Richard III and Kingly Justice for All?

When taking stock of Richard III’s short reign, one of the positive developments cited by his modern-day supporters is his extension of kingly justice to the poor. Not long after his accession in 1483 Richard reportedly made a ‘proclamation general’ that ‘every man wronged that would complain should have hasty remedy’. Accounts by civic administrators and local gentry confirm that the freshly crowned king spent his progress through the Midlands that summer ‘determining the complaints of poor folks with due punishment of offenders’. In private correspondence the Bishop of St David’s, Thomas Langton, observed that ‘many a poor man that has suffered wrong many days has been relieved and helped’ under Richard’s early governance.

Whether or not one believes that Richard dispatched his nephews on his way to the throne, he plainly had good reason to appear as a bountiful and generous king. His accession was abrupt, involving several executions, and to the political community around London he was associated with those northern reaches that he had governed as Duke of Gloucester.

At the same time, every treatise-writer of the age concurred that justice was the ‘chief charge’ of the king’s office. Every English monarch swore at their coronation to uphold it, equitably and indifferently. Putting Richard’s judicial advancements within this broader historical context is long overdue.

Late-medieval overtures about the king’s judicial duties referred not only to his observation of the law and punishment of crime but also to his resolution of disputes between subjects. Neighbours fought over the boundaries, occupation and use of land. Families feuded over the terms of testamentary bequests, especially the inheritance of household goods, money and legal deeds. Merchants and their business associates came to loggerheads about the money and material they exchanged. Since these matters impinged on the peace of the realm, the king was theoretically the ideal mediator.

In practice, this had long meant that kings were expected to minister remedies to subjects personally. Henry V received petitions from aggrieved subjects while he was besieging French castles in 1420, responding by referring cases on to his ministers back in England. Edward IV was similarly diligent, passing petitions received in his household to local judges with a covering note proclaiming his own care to see justice done ‘as well to the poor as to the rich’. By the time Richard III came to the throne, offshoots of the central government had been established in the marches of Wales and in the northern reaches of England to keep the peace and to examine subjects’ complaints directly.

The key piece of evidence for Richard’s improvement of these practices is an entry in his financial accounts documenting the appointment of a ‘clerk of our council of requests and supplications’, with specific reference to the bills of ‘poor persons’, in December 1483. The timing is certainly telling. Richard openly invited petitions throughout the autumn, seeking to win favour after Buckingham’s Rebellion – an attempt to overthrow his reign – in October. By that winter the king’s council had perhaps become so inundated with cases that it required dedicated personnel.

The allusion to ‘poor persons’ in the appointing grant has been taken to mean that Richard’s justice was especially progressive, amounting to the introduction of ‘legal aid’. In fact, England’s monarchs had long demonstrated an especial care for the disadvantaged, especially when it came to justice-giving. In 1390 Richard II’s council ordained to prioritise petitions submitted by ‘people of small charge’. In 1429 Parliament decreed that the council for the seven-year-old Henry VI should ‘look which is the poorest suitor’s bill, that first to be read and answered’. The appointment of Richard’s clerk therefore represented a continuity in practice.

Nor did his deposition by the first Tudor king at Bosworth in 1485 put a stop to these developments. A diary of certain burgesses present at Henry VII’s first parliament reports a bill calling for the abolition of the ‘court of requests’ – interpreted by some historians as a targeted take-down of a Yorkist tribunal. Yet the bill does not appear to have passed, and just one year later Henry VII’s council moved to support judgments made by that same ‘court’. In the following decades, under early Tudor rule, the Court of Requests further flourished, gaining its own registers and clearer routines.

What remained was the flexible and personalised nature of royal remedies. Plaintiffs to Henry VIII recalled meeting him at the gates to Greenwich Palace, rehearsing complaints verbally and then being directed to submit a formal petition to his councillors. These men worked quickly to order the production of a powerful writ of summons, under the royal seal, demanding the attendance of the accused – often within days. They heard both sides of the case and gathered testimonies from witnesses and neighbours of the parties to aid their investigations. If necessary they passed a final judgment, often seeking to please both parties and achieve lasting peace.

By the middle of the 16th century this popular court had a professional bench of judges and a permanent seat in the White Hall at Westminster. And it did offer some formal succour to the poor. From the 1510s onwards the Court of Requests recorded some of its petitioners as ‘paupers’, and seemingly waived their fees for lawyers and for the production of documents. This meets modern definitions of ‘legal aid’, even if did not relieve complainants of their considerable expenses for hiring horses and accommodation as they ventured to submit petitions. It was unlikely to have helped the very poorest. Still, these interventions were enough for contemporaries to refer to this as the ‘court of poor men’s causes’.

Without earlier, detailed records it is difficult to know whether the same provisions were being offered by Yorkist regimes. All late medieval kings, Richard III included, were concerned about justice-giving – and about being seen to be doing it. Administering justice was, after all, a core expectation of government in this period. The 15th and 16th centuries certainly saw the formalisation of procedures around royal justice. Yet the principle transcended the individual on the throne.

Laura Flannigan is a junior research fellow at St John’s College, Oxford and author of Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485-1547 (Cambridge University Press, 2023).