Wolsey, the Council and the Council Courts

Guy, John

doi:10.1093/ehr/xci.ccclx.481

Cited by 6 publications

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“…The King's Council, both a decision-making body based near the monarch and increasingly also an equity court, was colloquially known as Star Chamber after the room it occupied when at the old palace. 34 From the late fifteenth century, the Court of Requests, another equity court, which operated as part of the itinerant royal household, could also be found occupying various rooms in the palace. 35 All of these bodies drew their authority from the king's person, but were also capable of acting without his personal presence.…”

Section: Royal Home and Royal Administration 1502 To 1529mentioning

confidence: 99%

Halls of Power: Changing Political and Administrative Culture at the Palace of Westminster in the Sixteenth Century

Biggs

2024

J. Br. Stud.

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During the sixteenth century, the medieval Palace of Westminster went from being the most-used royal palace, where the king lived and worked alongside his administration, to becoming solely the home of the law-courts, Parliament, and the offices of state. At the same time, the numbers of individuals who came to the palace seeking governance or to take part in the business of the law-courts increased over the course of the century. While Westminster had earlier been a public venue for governance and royal display, the increasing absence of the English monarch from the palace created alternative uses. Political culture came to focus on Westminster as entirely separate from the court. This article explores how these changing uses created new forms of political and administrative culture. It examines how the administrative offices, particularly the Exchequer, were remade to accommodate changing financial demands and the increasing contact between individuals and the Crown. It argues that the repurposing of the Palace of Westminster created a distinctly different set of relationships between the Crown and the public. This gave the institutions that called the palace home the space to develop as bodies that drew their legitimacy from their representation of the community of the realm as a whole.

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Section: Royal Home and Royal Administration 1502 To 1529mentioning

confidence: 99%

Halls of Power: Changing Political and Administrative Culture at the Palace of Westminster in the Sixteenth Century

Biggs

2024

J. Br. Stud.

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“…Thomas Wolsey's project to expand and open up the conciliar courts in the mid-fifteen-tens generated a substantial volume of business for the Dean in Requests. 23 The Court's caseload more than doubled in the final years of that decade, reaching around 300 cases in 1520. 24 However, the Dean at that time, John Clerk, left England for over a year from March 1521 to deliver Henry VIII's Assertio Septem Sacramentorum to the Pope in Rome.…”

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‘Allowable or not?’ John Stokesley, the court of requests and royal justice in sixteenth-century England

Flannigan

2020

Historical Research

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In 1523 the theologian John Stokesley was dismissed as a judge in the English court of requests following an investigation by the royal council. This article reconsiders the significance of this episode as part of continuous efforts to define royal justice across the sixteenth century. Grounded in unprecedentedly detailed research in the early Requests archive, the article studies the business and personnel of Requests before, during and after Stokesley’s presidency. It demonstrates that Stokesley’s indiscretions probably undermined the principles of royal justice and required amendment. But this was no simple victory for the common law over extra-legal, equitable justice.

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Litigants in the English “Court of Poor Men's Causes,” or Court of Requests, 1515–25

Flannigan¹

2019

Law hist. rev.

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The early-Tudor English government oversaw the rise of various centralised courts offering the king's subjects access to extraordinary justice in their private suits. One such new arena was the ‘Court of Requests’, an early equity or conscience court long overshadowed in histories of the period by the better-known courts of Star Chamber and Chancery. This article analyses the little-studied Requests archives to ask who sued there and when/why the court became associated with specifically poor men's causes. Focusing on the formative decade of ‘popularisation’ between 1515 and 1525, it finds that whilst litigants appear to have been largely from the lower sectors of society compared to their counterparts in the other conciliar courts, most petitioners opted for imprecise, rhetorical and non-static descriptions of their relative poverty – defined not just economically, but also in terms of age, property, and kin – in comparison to their opponents, appealing to the specific interpretation of conscience in Requests. The article thus scrutinises the methodologies we use for uncovering the demography of early-modern central courts, and has implications for understanding litigants' legal strategies, recorded identification as distinct from self-identification, and the theory and practice behind commonly-held ideals about the provision of royal justice for the ‘poor’.

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Wolsey, the Council and the Council Courts

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Halls of Power: Changing Political and Administrative Culture at the Palace of Westminster in the Sixteenth Century

Halls of Power: Changing Political and Administrative Culture at the Palace of Westminster in the Sixteenth Century

‘Allowable or not?’ John Stokesley, the court of requests and royal justice in sixteenth-century England

Litigants in the English “Court of Poor Men's Causes,” or Court of Requests, 1515–25

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