The Slaying of Sir William Pennington: Legal Narrative and the Late Medieval English Archive

Abstract

On 20 April 1532, near the king’s palace at Westminster, two gentlemen, Richard Southwell, esquire, and Sir William Pennington, faced one another in a sword fight, a quarrel that ended in Pennington’s death. The slaying came at a sensitive time in Henry VIII’s reign, when much attention was focused on ‘the King’s Great Matter,’ his divorce of Katherine of Aragon and projected marriage to Anne Boleyn. The killing of William Pennington was bound up in those issues, one version of events depicting the genesis of the quarrel in an alleged disparagement of Anne Boleyn’s virtue. The official version, however, recorded on the rolls of the Court of King’s Bench, told a different story, one that omitted the larger political issues that underlay the quarrel between these two men, giving us important indications about how legal records were composed and used in premodern England to manage politically sensitive issues. The records of this affair reveal the use of both formal and informal channels, from local juries to the king’s council, for dealing with acts of violence in Henrician England, particularly those with serious political repercussions. These official and unofficial processes, and the records they generated, were tightly imbricated; although in a legal sense the plea roll at King’s Bench was more or less sufficient unto itself, politically its record worked only in tandem with the unofficial negotiations and manoeuvres behind the scenes. In turn, the political imperatives demanded that the formal processes be massaged, that the official record read in particular ways and not others regarding the facts of the case — which were probably not the ‘facts’ at all.