Chapter 7 turns to the recipients of petitions for royal justice and their initiation of litigation. The chapter begins by weighing up the evidence for direct royal involvement in these judicial processes, with particular attention paid to a set of documents signed by Henry VII and Henry VIII personally. Otherwise, based on a survey of the signatures and annotations scattered across the Court of Requests’ early Tudor archive, this chapter identifies the men who delivered justice in this tribunal day to day. Mapping onto the evolutionary trajectory set out in Chapter 3, the overall impression is of transition from a diverse and changeable group of bill handlers within the royal household under Henry VII, followed by a spell in which the household clergy oversaw all business in Requests, and culminating in a smaller quorum of legally trained judges and Masters of Requests by the end of the period. The chapter then spells out the procedures followed once a petition was in the hands of this frontline personnel, and the measures they took to preserve the traditional prioritisation of the poor litigant.

This chapter assesses the impact of co-rule on the duchess’ political networks, using this external perspective which rarely features in studies of shared power to concretize the contemporary perceptions of joint authority. The stability, composition, and affiliations of two well-documented groups within the administration – the ducal council and the regional officials across Brittany – differentiate Jeanne and Charles’ scope of administration according to both chronological and geographic circumstances. Despite these differences, Jeanne actively worked together with Charles to reward their followers’ loyalty and maintain these political relationships; correspondingly, service to the duchess and duke was largely interchangeable, even for formal relationships such as homage. This relatively level hierarchy further links spousal co-rule to the other power-sharing structures in the medieval aristocracy, which promoted the idea (if not always the practice) of equality between lords.