WRITING WRONGS: THE DRAFTING OF SUPPLICATIONS TO THE CROWN IN LATER FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

Abstract

Petitions, bills, complaints, supplications -however one wishes to describe formal written requests to the English Crown from the king's subjects, this distinctive and ubiquitous type of prose writing has only recently been the subject of focused scholarly research.1 Much of the interest has focused on the content of supplications, and how this fits into broader political and administrative contexts; but increasingly attention has turned to the language of supplication and the place it holds in the Anglo-Norman and English-language writing cultures of the period.2 This discussion takes a different approach by focusing on the petitionary 'form': that is to say, the stylistic, lexical, and morphological conventions that generated stereotypical petitionary vocabulary and provided the basis for a universally applied linguistic structure or epistolary framework. My intention is to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding how petitions were written. It is not, it should be stressed, an enquiry about who wrote petitions. This is a question that eludes comprehensive treatment because petitions almost never displayed authorial markings, and indirect evidence for authorship is unfortunately extremely scarce.3 Nor is it my intention to investigate directly what language was used to write petitions, since until the fifteenth century there was little variation in the employment of Anglo-Norman French. Rather, the aim is to place petitionwriting into a broader epistolary context, to understand what influences helped fashion the petitionary form and to establish what levels of specialist knowledge and expertise were required for the conventions of supplicatory writing to be successfully implemented. Many of my conclusions will apply in broad terms to petitioning across the late medieval period, but I have necessarily drawn most examples from a narrower time-frame - the 13905 -when a sufficient number of different types of petition are available for comparison.The investigation divides into two parts. In the first, supplications are considered as a unified mode of writing and are compared with other documentary contexts. The intention is not to discover the origins of the petitionary form, by looking to twelfth- and thirteenth-century precedents,4 but to link petitions with other types of writing current in the late fourteenth century, and to suggest that they belonged to a broad and organically developing writing culture. In the second part an attempt is made to identify specific strands or types of petition-writing, by comparing the idiomatic forms of the supplications of the medieval chancery with those of parliament. By the late fourteenth centuty chancery had only recently emerged as a court in its own right, offering - alongside parliament and the council - a special form of jurisprudence that has come to be known, somewhat anachronistically, as 'equity'.5 Chancery was thus the newest of these institutions to develop petitionary procedures and it is only from the 13905 that original chancery bills survive in significant numbers. In this second section, I ask how far petitionary diplomatic transcended the contexts in which the petitions were presented. Was there a One size fits all* mode of petition/bill-writing, or were there stylistic and lexical differences that distinguished one type of supplication from another? This is a pertinent question to ask, not least because in modern scholarship a major difference is inferred by virtue of the fact that supplications presented in parliament are generally known as 'petitions', whereas those submitted in chancery are termed 'bills'.6 All this will provide the basis for a better understanding of the 'mechanics' of petition-writing in the fourteenth century. We may not be able to advance much beyond a general assumption that petitions were written by a mixture of clerks, scriveners, attorneys, and freelance scribes, but an in-depth exploration of how language was used to frame petitions promises at least to shed light on how the drafters of such documents plied their trade. …