Medieval petitions

"Medieval Petitions provides an innovative study of the mechanics, politics and culture of petitioning in the middle ages. In addition to important and wide-ranging studies of the ancient world and the medieval papacy, it focuses particularly on petitions to the English crown in the later middle ages, drawing on a major collection of documents made newly accessible to research in the National Archives." "Offering vivid new insights into judicial conventions and the legal creativity spawned by political crisis, these papers offer a closely integrated assessment of current scholarship and new research on these most fascinating and revealing of medieval social texts."--BOOK JACKET.