Whispering, murmuring, talking, speaking, chattering, shouting, clamouring, heckling, jeering, crying, screaming: vocalisation is a theme familiar to cultural historians, and a rich vein of scholarship has pursued the significance of human noise in medieval life. For obvious reasons, political historians have given rather less consideration to the use of the voice in interactions between the individual and the state. Here, ironically enough, it is the very richness of the written record that leads us so often to imagine and consider Plantagenet government very largely as a matter of written forms. This is not to say that the performative elements of many aspects of government in this period are not well understood. But the physical and verbal dimensions of the relationship between king and subject are still often obscured by historians’ preference for establishing the paper-trail. This study engages with petitions to the crown as preserved on the parliament rolls and in the Ancient Petitions (TNA SC 8), dating between the late thirteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries, and considers the significance of the ‘noise’ that these documents captured, asserted and sometimes provoked. The project represents the kind of quantitative and qualitative analysis that is possible as a result of the electronic publication of the parliament rolls and the on-line catalogue of the Ancient Petitions, and thus points the way to further uses of this material for the political–cultural history of later medieval England.

Petitions lend themselves to a study of this nature for a number of reasons: first, because they ‘speak’ the complaint of the petitioner and (in their answers and endorsements) the remedy offered by the king; second, because their audience (a significant word) by the king or his delegates was undertaken orally/aurally; third, because they were discursive and therefore allowed the use of quite developed narrative strategies often lacking in other legal forms; and finally, because they borrowed the language and/or metaphor of ‘murmur, clamour and noise’ as a means of expressing commonality in complaint.

The following discussion takes these four features of petitions as categories of analysis in relation to both ‘private’ petitions (those from individuals or from institutions and corporate bodies) and ‘common’ petitions (those that were made in the name of the Commons or were considered to have implications for the commonalty).