Chapter 8 - Answers and Arguments

Summary

Chapter 8 illuminates the intermediary stages of litigation before the early Tudor kings. It takes up the little-studied perspective of defendants in cases heard by the king’s Court of Requests and examines the potential for even this most authoritative kind of justice to be resisted. The chapter begins by studying the testimonies of messengers, recorded in Requests’ order books, for evidence of accused parties evading or rejecting the initial summons into court. It then reconstructs the process by which defendants made formal answers to petitions, and outlines the arguments they raised in their own defence. In line with debates ongoing contemporarily in Parliament and Council, defendants’ answers often contrasted extraordinary royal justice with the due process enshrined in English law. These lines of contestation were crucial to the increasing definition of royal justice under the early Tudor regimes, this chapter argues.