Chapter 2 surveys the system of courts that emerged around the early Tudor monarchs. Examining ordinances for the organisation of the royal Council from the late medieval period, it reveals earlier precedents for prioritising justice-giving, particularly to poor suitors, within the central administration. Further procedural models are identified in the established central Court of Chancery, its procedure under English bills and its reference to conscience in decision-making, and in the arbitration of disputes by regional magnates. Turning to royal conciliar justice, the chapter outlines the administrative and judicial capacities of the councils in the North and in the Welsh Marches. Finally, it sets out the development of two offshoots of the royal Council by the very end of the fifteenth century: the council or court in the Star Chamber at Westminster and the Court of Requests within the attendant royal household.

Chapter 7 turns to the recipients of petitions for royal justice and their initiation of litigation. The chapter begins by weighing up the evidence for direct royal involvement in these judicial processes, with particular attention paid to a set of documents signed by Henry VII and Henry VIII personally. Otherwise, based on a survey of the signatures and annotations scattered across the Court of Requests’ early Tudor archive, this chapter identifies the men who delivered justice in this tribunal day to day. Mapping onto the evolutionary trajectory set out in Chapter 3, the overall impression is of transition from a diverse and changeable group of bill handlers within the royal household under Henry VII, followed by a spell in which the household clergy oversaw all business in Requests, and culminating in a smaller quorum of legally trained judges and Masters of Requests by the end of the period. The chapter then spells out the procedures followed once a petition was in the hands of this frontline personnel, and the measures they took to preserve the traditional prioritisation of the poor litigant.

By way of a firm case study for the new system of royal justice in action, Chapter 3 provides the first history of the Court of Requests from its initial entry in the historical records in 1483 through to its settlement at Westminster by the end of Henry VIII’s reign. The origin of this tribunal is located in the practice of receiving petitions during royal progresses, particularly in the reign of Richard III. Thereafter, Requests was part of the itinerant household, following Henry VII and Henry VIII as they travelled around their dominions. It only acquired a more defined timetable, judiciary, and seat at Westminster in the 1530s, when it became subject to ministerial reform programmes. Importantly, this evolution to courthood was neither smooth nor linear: its business levels peaked and troughed, it could seemingly always revert to acting on the road, and it was rarely referred to by the name ‘Court of Requests’. With these interpretive challenges in mind, this chapter argues that, contrary to administrative historians’ tendencies to identify positive development in improved bureaucracy, Requests’ flexibility and proximity to the king’s person was advantageous to petitioners.

Cambridge was at the very heart of national events and the great political and religious changes of the Tudor period. By Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, the University was closer to royal power than it had ever been. The author explains how and why the Tudor monarchs became so involved in Cambridge and examines the crisis of Henry VIII’s Break from Rome, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Protestant Reformation. The author includes key figures in Cambridge such as Lady Margaret Beaufort, John Fisher, Erasmus and Thomas Cranmer. She also looks at the early Cambridge Protestant reformers such as Latimer, Ridley and Matthew Parker, who secretly discussed Luther’s ideas at the White Horse Tavern near King’s Parade.