Book excerpt: Introduction : Medieval petitions and strategies of persuasion / Thomas W. Smith, Helen Killick -- Blood, brains and bay-windows : the use of English in fifteenth-century parliamentary petitions / Gwilyn Dodd -- Petitoners for royal pardon in fourteenth-century England / Helen Lacey -- The scribes of petitions in late-medieval England / Helen Killick -- Patterns of supplication and litigation strategies : petitioning the crown in the fourteenth century / Petitions of conflict : the bishop of Durham and forfeitures of war, 1317-1333 / Matthew Phillips -- A tale of two abbots : petitions for the recovery of churches in England by the abbots of Jedburgh and Arbroath in 1328 / Shelagh Sneddon -- 'By force and arms' : lay invasion, the writ "de vi laica amovenda" and the tensions of state and church in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries / Philippa M. Hoskin -- The papacy, petitioners and benefices in thirteenth-century England / Thomas W. Smith -- Playing the system : marriage litigation in the fourteenth century / Frederik Pedersen -- Killer clergy : how did clerics justify homicide in petitions to the Apostolic penitentary in the Late Middle Ages? / Kirsi Salonen.