This exemplary collection of essays examines medieval supplicants from all walks of life, highlighting how petitioners appealed to both secular and ecclesiastical authorities. As such, it is one of the few works of legal history that attempts to reconcile the (sometimes disparate) historiographies of church law and royal or secular law. Together, the ten essays cover quite a bit of ground. These include contributions on the practice of petitioning for pardons—including those for homicide and other infractions (those by Kirsi Salonen and Helen Lacey), essays on strategies and patterns of litigation in petitions to the crown or parliament (those by Anthony Musson, Matthew Phillips, and Gwilym Dodd), petitions seeking to recover church property lost during war or other forms of violence (those by Shelagh Sneddon and Philippa M. Hoskin), ecclesiastical petitions involving benefices and marriage disputes (those by Thomas W. Smith and Frederick J. G. Pederson), and an essay on the authorship and legal training of scribes responsible for composing petitions (by Helen Killick).

This book paints a broader, more holistic picture of petitioners and the interactions they had with various officials and institutions in late medieval England. One of its strengths is that many of the contributors are concerned with histories “from below,” which draws out how non-elite individuals (through intermediaries) used effective strategies in formulating their petitions to achieve specific ends. Lacey's focus on the gendered dimension of petitioning, showing how only a small number of petitioners were women, is also particularly illuminating. Additionally, the essays draw on a deep well of archival documents that illustrate the careful deployment of legal rhetoric in petitions and how the language of supplication changed over time and in different contexts.