Based upon the author's doctoral dissertation, completed at the University of York in 2005, this book examines the multiple uses of the royal pardon in fourteenth-century England. The work draws upon both archival and literary sources, including some 500 petitions for pardon, nearly 40,000 letters patent, and such texts as sermons and outlaw ballads, to demonstrate that royal mercy impinged upon medieval society well beyond the law courts. Part 1 examines individual pardons, providing valuable detail on the supplicants, intercessors, and sovereigns involved in the pardoning process. Included here are pardons for debt, a subcategory often omitted from studies focused on the criminal law alone. Part 2 turns to general pardons. Individual chapters provide, among other things, detailed analyses of the pardons given after the Peasants’ Revolt and the Appellants’ uprising. Of particular value is the examination of Edward III's innovation in granting a comprehensive statutory pardon to celebrate his jubilee in 1377. Beyond serving as an enduring precedent, this measure also allowed the king to respond to complaints about feudal exactions without any lasting reduction of his prerogative. General pardons served as conduits for negotiation, and like pardons more generally, as tools for reconciliation. Overall, the author detects a “change in emphasis away from the idea that the offender was being restored into the feudal relationship with his lord and towards the idea that he was being readmitted into the king's peace.” (93) Four appendices complete the volume, including lists of all known intercessors for pardon that allow fascinating and potentially important insight into the influence held by some members of the fourteenth-century polity.

The treatment of these subjects is consistently careful and considered. This reviewer's criticisms are merely based on occasionally wanting more. The study draws upon several historiographical strands, including the Warwick school of legal history associated with E. P. Thompson and Douglas Hay, debates about the degree and significance of disorder in the fourteenth century, and more generally the “new constitutional history” of the late Middle Ages. How this study in turn contributes to these ongoing discussions could be made more explicit. As one aim of the study is to examine the pardon as a link between Crown and subjects, one might wish for more on the briefly mentioned devolution of pardoning powers to some of those subjects. Given the fruitful repudiation of older approaches that condemned the pardon as violating transcendent standards of justice, one might want a more developed discussion of why Richard II's use of the pardon with the Lords Appellant should nonetheless be considered a subversion of guiding principles. Above all, however, this reviewer would like to see more on the ways in which royal pardons drew upon religious discourse and ecclesiastical practice.

Running throughout the book are a number of fascinating and perceptive observations about such links. The author compares the king's pardons with indulgences, highlights Good Friday pardons given “out of reverence for God and the day” (72), and discusses the rival papal and royal uses of jubilee, for example. Like much recent scholarship, this study explores the intersections between law and politics, but it also goes further in starting to bring religion more directly into the mix. While one hopes that the author might return to this subject, she has already provided a work that will be of interest and use to scholars working on late medieval political culture and on the history of English law.