Petitions from Lincolnshire, c. 1200–c. 1500 ed. by Gwilym Dodd, Alison K. McHardy, and Lisa Liddy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Petitions from Lincolnshire, c. 1200–c. 1500 ed. by Gwilym Dodd, Alison K. McHardy, and Lisa Liddy Mark Ryan Geldof Gwilym Dodd, Alison K. McHardy, and Lisa Liddy, eds., Petitions from Lincolnshire, c. 1200–c. 1500. The Lincoln Record Society 108 ( Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020), lxvi + 375 pp. With the growing ubiquity of digitized collections of primary sources, one could be forgiven in thinking there is little desire for, or value in, the "traditional" output of printed collections sponsored by records societies. The present volume is one of those collections that reminds readers why this particular type of academic scholarship remains important. While it is a major simplification, one can think of the medieval English justice system as "complaint-based," where offended parties seek remedy, rather than having central judicial authorities seek wrongdoing. These complaints form the content of medieval petitions as well as the petitioning system of legal remedy itself. Dodd and McHardy, with assistance from Liddy, have assembled a diverse collection of material with roots in Lincolnshire that share the form of petitions—documents written to persuade readers and elicit sympathy and support for the petitioner—composed between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Dodd's extensive experience with this genre is evident, as the collection does not limit itself to the Parliamentary petitions alone; also included are petitions addressed to the court of Chancery, Justiciars, and regents (when and where they are present in the course of English political history). Thus, the range of issues, varieties of claimants, defendants, and interested parties is as diverse a group as possible. More than just a collection of abstracted and transcribed records, this volume contains a lengthy introduction to the genre of rhetorical petitioning, its goals as persuasive texts, the routes petitioners used to seek remedy, and the subtle and unsubtle ways petitions obscured, amplified, or manipulated facts, motives, and interests. While many of these texts describe disputes in ways that are frustratingly oblique and that further research can little differentiate, the value of the petitions themselves—as examples of persuasive or argumentative writing—hold value beyond the specifics they may or may not contain about the period, place, and people they discuss. Of the 190 petitions in the collection, the majority date from the fourteenth century (120) with another 52 from the fifteenth century. Fifteen petitions date to the thirteenth century, while only one petition is included from the sixteenth. Each petition is given its current archival or institutional reference, established or presumed date of production, a detailed abstract (which in some cases is a translation of the original text), a transcription of the original document, and, finally, a detailed (in many instances, probably exhaustive) contextual discussion that notes previous occasions of publication and collection details. These [End Page 245] extensive notes are where this sort of collection really shows its value, as each petition turns into a kind of "worked example," which demonstrates just how much one can learn from sources that superficially seem too thin on content or too obscure in subject to justify close analysis. Those notes also show us just how far scholarship has progressed since the early years of the record societies, which printed collections such as these with little or no contextual material or even abstracts. Of course, the audience for such works has changed and so too has their value as research and teaching aids. Because of the chronological and contextual scope of this collection, readers can more clearly see the ways that the petition genre changed over time. Changes in the choice of Latin, French, or English are obvious but less so are the changes in the way arguments are made, and who they addressed. Some petitions exhibit a careful strategy of omission, often when petitioners are less than innocent of offence themselves. Others play on the readers sympathies or appeal to their obligations as powerful arbitrators or sources of justice. Very little of this sort of rhetorical content appears in the more numerous but less argumentative material in the records of the common law. This collection adds considerable detail and variety to our understanding of the social, economic, and political contexts in which these petitioners, and their communities, lived. Mark...