noblemen and gentlemen down to craftsmen such as brewers and a scythe smith.

Table 1 divides the defined status descriptors found in the Requests books for its principal parties into five clear groups: civic officers, clergy, crafts and service people, those of landed status, and professionals. Admittedly, some of these imposed categories are especially capacious. Although the Requests books do not provide enough evidence to delineate further, those individuals included under the “Crafts, Trades, & Services” heading varied from those of citizen or livery status, such as merchant tailors, to those in unincorporated trades. This would reflect the findings of Alexandra Shepard's work on expressions of worth in the second half of the sixteenth century, which demonstrated that those in crafts or trades provided statements of worth rounded to values ranging from 40s up to ₤20.Footnote ⁷² Similarly, the landholdings of those considered to be of “Landed Status,” although not stated in the records here, also presumably varied greatly.

Table 1

Petitioner and Respondent Occupation/Status Descriptors Recorded in the Order Books of the English Court of Requests between 1515 and 1525

Source: REQ1/4, REQ1/104, REQ1/105, and REQ1/5, and fragments in REQ3/22, 3/29, and 3/30.

These data suggest that petitioners were very commonly from the clerical branch. “Clericus” is one of the most frequent identifiers to be found for both petitioners and respondents across the Latin appearance registers and the decrees within the Court's books, although we also find numerous priors, prioresses, deans, and abbots. On most occasions the house or organization with which a petitioning clergyman was associated went unmentioned in the books, hindering any attempts to trace the distribution of wealth of individuals in this grouping. One of the few instances in which this information was recorded is the suit in 1518 of the Prior of Thurgarton in Nottinghamshire, a relatively wealthy monastery according to valuations made in the 1530s.Footnote ⁷³ Haskett found that those of “ecclesiastical office” made up 28% of men suing to the late-medieval Chancery, with the general prominence in that category of priests and priors/prioresses defending their houses roughly matching the findings in Requests. As to their apparent predominance in Requests, it ought to be noted that as members of the clergy were more wholly defined by their relation to the ecclesiastical hierarchy and therefore their status designation, and as the councillors of the court were themselves clergymen, it may be that ecclesiastical offices are over-represented in the records, as Haskett argued of his data as well.Footnote ⁷⁴

Craftsmen and traders were four times less likely to appear regularly before the court than the clergy, although merchants of varying wealth sought judgment in relation to matters of confidence and trust. Civic officers emerged less frequently as complainants than they did as the accused, reflecting the aim of discretionary justice in part to regulate the activities of local royal officials. They were only slightly less present than those of landed status and professionals, who also seem from these data to have found little use for the court as petitioners even though they would have possessed the means to reach the later stages of a suit. This observation stands in significant contrast to the demography of Chancery, where men of “lay rank,” including esquires, knights, gentlemen, and yeomen represented 43% of all male parties in the court.Footnote ⁷⁵

Beyond these descriptors, 149 (more than 10%) of petitioners recorded in the books in this period were women. Ninety-two of those women appeared as sole petitioners, whereas fifty-three were mentioned as the wives of the main petitioner, two acted as main petitioners alongside unnamed others, and one woman, a widow, was an additional petitioner. Five of the sole female petitioners were prioresses, but overall, forty-one of the sole female petitioners were recorded as widows. In fact, as Table 1 reveals, the most common single status descriptor for petitioners across the books was “widow,” with forty-two recorded. Most widows in the court acted as executors for their late husbands’ wills, just as many of the women named as wives were featured on the basis that their remarriage following widowhood meant that their new husbands could stake a claim to the assets associated with that original marriage. Although it was one of the standard three legal categories for women, alongside maid and wife, from the historian's perspective the descriptor “widow” is a levelling term that encompassed women occupying a range of different economic and social positions. One of the women so described in the books was entitled as a lady, and another was a dame, whereas in the petition sample the widow Joan Tolby was poor enough to be admitted to sue in forma pauperis.Footnote ⁷⁶ The apparent predominance of designated widows in Requests may relate to its nature as an expressly royal court: widows, alongside orphans and strangers, were often singled out in epithets and tracts on the rightful duty and charity of the king during this period.Footnote ⁷⁷ In comparison with other courts, however, the number of women in Requests was not especially high. According to Haskett's data, women made up 21% of all petitioners to the late-medieval Chancery, compared with 10% in Requests, and Brooks found that widows comprised 6% and 9% of plaintiffs in King's Bench and Common Pleas, respectively, in 1560 compared with just 3% in Requests.Footnote ⁷⁸

Among the respondents, individuals of landed status overtake the otherwise sizeable category of the clergy considerably and see a tenfold increase compared with their presence as petitioners. The most common single descriptor among respondents is “generosus,” or gentleman, a term used by a range of professionals as well as those of gentle birth, with the identifier “clericus” again not far behind, followed then by esquires, widows, abbots, and knights. From Table 1 it is evident that respondents tended to be higher on the social scale than petitioners. This is supported by the forty-eight cases for which the order books provide us with clear, unambiguous descriptors for both the petitioner and the respondent. Forty-five percent of these cases appear to show petitioners suing opponents of similar status as themselves, including a girdler against a haberdasher, a prior suing a prior, and a gentleman bringing action against another gentleman. Even when assuming that the cases in the order books represent only those parties with the means to reach the final stages of the court's process, the larger proportion of the forty-eight cases with listed statuses for petitioner and accused—47%—still consists of petitioners suing someone of a higher status than themselves, including priors suing noblemen, yeomen suing gentlemen, and gentlemen suing knights. Meanwhile, only 8% of these cases contain instances of respondents of a lower social status than the petitioner, largely supporting the claim that Requests might function as a court for the poor and disadvantaged. On the surface, this suggests that, like Star Chamber, Requests provided an opportunity to challenge powerful landholders and officials; punishing “the ryche,” as Hall accused the conciliar courts of doing, perhaps.Footnote ⁷⁹

A more nuanced understanding of the data set drawn from the order books may be achieved by turning to a smaller sample of the extant petitions to the court. Doing so not only allows us to examine litigant experience at multiple stages of the process, from the initial supplication through to the final appearances before the councillors, but also helps offset issues with the Requests archives, wherein most cases that appear through petitions might never have been recorded in the order books and vice versa. For the purposes of this analysis, 100 petitions have been selected from the second and third classes of the Requests archive. This number represents approximately a quarter to a third of the catalogued pleadings material for the chosen decade. The petitions have been selected unsystematically and were drawn from the archive based primarily on the certainty of their date within the parameters of this study, which might be ascertained through the dates and signatures of the councillors written on the dorse, internal references to date, or the appearance of the same case in the order books. In other words, in order to best represent the contents and form of Requests petitions, the sample has not been constructed purely from those petitions with clear status descriptors. As such, considering both the order book data set and the sample of 100 petitions side by side reveals distinctions between description and self-description, certainly, but also reveals that all forms of defined description in Requests as well as in the other discretionary courts have their limitations as evidence for a demographic account. The 100 petitions feature 122 petitioners and 132 respondents, again with many cases including multiple parties on each side. They state a total of thirty-seven different status or occupational descriptors (Table 2).

Table 2

Petitioner and Respondent Occupation/Status Descriptors from 100 Sampled Petitions in the English Court of Requests between 1515 and 1525

Source: REQ 2: Pleadings and REQ 3: Miscellaneous Classes.

In many senses, the petition data confuse the picture provided by the data from the order books. Where the clergy appeared to be the most prominent group of petitioners and “widow” the largest individual group in the records of the clerks, the petitions instead suggest that craftspeople and tradespeople were the most likely to approach the court in the first place, just ahead of those of landed status and husbandmen. We find that “husbandman” and “yeoman” are the most frequent identifiers amongst petitioners, where they were hardly used at all to describe petitioners in the books. We also observe royal servants, including clerks of the signet and the royal ordnance, ushers and sewers of the king's chamber, a “gentleman of the king's chapel,” and yeomen of the guard, petitioning the court. Indeed, as it was derived from the attendant council, Requests naturally served those who, as a result of their attendance upon the king's person, could claim the advantages of accessing the extraordinary royal justice of Requests under the justification that they “cannot conveniently attend at Westminster” or elsewhere to wage their law.Footnote ⁸⁰

It is possible that such discrepancies between the order book and petition data sets exist because husbandmen, yeomen, and royal servants did not take their suits as far as appearances before the council. But given that they would likely have possessed the means to do so, it is equally plausible that petitioners identified themselves in ways that the clerks and councillors did not feel the need to record. Further insight into the statement and recording of status descriptors, and particularly the court's reception of those descriptors, is gained by examining the sixty-two cases represented in the petition sample that also appear as entries in the order books. In thirty-five of these cases, the petitioner offered some form of self-description, but this was carried through to their entries in the order books in only five instances, in cases brought by widows and priests. Otherwise, the general tendency was for both petitioner and respondent descriptors used in the petitions to go unmentioned in the books. This was especially the case for menial royal servants and for tradespeople. In the case brought by Anthony Complay against the prior William Browne, which moved through the court in 1519, Complay described himself as a “surgeon” in his petition, but in the final decree, he was given no status whatsoever.Footnote ⁸¹

The effect or purpose of this apparent downplaying of litigant status by the councillors and clerks of the court, deliberate or otherwise, is unclear. Generally, however, the statuses of respondents identified as clergymen, esquires, knights, and gentlemen in the petitions were more likely to be recorded in the books. To a small number of respondents, the clerks applied the descriptor “generosus,” even where it had not been ascribed to them in the original petition. One way of reading this is that whereas litigants sought to assert their affinity to flexible categories of social distinction, with relation to landholding or royal service, the court itself seems to have been far less concerned with ascribing statuses, recording descriptors mostly when individuals had connections to the ecclesiastical hierarchy or claims to gentility, with only the neutral, legal status of widowhood holding ground in both contexts.

Assessing how individuals of specific statuses moved through the court's process in more detail is made difficult by the differing treatment of ascriptions of status across the two record sets. What can be said is that those individuals with descriptors recorded on a similar basis in both data sets made up a slightly smaller proportion of total litigants in the final stages of the process than they did at the beginning, with clergymen dropping from 4% of the total petitioners to 3.5% in the books, and widows from approximately 5% to 3%. It is likely that they dropped their suits or were otherwise dismissed from the court at an intermediary point. The reasons for this are myriad, of course, and we should certainly not overlook factors such as successful arbitration or the possibility that the case was vexatious in the first place. However, the higher proportion of individuals of expected substantial worth, such as gentlemen, in the books than in the petitions supports the argument that means dictated full use of the court's process.

A comparative demography of the early-Tudor conciliar courts may be outlined by examining the data of Tables 1 and 2 alongside the broader analyses provided by Haskett for Chancery and Guy for Star Chamber. Haskett found 8,000 entries with distinct occupations in Chancery from the fifteenth century through to the 1530s. As we have seen, he concluded that most of the Chancery petitioners were “esquires, knights, merchants, clerks, mayors and bailiffs,” “the middle ranks of English society,” whereas women were increasingly appearing there, usually as widows.Footnote ⁸² Guy's analysis of Star Chamber proceedings for 1515 to 1529 indicated that 16% of petitioners were of the status of “gentleman or above,” and 14% were “professional and clergy,” but the largest category was “yeomen, husbandmen, craftsmen, labourers” at 18%. Guy reflected that under Wolsey “Star Chamber plaintiffs tended to come from the upper echelons of society.”Footnote ⁸³ Who precisely belonged to the “upper echelons” in Guy's short analysis is unclear, although he stated that the nobility only rarely used the court; moreover, he and Haskett appear to have had different senses of which professions and occupations belonged to the “middle” and “upper” classes.

To summarize, combining inferred evidence with empirical data on petitioner and respondent statuses in Requests reveals that there was, in comparison with Star Chamber, a general absence of the proper “upper echelons”—specifically, noblemen and members of the upper gentry—as petitioners there near the time of the “popularization” of discretionary justice in the 1510s and 1520s. This leads to the conclusion that Requests did, in real terms, serve a relatively lower sector of society than did the other major conciliar courts. However, the litigants there were not “poor people” by the technical standards of per annum income from lands and value of goods typically expressed in those contemporary “state-sponsored attempts to demarcate social boundaries,” such as sumptuary legislation.Footnote ⁸⁴ The court served wealthy widows and ecclesiastics in matters of confidence, traders and craftsmen in their mercantile dealings, and landholders of varying degrees in their territorial disputes. In all, and with the potential provision for in forma pauperis in mind, Requests offered legal remedy to a group of people marginally less economically stable than did Chancery and Star Chamber during this period, although these were still perhaps the only theoretically poor people that central justice, especially in its itinerant form, would and could ever realistically entertain. The reality of a true “court of poor men's causes” along the lines of contemporary ideals at this time may, from this evidence, seem doubtful.

Petitioning and Poverty

We should not, however, overlook the fact that the majority of individuals represented in the order books were not given any clear social identification, as the capacious “unknown” categories in Tables 1 and 2 show. If the 349 order book entries with only respondent status given are combined with the 931 entries that record no status or occupational descriptions for either the petitioner or the respondent, we find that the petitioner is not described in 1,280 instances, or in 90% of the total 1,422 order book entries. In the 100 sampled petitions, 57% of petitioners opted not to define themselves socially or economically when they approached the court, as Table 2 indicates. A substantial lack of clear statements on status was also a feature of demographic studies using petitions in Chancery and Star Chamber, although it was one that went largely unaddressed: Guy was transparent about the fact that almost 44% of the cases he sampled did not provide any indication of litigant status; Haskett, although less explicit, mentioned that of 18,173 “principals,” 8,000 entries provided information on occupation.Footnote ⁸⁵ Instead, the flexible pleadings procedure of the conciliar courts, and particularly of Requests, allowed litigants and respondents, through the advice of their legal counsel, to craft more subtle narratives about their social position, which also evoked certain expectations about governance and justice. The petition sample can provide a deeper and more textured understanding of how many of the “unknowns,” and some of those who did offer forms of self-description, defined their own status.

Even before the Court of Requests’ self-definition by the end of the 1520s as a court for the poor and socially vulnerable, petitioners perhaps hoped to be perceived as poor by omitting any information about their livelihood or status. This was in contrast to their strategies in law courts closer to home, where, as Shepard's analysis of church court depositions has shown, witnesses often used reasonably accurate estimates of worth in order to avoid being seen as in any way destitute so as to sustain networks of credit and trust.Footnote ⁸⁶ Instead, approaching the king and his councillors—who stood apart from, and thus as arbiters for, local issues—as a petitioner in these earlier years seems to have required a language describing relative poverty and power that may, especially in the case of the seventeen litigants active in a range of courts, have constituted a fictive or exaggerated self-description designed to help navigate the legal network and the conscience-based ends of discretionary justice. In other words, it paid to be poor in Requests.

Although 57% of the Requests petitioners examined did not provide any form of identification, more than 60% of the 100 petitioners employed a claim to poverty of some form when justifying their petitions to king and council. Often this was simply expressed in the statement that the litigant was a “pore” orator, suppliant, or subject before the king. This was standard in the conciliar courts: the phrase “pore orator” was common also in bills sent to Chancery and Star Chamber, indicating that it was used regardless of jurisdiction and probably to emphasize deference to authority and a position of neediness rather than a precise economic situation. However, in Requests, this self-definition as poor regularly extended beyond the introduction of the petition and into the justification in the final lines, where petitioners formulated a reason for not having been able to approach the common law and staked their claim to the remedy of extraordinary royal justice.

Such claims to poverty made in these justifications could be especially abject in Requests. In forty-four of the sampled petitions, the petitioners decried their “extreme” or “utter undoing” and “disherison,” and, in a few instances, also the “utter disinheriting of yor said suppliants and ther children for ever.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Sometimes this poverty was expressed as though it were a pre-existing or general state: “yor pore orator [is] a pore man,” for example.Footnote ⁸⁸ Occasionally, complainants would be slightly more specific in stating that they lacked “substans,” by which they appeared to mean physical possessions and goods. This was the case for the imprisoned William Tailor, who was “without comfort of substaunce of any his owen goods to help or releyve hym.”Footnote ⁸⁹ William Stone described himself as “having lytell to lyfe by but only the sayd close” that was in dispute between him and Simon Mounford in 1522.Footnote ⁹⁰

More often, however, it was either the actions of the accused, the travelling to the location of the dispute, or the suing of the case in local courts that had allegedly caused the petitioners to “spend all ther money.”Footnote ⁹¹ In cases in which litigants had been forcibly removed from their own property, they might occasionally suggest that they had lost their homes, whether through genuine dispossession or fear for their lives, “so that in no wyse [they] witteth not where to abide.”Footnote ⁹² Just as clear statements on social position were only occasionally included, any loss that petitioners claimed to have experienced as part of their poverty was rarely quantified beyond the standard phrase “to their great losse.” Exceptions to this rule within the sample here include William Barney's claim that he and his wife had lost at least ₤13, and Philippa Crycheley's reference to having spent £100 in the space of a 16 year dispute.Footnote ⁹³

Poverty was not, however, always expressed simply in economic terms. In fact, the 100 petitions analyzed here display a range of tactics for locating their complainants within the overlapping social hierarchies of sixteenth-century England, usually in a position of disadvantage.Footnote ⁹⁴ Age was one such hierarchy: Thomas More, a clerk from Gloucestershire, described himself as a “right aged” and sick man, unable to work, John Jacob said he was “of thage of lxx yere,” and Mary Oneslowe revealed that she was a “pore widow of the age of lxxxij.”Footnote ⁹⁵ John Bonyfaunt went further, prefacing his request for a commission to investigate his case against Laurence Dobell with the claim that “yor sayd Orator ys agyd” and, therefore, “nat able to ryde from those partes to com byfor yor grace.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Gender was a less common factor, although it could intersect with age and experience, as in the case of the widow Agnes Swetyng, who appealed on the basis that she was an “Innocent woman no expert in worldly business.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Men of working age might emphasize the pressing nature of their claimed destitution by stating their responsibility for their wives and children, particularly in terms of lost productivity as a result of land dispossession.Footnote ⁹⁸ In any case, the need to justify approaching the royal council in Requests rather than the common law courts meant that the impact that this poverty had had on seeking a legal remedy was usually the key point, such that all of the petitions examined here made a claim to the effect that “yor seyde Orator is very poore & not abyll nor of power [or substance] to sue for his remedy.”

More prominent than self-description by the petitioners themselves was a discourse of relative poverty, power, and vulnerability, and of general social disparity between petitioner and respondent. Many petitioners used the justification section to make a direct and explicit comparison between the status and worth of the two principal parties in the case. Again, this disparity often was expressly about money. For example, in a suit between Alexander Abraham and William Gery starting in 1517, the bill of complaint sought the court's remedies on the basis that the “suppliants are very pore and the said William Gyry of great riches, so that your said suppliants be without remedy and not able to sue for redress hereof by course of your comen lawes.”Footnote ⁹⁹

In approximately 20% of the petitions sampled here, it was not just the wealth but the general “greatnes” of the respondent in comparison with the petitioner that was presented as the central reason why a litigant could not sue in the local courts. In 1519, William Selwyn pointed out that a remedy at common law was a hopeless ambition in his case, given that his opponent, William Stourton, fifth Baron Stourton, “is a grett lord of might and of suche possession and youre said orator butt a pore man.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Similarly, Edmund Langley complained that as his opponent, Lord Cobham, was a “lorde of name” and he a “very power man,” his lands being “in that countree where the power of the seid lord most ys,” he feared he “shall never recover … his seid enheritaunce by course of the kynges common lawes.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Friendship and alliance also played a part in social distinction. Compared with William Hokemore, Sir Edward Pomeroy was of the “grettist might power & frendshippe & alyens with yn the seid Countie.”Footnote ¹⁰² William Holt claimed that his opponent Richard Griswold was “a man of grett londes havyng many kynsmen frends & alyans and also of gret mayntenaunce within the said Countie of Wigorn and yor seid Orature but pore and had nother frends alyens nor acquentens within the same shere.”Footnote ¹⁰³ To the clerk Thomas More, the Marches of Wales seemed a place of “suche mayntenaunce and percialities of kindred and fryndes” that it was unlikely that he would ever gain “lawfull remedy” there.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The petition submitted by the widow Beatrice Alice against John and Peter Alice made explicit the connection between these localized power structures and the flaws of the common-law system when she stated that she “can have non indifferent trial in those partes by reason of the grete bearing maytenaunce & embracerie” of her opponents.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

It was not simply that litigants were truly destitute in most cases, nor even that they were “temporarily poor”; as a result of these local power dynamics, petitioners expressed fears of a continuing “impoverishing,” as opposed to a completed impoverishment, which they hoped the council would help to curb. Addressing the king directly in the final lines of their complaints, many petitioners made a direct appeal that “it may please your highness the premisses tenderly to consider youre pore Oratoure and his heyris be likely to be disherityd for ever more.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The prior of the “pore house of Penmon” in Anglesey declared in 1518 that if the king did not help to prevent the further decay of his poorhouse caused by the taking of their “milnestones” from the local quarry, then “your seid beydeman and all his brethren … shalbe compelled to departe from the seid house & to goo abeggyng for their lyvyng.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The key words here are “likely” and “shalbe”: these individuals were not yet poor, but would become so if the king and the councillors acting in his stead did not execute his expected duty as an arbiter and judge on the petitioner's behalf. This was a measure of poverty that therefore treated poverty itself not as a long-standing economic condition but as part of a recently inflicted struggle for power or title that could potentially result in downward social mobility. The litigants examined here, and those visible in the Requests archive more broadly, defined themselves against those around them as opposed to presenting a vision of a static society expressed only in terms of occupation or status descriptors.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

In describing these relative power dynamics, petitioning vocabularies might move beyond poverty and power and into the realm of morality, indicated through descriptions of opponents’ “unconscionable actions” akin to those observed by Haskett in bills to the late-medieval Chancery.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Petitioners sought conciliar assistance in defending the status quo of pre-existing local hierarchies against aberrations of maintenance and “extort power.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Respondents were often presented as behaving “to the perilous example of al other evil disposed persones.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Common to many of the petitions sampled here is the image of the untrustworthy opponent; respondents were variably said to have exhibited a “subtyll craft,” “covyn & craft,” “subtyll & contrived disceyt,” or “senyster meanes,” often in relation to their corruption of the common law process.Footnote ¹¹² Caylway and his associates were said to have acted in a “cruell and violent maner,” whereas a couple of respondents were said to have a “covetous mynd” or “appetite,” drawing on the vice of avarice and the pursuit of worldly goods.Footnote ¹¹³ Although the limited education and means of the poor were frequently associated with immorality and a tendency toward sin in early modern culture—in sumptuary legislation and in political treatises, for example—poor petitioners appealed to the conscience-based jurisdiction of Requests by setting themselves, as humble subjects of the king, against morally lax and potentially dangerous opponents.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In this sense they leaned into the alternative contemporary notion that the realm's most impoverished subjects might also be uniquely virtuous.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Overall, Requests was a “court of poor men's causes” prior to 1529 in the sense that it served those with some claim to relative societal disadvantages, including but not exclusive to economic poverty, under the principle of “right and good conscience.” Such conscience was not applied solely in terms of saving the respondent's own conscience, as it was in Chancery, nor only in cases for which no action existed at the common law. Indeed, Requests increasingly heard cases that might well have found remedy at the common law, including trespass, disseisin, and detinue. Petitioners therefore construed the court's conscience jurisdiction—interpreted as being at the discretion of the king himself—as pertaining to the more universal ideals of fairness, reason, and indifferent justice for all.

The forms of self-definition and representation as being relatively poor that were prominent within the Requests archives, beyond the clear descriptors that we might expect to find, were employed with this end in mind. In this sense, the above-described findings are largely consistent with the similar examinations of litigant experience and petitioning methods in the face of the king's own “grace” or justice in the work of Haskett.Footnote ¹¹⁶ What set Requests apart from Chancery and Star Chamber in the early sixteenth century was its practical as well as theoretical proximity to the king's person. By the late 1510s, it typically circulated around the royal residences alongside other aspects of performative rituals of divine kingship, including almsgiving and processions to services, and was principally administered by the dean of the Chapel Royal and the king's personal almoner. Therefore, its emphasis on conscience—in terms of a general virtue, the king's own conscience, and extraordinary judicial remedy—and a care for the poor may have seemed especially defined. The aforementioned concentration of in forma pauperis admissions in the decade studied here may well be evidence of the enhancement of these juristic principles, although it might also reflect the growing expectation of litigants that it was truly the poor man's court. Whatever the case, it was not just the litigants themselves, viewed biographically, but also the acknowledged purpose and ends of justice in the Court of Requests, that formulated the sense of a poor men's jurisdiction there.