Litigants in the English “Court of Poor Men’s Causes,” or Court of Requests, 1515–25 LAURA FLANNIGAN In early sixteenth-century England, royal subjects increasingly submitted those private civil complaints for which they could not find remedy at the common law directly to the king and his council. Although individual councillors had long been expected to receive and handle requests from petitioners approaching the king’s court, it was in the 1510s and 1520s that the extraordinary royal prerogative delegated to those men in close proximity to the king coalesced into an expanding range of judicial arenas. These included several temporary tribunals founded between 1518 and 1520 and presided over by high-ranking ecclesiastical councillors, the established jurisdictions of Chancery and Star Chamber, operating under either conscience or equity, and the tribunal known to us now as the Court of Requests. 1 From the apparent inception of its records in 1493 through to the middle of the sixteenth century, Requests was not truly what we might recognize as a proper court, with a designated location and timetable and dedicated judges. 2 Instead it was a committee of the royal council attending upon Law and History Review 2019, page 1 of 35 © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2019 doi:10.1017/S0738248019000440 Laura Flannigan is currently studying for a Ph.D. in history at Newnham College, Cambridge <laura.flannigan17@gmail.com>. Her thesis, entitled “Justice in Requests, c.1485-c.1535,” examines the principle and practice of the king’s extraordinary, discretionary justice in the early Tudor Court of Requests. This arti- cle draws on research originally undertaken for an M.A. dissertation at the University of York. Further research was made possible by a generous grant from the F.W. Maitland Memorial Fund at the Cambridge University Law Faculty. The author is grateful to Tom Johnson, Paul Cavill, Carys Brown, and Brodie Waddell for encouragement and feedback on various drafts, and expresses gratitude to Gautham Rao and to the four anonymous reviewers for Law and History Review for their constructive comments on the submitted article. 1. J. A. Guy, “Wolsey, the Council and the Council Courts,” English Historical Review 91 (1976): 481–505. 2. The earliest known records date to March 23, 1493: Kew, The National Archives, PRO REQ1/1 fo. 77 (hereafter TNA); this definition is according to Geoffrey Elton’s criteria for terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248019000440 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 154.16.25.173, on 06 Nov 2019 at 12:36:28, subject to the Cambridge Core