This collection of early common petitions in the English parliament has been some years in the making, and we owe thanks to a number of organizations and individuals who have made it possible to bring it to fruition. The original identification of the relevant body of material in the National Archives was completed for Mark Ormrod by Dr Lisa Haworth Liddy under a small grant from the Department of History, University of York; this work was supplemented by further identifications and the creation of critical editions of documents, undertaken by Mark Ormrod and Helen Killick, and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; we are grateful to Professor Alexandra Gillespie and Professor James Ginther, the Principal Investigators on these projects, for their interest, commitment, and support, and to Dr Kitrina Bevan, Dr Gwilym Dodd, Dr Holly James-Maddocks, Professor Linne Mooney, Professor Anthony Musson and Dr Matthew Phillips, who participated in workshops arising from these grants and have given freely of their knowledge in the making of this edition. Phil Bradford joined the editorial team at a later stage to assist particularly with the historical notes.

The opening decades of the twenty-first century have seen a notable revival of interest in the records of the medieval English parliament. In 2004–2005 a team of scholars funded by the Leverhulme Trust and led by Chris Given-Wilson published The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (PROME), a new electronic and print edition, with full translation, of the extant parliament rolls for the reigns of Edward I to Henry VII. Because PROME focuses on those aspects of parliamentary business that were committed to permanent record on the parliament rolls, it does not consider systematically the other available records associated with the medieval parliament. In particular, it does not reproduce the substantial numbers of unenrolled petitions submitted in parliament that were printed in the eighteenth-century edition of the rolls, Rotuli Parliamentorum (RP), though it does include introductory materials and appendices providing summaries and transcripts of these and other ancillary documents.

The people: complaint about the great damage and destruction done to them by sheriffs, who oppress people by appointing men to indict those against whom they bear ill will, or whose property they covet, and then extort money by having them imprisoned and put up for mainprise. In particular, the sheriff of Shropshire has made in excess of £200 from the deliverance of prisoners in this way. Request that the king ordain a remedy against such false indictments.

The lieges of the commonalty of England: complaint about offences committed by ordinaries of the Church, who daily take before them pleas of contract, covenants, debts, and other pleas, greatly damaging and oppressing the people, to the disinheritance of the king and against the dignity of the crown. Any poor man without prohibition who is placed in contempt under their jurisdiction will be made to pay penance or excommunicated, and thus unable to respond in court. Request for a remedy.

The people: complaint that, when a free man dies without having produced an heir but has a brother or sister, the king's ministers sell the land or retain it as an escheat, depriving them of their proper inheritance; request for a remedy.

The common people: complaint that those summoned to appear before justices at inquests and assizes do not come for fear of death and other mischief perpetrated by those who do not fear the law, and suitors are thus delayed in recovering by default of suit and greatly impoverished. Request that the king will not suffer this to continue.

[No petitioner specified]: request that no wines brought into the country by foreign merchants should be taken for the king by the butler or his people without the payment of the custom of 2s for wine of good quality; for if the wines are the king's and the custom is paid, he will lose nothing. A writ on this is requested to all collectors of customs.

The knights of the shires and all the commonalty of the land: request that the king appoint justices to take fines from all those former adherents to the king's rebels and enemies who wish to come forward voluntarily and make fine for their trespass according to their wealth and the quantity of their lands. By this means the king will have profit and the commonalty of his land will be put at ease.

The table that follows attempts to summarize all known instances of extant common petitions, either in original form, in enrolments on the parliament rolls, or in transcriptions made elsewhere in the public records and in other archives, between the earliest known common petition (of 1290) and the year 1340. After 1343 the clerks of parliament normally included on the parliament roll a transcript of the schedule of common petitions submitted in the assembly, often in conjunction with grants of taxation; although there remain a significant number of unenrolled common petitions dating from after 1340, the overall chronology of the records is therefore rather more straightforward.