Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

Chapter 2
The Presentation of Cases in Medieval Chancery Bills
Timothy S. Haskett
The medieval chancery bill is a petition, an instrument by means of which
a person who believes that he has no common law remedy, or that an
existing remedy is ineffective, asks the chancellor of England to provide
redress. 1 Such bills survive from the late fourteenth century onwards in great
numbers, sufficient, in fact, to warrant their collection into a separate class
in the Public Record Office as C 1, Early Chancery Proceedings. There are
perhaps 90,000 cases in C 1 for the period before 1500, but problems apart
from the sheer bulk of the material have limited scholarly assessment of
these records, even though they constitute the main body of evidence for
the activity of the medieval court of chancery. Usually, although by no
means always, the bill is the only documentation for a case, there being only
scattered depositions, writs and other miscellaneous related material in the C
1 bundles. And the bills themselves are for the most part not dated directly;
they are addressed to a chancellor identified by his bishopric alone, and could
thus be placed in a variety of periods. Notwithstanding that further work in C
1 and other fifteenth-century chancery records will surely improve both our
general understanding of the medieval court of chancery and of individual
cases therein, it remains that the bills themselves are legitimately the subject of
a precise diplomatic analysis. As the paramount primary source for the court,
they are quite eloquent, but only in certain respects. The purpose of this study
is to demonstrate how an analysis of the way in which cases are presented in the
chancery bills may advance our understanding of several important aspects of
the court. It is based on a group of 200 chancery bills, selected because they can
- unusually - be dated precisely: they were submitted between 1432 and 1443,
during the tenure of Chancellor John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells. 2
The medieval chancery bill displays a distinct canon of form, and this form
1 The author would like to thank Professor J.H. Baker for several important suggestions concerning
this essay. Any errors that may remain are, of course, the author's own.
2 They are found in Bundle 9 of the Early Chancery Proceedings, hence C 1/9. For a complete
description of the records that pertain to the medieval court of chancery, see T.S. Haskett, The 'Equity'
Side of the English Court of Chancery in the Late Middle Ages: A Method of Approach, (Diss. University
of Toronto, 1987), 42-82. Unlike the vast majority of medieval chancery bills, these 200 display a
memorandum of surety on their faces which provides the precise day, month and regnal year that two men
undertook in chancery to stand surety for the verity of the petitioner's case (see the appended texts).