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A Family Feud and Parallel Petitioning to the Crown from Sixteenth-Century Devon

Laura Flannigan

[This post explores the case of two feuding families who submitted a long series of judicial petitions against each other to a variety of different courts. It is written by Dr Laura Flannigan (@LFlannigan17), who is Lecturer in History at Christ Church College, Oxford.]

Petitioning for justice before the highest authorities in early modern England involved decisions and strategies. By the middle of the sixteenth century, numerous royal courts with overlapping jurisdictions were crammed into the legal marketplace of Westminster: Common Pleas, King’s/Queen’s Bench, and Chancery in Westminster Hall itself, and the courts of Star Chamber, Exchequer, Requests, and Wards in adjoining spaces. Why choose one forum over another? On what grounds did litigants and the lawyers they hired make these choices?

View of the north end of Westminster Hall, showing the Courts of Chancery and King’s Bench in session with lawyers in gowns. The British Museum, early seventeenth century (available under Creative Commons license)
View of the north end of Westminster Hall, showing the Courts of Chancery and King’s Bench in session with lawyers in gowns. The British Museum, early seventeenth century (Creative Commons)

Of course, while royal justice was positioned as a last resort and poorer suitors may have been priced out of its costly proceedings, the more resourceful petitioner sued in as many of these forums as possible. To understand why cross-litigating before the Crown was so popular, and why pluralism developed in this jurisdiction at all, we can examine petitions for cases that appeared repeatedly.

One family feud ran through almost all the central equity courts in the early sixteenth century. Its dramatis personae were the Halswell and Strode families, hailing from Devon. The gentry family of Strode from Plympton St Mary was headed by the elderly William Strode and his brother Richard until both of their deaths in 1518, and thereafter by Richard’s son, also called Richard. Men of considerable standing in the county, they acted as local officials and both Richards sat as MP for Plympton Erle. In managing their estates, they were voracious users of the law. All three men appear regularly in both the central common-law courts and in the equity courts, as petitioners and defendants in suits with their tenants.

Family trees of the Halswells of Dartmouth and the Strodes of Plympton St Mary, Devon, in the early sixteenth century.
Family trees of the Halswells of Dartmouth and the Strodes of Plympton St Mary, Devon, in the early sixteenth century.

Leading the Halswells of Dartmouth were the brothers John and Richard, Richard’s wife Joan, and their children, John and Jane. The Halswells left little trace in the historical record, so were presumably poorer than the Strodes. John Halswell senior had sold his lands to make up for various debts owed and was described at one point as a ‘common land seller’. But the younger John Halswell was said to be a ‘yeoman’ and was able to hire a serjeant at law as his legal counsel.

The dispute between them produced at least seventeen separate suits, with twelve surviving petitions in the central archives.[1] Taken together, they illustrate the perceived differences in the character of each royal court and the strategies adopted when petitioning to them. Continue reading “A Family Feud and Parallel Petitioning to the Crown from Sixteenth-Century Devon”

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Now Online: Nearly 150 Investigations into Seventeenth-Century Petitioners

Tens of thousands of people submitted requests and complaints to the king and other high-ranking royal officials in seventeenth-century England. Each of these ‘petitions’ tells a story and investigating them further can reveal much about life during this tumultuous century.

As part of ‘The Power of Petitioning’ project, we completed a six-month Shared Learning Project with a group of 46 amateur researchers from the London Region of the University of the Third Age. Each of these researchers wrote one or more reports about the petitioners and their requests or complaints. All of these 149 short pieces of research are now online at ‘Investigating the Lives of Seventeenth-Century Petitioners’, so please take a look at these new investigations to learn more.

A petition from Kent just before a Royalist revolt in 1648, discussed in a report by Sarah Harris.

We are extremely grateful to the many people involved in this project who made it possible. In addition to the main U3A researchers – listed in full on Investigating Petitioners – we would like to thank Peter Cox, who coordinated the project from the U3A side; Frank Edwards, David Moffatt and Sarah Birt, who helped to edit the reports and get them online; the London Metropolitan Archives and Westminster Archives for introducing the researchers to their collections and offering palaeography training; and of course to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding most of the associated costs.

The reports each began with one of the almost 400 transcribed State Paper petitions from across the seventeenth century that we have published on British History Online. These are based on images of manuscripts held at The National Archives at Kew. The photographs were collected by Sharon Howard, transcribed by Gavin Robinson and edited by Brodie Waddell.

The U3A group also completed reports about a number of seventeenth-century petitions submitted to the magistrates of the City of Westminster, which we are preparing organising for publication online. Keep an eye on our project site for a further announcement.