Throughout the nineteenth and a part of the twentieth centuries the history of the inhabitants of the Anglo-Gascon duchy of Aquitaine was written almost exclusively from the point of view of the sovereign: the king of England in his role as duke of Aquitaine. The documents issued by the king and his Chancery, recorded in the Gascon rolls, enable us to write an almost complete political history of the duchy of Aquitaine, and it is also possible to describe the economic and commercial history of the period based on the accounts of the constables and controllers of Bordeaux, and the Bordeaux customs.

However, these sources do not throw light on any direct links between the king of England and his Gascon subjects. In fact, they merely constitute a set of decisions taken in England, dry accounts that provide comparatively little detail about the life and situation of the Gascons. Fortunately, the collection of Ancient Petitions (SC 8) at TNA contains many interesting documents, either unexplored or not yet fully explored, which are invaluable for their clues about the ‘true’ voice of the Gascons. Historians traditionally call them ‘Gascon petitions’, even though they do not form a distinct collection, mingled as they are with all the other medieval petitions sent to the king of England, the vast majority from England itself. Petitions from Gascons are also to be found in other TNA series, particularly Ancient Correspondence (SC 1), Chancery Warrants (C 81) and (especially for the first half of the fifteenth century) Exchequer: Council and Privy Seal Records (E 28). Not all petitions provide vivid accounts of conditions in Aquitaine: many are laconic, particularly those making bald requests for payments. Nevertheless, in the absence of Gascon narrative sources, and because of the disappearance of the ducal archives kept at the castle of l’Ombrière in Bordeaux, these petitions are probably the most important means of access that we have to the points of view of the king-duke's Gascon subjects in the later Middle Ages.

In the task of dating Gascon petitions, the crucial resource is provided by the Gascon rolls, which record the royal decisions made on many of these requests.