TY - JOUR
AU1 - Horowitz, Mark R.
AB - Abstract Henry VII inherited a society long accustomed to utilizing written obligations for the performance of numerous transactions of everyday business and judicial proceedings – a cultural polity not always appreciated by historians. He staffed his government with family officials and government administrators well versed in keeping household accounts and administering government finance and law through the use of these bonds. Modelling a policy based on the administration of England's largest household – the duchy of Lancaster – Henry and his working councillors raised the level of bond-taking, prosecution and collection to establish law and order while creating a financially stable monarchy. This article discusses the development of that ‘bond policy’ from the ground up, showing that English men and women of all stations in life were involved in this intensified use of bonds as a pragmatic means for the king to rule England. The ramifications of this policy were not only a greater understanding of, and respect for, the law but also a centralization of law enforcement and finance, key attributes for the development of the modern state. Whether Henry VII was an innovator, renovator or simply lucky has not been definitively ascertained in the years since S. B. Chrimes's biography of the king, although a recent work has provided greater clarity.1 One unapologetic admirer of Edward IV proffered the opinion that the first Tudor's reign ‘was not a type of kingship appropriate to late-medieval England’. This presumed, of course, that Yorkist successes and failures were somehow appropriate in a world that was supposed to stand still in a medieval pose.2 Such an argument, or a disdain for Henry VII, did not advance the unravelling of how and why this usurper succeeded in bringing stability to the realm amid intermittent uprisings, unprecedented solvency to the monarchy, and viability to a dynasty in less than twenty-four years – about the same period of time in which all three Yorkists lost their thrones at least once (and two of them also shared the label ‘usurper’ with the first Tudor).3 It was fortunate for both Henry VII and the development of the modern state that he did not share a belief in repeating the ‘medieval’ failures of the past, or in doing royal business as usual. One significant image of the shape-shifting first Tudor, supported by mounting evidence, is that of the hands-on ruler who, working directly through trusted and competent ministers, officials and servants, actively prosecuted the laws of the realm to secure not only a more orderly, law-abiding society but also a potentially enormous source of royal revenue previously untapped with any regularity by his predecessors.4 Whether the ‘exaction’ of money due on both law enforcement and financial debts called obligations and recognizances was harsh or par for the period will continue to be discussed and debated.5 So, too, will the deeds and malversation of the only two proponents of these activities to lose their heads for their efforts: Sir Richard Empson, knight and Edmund Dudley, esquire.6 Nonetheless, this perspective is not new to the study of early Tudor history. G. R. Elton noted that ‘the king was trying to restore solvency and power to the crown, but he was also trying to bring peace, justice and order to the realm; rightly he regarded the first as the necessary condition for the second’.7 Both F. C. Dietz and W. C. Richardson spent time discussing what can collectively be called bonds as aspects of finance and chamber administration, an important examination of government that continues today.8 But it was Henry's contemporary court observer Polydore Vergil who perhaps first recognized a behavioural pattern and mode of governance that was more steadfast than serendipitous: ‘the king claimed that he tolerated these exactions of set plan, in order thereby to maintain the population in obedience.’9 This ‘plan’– or what we today would call a major policy – involved taking and driving in debts, fines and penalties arising from the various written obligations and the enrolled or filed recognizances taken by royal officials, courts and central and local departments from citizens high and low for a multiplicity of reasons. These included payments for customs duties and farms; licences to trade; entry into lands; promise of allegiance or keeping the peace; securing an office (and sometimes paying for its discharge at the end of tenure); ecclesiastical livings; wardships and marriage; renegotiation of an old debt; appearance in a court of law or before a judicial proceeding or conciliar court; payment for pardons – in fact, debts to the crown, real or potential, for just about anything one could incur involving money or behaviour.10 One critical quarter for ministerial activity related to political and societal stability involved bonds concerning the law and its maintenance, among them those for appearance at court, good behaviour (‘good abearing’) and keeping the peace, bail and fines. This vital area did not simply target the enclave of the nobility, but all stations in life.11 Indeed, given the surfeit of bonds investigated and discovered, taken, filed, enrolled, renegotiated (compounded) and either prosecuted or arbitrated during the reign involving both private and public parties, it is not difficult to reach a stark conclusion: when it came to English men and women interacting between each other or with a local government, a royal court or an official requiring a promise, oath or debt, Henry VII ruled an England under obligation, legally and literally.12 What has not been fully appreciated for the period is that most business was conducted through written debts, not through actual cash payment. A reminder for modern historians of the ubiquity of bonds as a critical finance tool is an enrolment in chancery on 4 October 1478 involving Alice Gairstang, widow of a London grocer. The entry, in the form of an indenture between the widow and two mercers, noted that she possessed among the debts owed to her husband twenty-nine written obligations that she wished to sell. It stated that Alice was required to give the right of first refusal to the two mercers, or then to a grocer and a fishmonger, but only if they ‘buy those obligations at an equal price with others, without fraud, they shall have the same’.13 It is important to think of these instruments in the way they were viewed and utilized at the time: binding, negotiable, enforceable, fungible and omnipresent.14 The present discussion takes the view of Henry VII's use of bonds as a far-reaching ‘bond policy’, one that evolved through the experience and activities of his trusted councillors and the recognition that the king could do the king's business in much the same way as his subjects conducted affairs in their own lives. Moreover, it involved English men and women of all walks of life, and not just the high born. In this way, it became a true national policy, one that folded in other political necessities pursued by the king.15 It was the long-established traditions and procedures for binding parties through a credit system of payment that allowed Henry's bond policy to take form and expand (see appendix).16 In fact, the policy could not have succeeded if it was in conflict with the accepted daily intercourse of society. This included a shift in the view of the centre. John Watts has aptly pointed out that while dynastic associations and affinities were still important by 1485, such loyalties were tempered by the ‘habits of obedience to the crown’, and that Henry Tudor therefore had a blank slate. Gerald Harriss noted that society wanted a more effective government.17 In this regard, the new king and his ministers could be viewed as perspicacious. However, it was both the specification and intensification of prosecuting all manner of obligations and recognizances that separated Henry VII from previous regimes. What needs to be explained is how this policy came about and developed during the course of the reign almost to subsume much of the business of the king and his close and trusted officials and ministers. Moreover, it would be helpful to assess his policy and its impact on the realm – one that did not simply vanish upon his death 500 years ago. It should come as little surprise that many of the answers lie not only in the accepted traditions and customs of the kingdom but also in the very personal nature of Henry's reign. Relying on trusted friends or even allies of one's parents or family members to run a government is hardly a unique concept, whether one studies the Caesars or the recent two-term U.S. presidency at the start of the present century. What strikes a special chord during Henry VII's sovereignty is the relation between the shared expertise and talents of his ministers and the accepted procedures of law and finance already in practice throughout the realm since ‘time out of mind’– Henry's councillors were experienced in taking and prosecuting bonds, and they applied what they knew to help run the royal government. This allowed the policy to flourish and succeed with little public outcry during the reign. The king was not so much innovating as executing age-old procedures to great effect and, as contemporaries would argue, often with a vengeance and an intensity never seen before or since his time.18 The purpose here, therefore, is not to return to an Eltonian view of persistent, planned bureaucratic developments but rather quite the opposite.19 Henry VII was a pragmatist schooled in what might be called ‘pure politics’: the pursuit of self-interest, self-preservation and the means to obtain and maintain both through the use of power. He knew this required actions to achieve the objectives of a financially sound, law-enforcing monarchy that could lead to a viable dynasty – something that his immediate predecessors failed to achieve. What was purposeful involved a bond policy to bring those objectives to fruition, and it came about not through deliberate design but from an understanding of what worked and what did not – with a critical reliance on learned councillors familiar with and committed to this modus operandi, in sharp contrast to the administrations of Henry VI and Edward IV. Furthermore, while designations such as ‘office’, ‘court’, ‘council/counsel’ and ‘department’ are helpful for present-day historians to discuss areas of administration, finance and justice, they are obfuscating because responsibilities and tasks devolved upon the king's councillors and faithful men, not the titles they assumed.20 Even today in our self-described modern world the same types of players may be found running governments while blurring bureaucratic responsibilities and organization charts to achieve the political needs of the leader. Indeed, it could be argued that Henry Tudor might have felt some familiarity with how statecraft in many countries functions in the twenty-first century. Monarchs, nobles, gentry, clergy, merchants and artisans alike kept accounts of the various bonds they entered. They preserved original documentation in boxes, ‘coffins’ or ‘caskets’ for future reference, especially when it was necessary to begin or defend an action at law.21 Such actions were not uncommon and all classes were represented in the king's courts: half of the defendants in king's bench from East Anglia between 1422 and 1442, for example, were yeomen or husbandmen. Moreover, credit and debt ‘was part of everyday life, not just for merchants, but for peasants and the upper classes’.22 Although there is a dearth of surviving private household accounts and journals from the late fifteenth century, it is clear that those people who kept such books recorded everything from private transactions to daily diets.23 Two such accounts are vivid illustrations of the care and scrutiny given to personal business affairs by the time Henry VII became king and exemplify the pervasiveness of written obligations.24 The first is that of William Mordaunt, brother of Sir John Mordaunt, the friend and councillor of Henry VII and chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. William became an important servant of justice, receiving a commission of the assize in 1490 and one for gaol delivery a year later – commissions he held for the remainder of the reign. Besides his role as a county judge, Mordaunt also had connections in the City. He was a treasurer of the Middle Temple and the chief prothonotary in the court of common pleas. Numerous folios in the files at common pleas include his name as author of the records and he undoubtedly sued many cases there on behalf of the king, perhaps as a ‘learned counsel’ to the king's councillors.25 His fortune was owed in part to the influence generated by his brother, John, and by the two men with whom he served on county commissions: Sir John Fyneux (chief justice of the king's bench) and Sir Robert Reed (justice of the king's bench and chief justice of the common pleas).26 His account book, ostensibly kept for the Middle Temple, contains numerous entries of a personal nature that allow a glimpse of an early Tudor civil servant making private transactions.27 Items include money spent for his gowns or lent to his wife, Anne, and ‘ffeez due to be paid’, some to the king. Payments were made for legal fees for various reasons, such as the 6s 8d paid to Humphrey Coningsby, serjeant-at-law and learned councillor of Henry VII, ‘for his councell in the corp[or]acon of the Gild of Thaxted’. What stands out in the account book are entries of Mordaunt's written obligations for the payment of sums for wardships, obtained by his brother John. A grant for the wardship of John Leventhorp was awarded to William Mordaunt and William Gascoign, his cousin, on 12 May 1506 by letters patent. The entries begin with the payment of £10 as partial settlement of £40 due to Wistan Brown, a gentleman-usher of the chamber who may have received moneys for the king and helped Mordaunt with the grant in return for a fee. The due dates of the remaining payments were then listed along with a final memorandum to have the written debt returned to Mordaunt when paid in full – the all-important denouement in discharging a written obligation if a written acquittance was not obtained.28 He ended this entry with another payment notation: ‘& then have I paid C [100] li. for lev[en]thorp ward to wystan broun & for hym – x [10] li.’ Mordaunt not only contracted debts for personal gain but as a surety for others: ‘I am bound in ij oblig[ations] eyther of x mrc [marks] as suerte for Thomas Sprot[t] to m[aster] wode wherof x marc must be paid at Seint Andrew day & at m[i]dsomr aftr x mrc.’ Sprott was a witness for a release and quitclaim of lands to John Mordaunt and Wistan Brown and an acquaintance of William Mordaunt. ‘Master Wode’ was the chief justice of common pleas, Thomas Wood, and this might explain Mordaunt's willingness to enter into two debts as surety for a family friend who owed money to his mentor at court. William also lent money and it was not beyond him to make a profit: on 1 April 1504, he recorded a loan to his brother, John, for £50 upon which £53 6s 8d was due – a modest but useful 6.67 per cent return on his familial investment.29 Special influence for gain was not the case with Dame Alianore Townshend, second wife and widow of Sir Roger, a justice of common pleas. Her husband kept a ‘vault’ of documents and deeds, in part for use in potential litigation. The majority of suits he initiated at common law on his own behalf involved debts on obligations, most likely to force arbitration and settlement. At times, he and his family recovered lands in lieu of money owed on bonds for the purchase of sheep and produce.30 It was possibly because her husband was both old and a busy royal justice that Alianore had to learn the business of running various lands and manors, for which she kept an account book.31 The book provides a common view of how households throughout England ran their estates and conducted everyday affairs, with written obligations an important vehicle to make things work. In August 1492, Sir Roger made Alianore his executrix in a new will; he died on 9 November 1493.32 Alianore entered into numerous business contracts involving the fruits of the cultivation of her lands.33 One such transaction was entered under the heading ‘10 Henry VII’ (1494–5) and shows the operation of an executrix of a will recovering debts owed to the decedent by obligation: This bull made at Reynhm [Raynham manor] the thursday next after ower lady day the Assumpcon in the xth yere of kyng harry the vijth wittenesse that I Dam' Alianor Tonneshend hath rec[eived] of John hewer Willm Curson & John Swyft of oxbysborgth xxli at divrs tymes wt yt x marke that my husbond rec[eived] in his lyve at penteney in p[art] payme[n]t of an obligacon of l [50] marke in wich the seid John Willm & John stande bounden In to my husbond befor In wittenesse wher of to this biel I have sette my seal yeven the yere & day a bove wreten. This was a copy of the original obligation, recorded by Dame Townshend's clerk or receiver-general for future reference. Other debts, however, demonstrated that Alianore Townshend personally supervised her husband's estates. One folio, headed ‘ffor wole sales’, listed a debt on 3 March 1493, more than a half year before the death of her husband and evidence that she was already managing the manor: John Bradman, ‘cytcyn & salter of london’, William Yorke ‘gentilman’ and William Bradman ‘cytycyn & fyshemongr of london bynde hem by ther obligacon to pay to my lady dame Alianor Townesend xxj li. vj s. viij d. At the fest of ye Natyvyte of sent John Baptysts [29 August]’, 1495. These three men were listed in five other obligations, each for £21 6s 8d and each due at the same feast in years extending from 1496 to 1500. Other obligations retained by Alianore Townshend were delivered for collection, including several overdue by John Bradman. William Dene, one of her agents, often received Alianore's unpaid written debts and conveyed them to Nicholas Nynes, a ‘gentleman’ of chancery and one of her representatives in London.34 What legal action Nynes may have resorted to is not known from the account book. Nor can it be determined that the overdue debts were ever paid. The book was a record of contracts and miscellaneous agreements, not an account of issues and receipts.35 For the most part they were private transactions involving the toil of her lands and her local or London buyers.36 The records kept by William Mordaunt and Alianore Townshend are indicative of the widespread practice of contracting debts for future payment in a well-developed credit society based in part on written obligations and not on immediate payment in cash or in kind. Sureties and agents were necessary to guarantee an agreement and to facilitate collection at the appointed, stipulated time, and it was quite common to renegotiate debts for future ones or when they were in default. Many indentures enrolled at chancery bound each party in a recognizance to perform the conditions of the agreement or to abide by the decisions of arbiters – a literal example of binding arbitration, with forfeiture of those bonds going to the crown.37 This mimicked the private indentures entered into outside the scope of royal government.38 Because less than ten per cent of lawsuits filed at common pleas reached a verdict in Henry VII's reign, such actions were often initiated to force arbitration – a usually peaceful solution to potentially violent disputes in many circumstances.39 When the first Tudor became king, it was over a realm that was already viewing arbitration, and therefore compromise, as a viable alternative to the factional disputes of the mid fifteenth century, drawing people closer to the central courts and central authority to assist in the process.40 This was occurring at a time when manorial courts were in decline and local litigants sued in alternative jurisdictions.41 Henry's councillors were involved in numerous suits to pursue peaceful results to disputes while maintaining a central governmental presence in the localities.42 It was the written obligation and its enrolled or recorded form as a recognizance that allowed a way for society to function and a means to enforce the oaths and promises between both private and public parties for finance and for legal solutions. Upon Henry VII's accession in 1485, the largest ‘private’ estate and household in England was the duchy of Lancaster, and it is important to review briefly the way in which it worked to obtain an understanding of how Henry VII's bond policy developed for the entire royal government. Since its incorporation into the royal demesne holdings in 1399, the duchy remained an important supplement for moneys employed by the fifteenth-century kings. It also adjudicated disputes through its own court of learned counsel and auditors, similar to the learned councillors of nobles and magnates (often referred to as their ‘council learned’).43 Indeed, the earl of Oxford, one of Henry's staunchest supporters and councillors, wrote to the king's chief minister, Reynold Bray, about a matter before him that he was examining along with ‘thadvise of my councell learned’.44 The king's mother, Lady Margaret, also had a council learned, which assisted her in hearing cases at her manor at Collyweston.45 The continuing procedure of administering the duchy lands as a household with the dual roles of revenue generation and adjudication of disputes promoted efficiency in accounting and collection, in contrast to the tedious process of tallies and paperwork at the exchequer at Westminster. The exchequer of the duchy received all the profits of lands and justice. What has not been fully appreciated is that the means by which this was carried out rested in part upon the written obligation. This has been largely overlooked in favour of an explication of duchy organization and procedure for the first Tudor's reign. For the years before 1485, there has been little discussion about what facilitated the duchy's efficiency in the areas of finance and justice – the written obligation.46 After Henry became king, the ‘council learned in the law’ was dubbed by Somerville seventy years ago as a committee of royal councillors using the duchy chambers as a prerogative and conciliar court. This has overshadowed any discussion of the actual workings of the duchy council and court and has thus left a void as to which came first – duchy procedure or royal conciliar activity there – and why.47 Indeed, it would perhaps be more useful to look at these activities in the duchy as being pursued by councillors who were ‘learned’ in the areas they worked in on behalf of the king, rather than an institutional entity for that purpose – activities that paralleled the work of the ‘counsel learned’ of other great households. This was expressed at the time in a recognizance entered into by several men involving payments due to six councillors of the king on his behalf whom Somerville identified as members of the ‘council learned’: Thomas Lovell, John Mordaunt, James Hobart, Richard Empson, John Hussey and Thomas Lucas. If any of the recognizors or their heirs died within four months new persons were required to guarantee payment ‘or ellys suche othyr as the kings lernyt Counsell for the tyme being shall accept to be bounden in like forme and condicion’– a reference to people, not polity.48 The officers of the duchy were required to take out bonds for their good behaviour and true accounting while in office, similar to the bonds required of sheriffs, customers and other royal officials that were usually filed at the royal exchequer. Upon completion of office, they also needed to obtain either those written bonds – which was preferable – or a written discharge (acquittance). For example, on 20 January 1509, three men were bound by recognizances for £100 to Sir Richard Empson, chancellor of the duchy, for John Butler to farm the duchy holdings of Ogmore in Wales. Over a year later, at the beginning of Henry VIII's reign, Butler had the obligation returned to him by command of ‘m[aster] fitzjames’ and ‘m[aster] bonhm’, the new attorney-general and receiver-general of the duchy respectively.49 Butler came in person to the duchy council chamber in Blackfriars, one of several meeting places. In the presence of Richard Lussher, the ‘auditor of the same contrey’, it was certified that Butler had fulfilled his obligation in office and he retrieved the obligation. The main function of these and other duchy officials was the collection of revenues accruing from farms and leases and, not surprising given the duchy's household origins, it was accomplished in part through the use of obligations for future payment. This method continued throughout the fifteenth century. When Richard III appointed a new chancellor of the duchy in the summer of 1483, among the items delivered to the new official were ‘iij coffyns wherin bee obligacions yat crtain [per]sonnes bee bounden unto ye said king Edward [IV] for paiement of thair fermes according to yendentures betwix thaim made’.50 This use of written obligations for payment at the duchy continued unabated through Henry VII's reign. The duchy council and its receiver-general were responsible for the collection of revenues on these obligations, which often included a penalty for non-payment. The receiver-general was charged with following through on revenue collection and the acquittance of those bonds. Along with the duchy chancellor and attorney-general, he was a key officer for discharging accounts and providing information for potential adjudication for non-payment. He worked in conjunction with the clerk of the duchy council to keep records of these transactions, and one such book of obligations has numerous entries, many from the reign of Henry VII. One entire section from the reign involves the taking and receiving of obligations by William Heydon, clerk of the duchy council, and John Ward, one of the duchy receivers; Heydon was probably the author and/or keeper of the book. Although no reasons are given for the obligations, notations were made that money was paid to the receiver-general.51 The receiver-general also retained the actual obligations. A typical example is the entry from 25 March 1507, written by Miles Gerrard, who held the office from 1505 to 1509. He referenced an obligation ‘of x li. of John Stanley Esquire’ that he had received of William Heydon. Stanley was constable of Tutbury castle and bailiff of the new liberty in Staffordshire in the duchy, as well as an esquire for the body. Gerrard signed the entry.52 Judicial proceedings were held in the various duchy chambers through its council sessions and the work of its own attorney since the time Henry IV was duke of Lancaster. The council was usually populated with royal servants and officials as well as the king's appointed chancellor of the duchy and attorney-general, and disagreements were settled effectively and usually in short order.53 They included both civil and criminal matters, which were therefore prosecuted by duchy officials who were also royal servants – a situation that continued during Henry VII's reign with those learned counsel who worked there.54 Many disputes involved the collection of revenues based on written obligations – it was critical to drive in ‘old bonds’ related to revenue if the king was to obtain his money, much of it committed to the royal household or for other assignments. Proceedings also included the various bonds for appearance and for the keeping of the peace, and they were issued in the same manner as in other courts of law: Robert Blundell and his sureties appeared before two of the barons of the duchy's exchequer to enter a recognizance of £40, the condition being to keep the peace against another person and to appear at the next term session of the exchequer.55 By 1483, when Richard Empson was attorney-general at the duchy, he could by statutory law submit a bill ‘into eny of the Kyng's Courtes by wey of enformation, shewying in the same to the Court, what and wherin the Kyng, or eny other to his use, shuld be unlawfully hurted or wronged in any thing to hym apperteynyng in the right of the same Duchie’. The duchy and its officers thus had wide-reaching authority to pursue every legal avenue to obtain what was due to the king.56 Bray, Empson and their fellow councillors would use this power for all obligations and recognizances owed to Henry, and not just those related to the duchy of Lancaster. It was the dual use of bonds at the duchy for revenue and the maintenance of law and order and adjudication of debts owed to the crown that became the model for Henry VII's royal bond policy,57 in large part because of the experience and expertise of those councillors at the duchy who did the work as opposed to members of the king's greater council who proffered advice. It is perhaps no coincidence that the earliest records of proceedings in the duchy date to 1485, when Henry's successive chancellors there also became key financial and judicial councillors for the royal government.58 When petitions were addressed to Empson at the duchy, it was recognized that the activity of the councillors there was part and parcel of the work of Henry VII's government: ‘Unto the Ryght Honorabull and Worshypfull Knyght, Master Empson, Chauncelar of the Dowche Chamber and oone of the Kyngg's Councell.’59 Household finance in England and its large-scale exemplar at the duchy of Lancaster became the basis for Henry VII's pervasive bond policy. It was centred on the king's chamber and his ‘working councillors’, notwithstanding the documentary intimations of earlier chamber activity under the Yorkists.60 Clearly, this did not come about through the machinations of a monarch with little or no administrative, managerial, legal or financial experience – one who spent half his pre-regnal life abroad in exile dependent on those foreign rulers, relatives and family supporters who somehow saw advantage in keeping him alive and sustaining him.61 When Henry became king in August 1485, he was assisted by his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, and his uncle, Jasper Tudor, duke of Bedford, in placing people in key governmental positions. And as has been demonstrated throughout history, it was such loyal and royal supporters who influenced and helped to establish a polity for running the realm based on their own areas of expertise. What may have surprised both minister and monarch alike was how quickly the first Tudor grasped the potential of a bond policy and consciously decided that he wanted to expand it and manage it. Furthermore, he well understood that simply enforcing the laws of the realm – which involved not only generating positive cash flow but also actively pursuing peace and order and the sure payment on contractual obligations to maintain both – would have little adverse effect on a citizenry that had tired of instability and were long attuned to the age-old practices of written bonds.62 How did Henry's policy take form? When looking at the personnel upon whom the new king relied to help him rule England, it is hardly coincidental that most of those involved in Henry's bond policy cut their financial teeth in household finance, either through their tenure at the duchy of Lancaster or in private households; through prosecution of legal disputes as ‘learned men’ in the law; or through connections with, or extreme loyalty to, the households of the king's family. The intent of this section is not simply to revisit the sometimes scattered biographies of Henry VII's key trusted servants and ministers, but rather to pinpoint and highlight those attributes they held in common, which in turn influenced the course of the statecraft that Henry was to pursue.63 It is perhaps fitting first to look at Henry's mother and the prime mover in helping her son to gain the throne of England: Lady Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond and Derby. Her three marriages, strong will and aptitude for political survival afforded her opportunities to learn household finance and to manage its accounting and personnel, while at the same time adjudicating disputes relevant to her lands.64 Those account books and rolls that survive relating to her estates suggest a firm understanding of the credit and legal culture of her time, including the use of written obligations.65 After her son became king, she ran her own court of equity and Henry often delegated cases to her at her principal residence of Collyweston in Northamptonshire.66 She could be both ruthless and acquisitive in her business methods, and until her death in 1509 she acted as an arbiter in many disputes and relied on household officials to assist her in both fiscal and judicial matters.67 One of those officials was Reynold Bray, whose early career was as steward and receiver-general in the household of Sir Henry Stafford, son of the first duke of Buckingham. When Stafford became Margaret Beaufort's second husband sometime before 1464, Bray continued in his position of managing their estates and legal matters while developing a personal relationship with the countess and her family. Part of the experience he gained as receiver-general involved searching documents to assist Margaret in her various legal disputes – an activity he was to raise to a deliberate national effort. He became part of the Tudor conspiracy to put Henry on the throne, and Bray joined him in exile and fought with him at Bosworth Field. His loyalty, experience and trustworthiness cannot be overstated, nor his influence on the king as the foremost policymaker, office recruiter and chief minister. Three weeks after Bosworth, Bray became chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. He thus moved from a long tenure as a major household officer of a noble family to being the chief executive of the largest household in England. He was soon after appointed treasurer of England, for only a short time, but maintained his working relationship at the exchequer in taking bonds from office-holders and in the oversight of customs, land revenues and the auditing of accounts. Additional appointments in the Welsh marches, northern England and the duchy of Chester ensured that those jurisdictions would be brought into Henry VII's financial and judicial policy.68 Other men with experience at the duchy, in household finance or with financial instruments and contract law, joined Bray as part of a group of working councillors involved with pursuing the king's ‘plan’ for securing law and order and financial solvency. They also exhibited an overt dynastic loyalty or benefited from well-placed connections with the royal family. The same day Bray became chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, Richard Empson, a member of the Middle Temple, was named its attorney-general, a position he had held under Edward IV but quickly lost under Richard III. He attended most of the duchy council meetings under the Yorkists and gained experience on royal commissions and from his charge ‘to ovrsee the kings said evidences’.69 He and Bray held several joint stewardships and Empson was one of the inner circle of councillors named an executor to Bray's will; his son, John, married the niece of Bray's wife. The last duchy meeting recorded in Richard's reign was attended by several learned counsel, including Richard Empson and a deputy steward, James Hobart of Lincoln's Inn from Norfolk. Hobart became Henry VII's attorney-general in 1486, perhaps through the influence of Empson and Thomas Lovell (discussed below), the latter also of Lincoln's Inn and Norfolk.70 John Cutte was a receiver of forfeited lands during Richard III's reign. Under Henry VII he became receiver-general in the duchy of Lancaster and under-treasurer of the exchequer, thus blurring ‘departmental’ responsibilities – as did all working councillors – when it came to pursuing royal policy. He worked closely with Bray and Empson in channelling money from the duchy and the royal exchequer to the king's chamber, as well as conveying recognizances due for payment.71 John Mordaunt, of the Middle Temple like Empson, was a member of Bray's own estate council and succeeded him as chancellor of the duchy; Empson would follow Mordaunt in that position. He fought for Henry at Bosworth, became a king's serjeant-at-law and was an attorney to Prince Arthur and chief justice of Chester – an institution that used obligations and recognizances for finance and the course of justice.72 He was also a commander at Stoke (1487). Thomas Lovell, who fought at Bosworth, helped to put down the northern rising (1489) and battled at Stoke and Blackheath (1497). He became Henry's chancellor of the exchequer, receiver of land revenues, treasurer of the chamber and later treasurer of the household – offices putting him in direct contact with Bray, Empson, Cutte and other royal councillors charged with royal finance and the maintenance of law and order.73 It was Lovell and Bray who helped to divert money destined for the exchequer to the king's chamber from the very outset of the reign.74 Lovell was a bencher at Lincoln's Inn and as treasurer kept and audited accounts; he also knew Hobart there.75 John Heron, who was Lovell's assistant before succeeding him as treasurer of the chamber, became the ‘traffic controller’ in the bond policy, keeping records of bonds and negotiating them, meeting with the various councillors and the officials at the exchequer and chancery, and spending time with Henry VII in scrutinizing books, rolls and records. He would become more than just a treasurer keeping the books, but the actual recipient of funds on bonds – a development perhaps recognized in a shift of language when he started to be referred to as ‘our Receyvor for oure said Chambre’.76 Edmund Dudley, grandson of John, Baron Dudley but remaining an esquire his entire life, studied at Gray's Inn and stayed on the periphery of the inner circle of councillors until later in the reign. He served in the English army in France (1492) and advised Henry VII on the treaty of Etaples, which provided the crown with a large annual stipend. In 1506, he was named president of the council. He was involved with James Hobart at various chancery common law pleadings.77 There is evidence that he worked with Bray in pursuing written obligations for the king before his formal royal service in September 1504.78 Thomas Lucas became Henry's solicitor-general and worked closely with Empson, Dudley, Lovell and Hobart. He began his career as secretary in the household of Jasper Tudor. John Hussey, a former surveyor of the lordships in Lincolnshire held by the duke of Clarence, helped to quell Francis Lovell's rebellion (1486) and fought at both Stoke and Blackheath. He obtained stewardships with Bray in the duchy of Lancaster and was a steward of two of Margaret Beaufort's manors. He was appointed comptroller of the household and became master of wards in 1503, a post he held until 1513 when Lovell, his kinsman by marriage, succeeded him; his patron was Reynold Bray. True to the way Henry VII governed, the king delayed Hussey's patent for failing to take out a bond for office.79 He was present at the peace negotiations in France where he may have met Edmund Dudley, if not sooner. Hussey's eldest son married the niece of Thomas Lovell. Three other councillors spent much of their time engaged in pursuing the king's financial and judicial rights through the bond policy. Henry Wyatt, who may have begun his Tudor support with Buckingham's rebellion in 1483, became clerk and then master of the king's jewels early in Henry's reign, and often worked with Dudley to collect on obligations.80 He fought at Stoke and Blackheath and at one time was ransomed from Scottish imprisonment. He took and delivered obligations to the king, and was one of those responsible for collecting the benevolence money owed to the crown.81 John Ernley, who succeeded Hobart as the king's attorney-general in 1507, was admitted to Gray's Inn around the time Edmund Dudley was there; he later acted as one of Dudley's feofees. Edward Belknap, who fought at Stoke and gained early experience in revenue collection as receiver for the Warwick and Spencer lands, was named surveyor of the king's prerogative late in the reign.82 Of the working councillors it was these men, following the lead of Reynold Bray and the king, who formed the core group facilitating royal policy. Others assisting in the effort had similar backgrounds or accomplishments. William Smith, who became bishop of Lincoln, headed up the king's council in the marches. He started his career in the service of Margaret Beaufort, before becoming surveyor and receiver-general for the Warwick, Salisbury, Spencer, Berkeley and Morley lands in 1499. He remained close to Bray83 and was named one of the executors to his will. Humphrey Coningsby, a king's serjeant-at-law who worked closely with his fellow councillors sitting at the various duchy chambers, began his practice as an attorney at common pleas; he later acted as a feofee for Bray. His clients included Queen Elizabeth and Peterborough abbey; Empson served as steward of the liberty of Peterborough around the same time. William Cope, Henry's cofferer, was a servant of Margaret Beaufort and lifelong associate of Bray and one of his executors. He was a feodary of the duchy in Wiltshire and Hampshire, as well as steward for various lordships. He also received revenues from the Isle of Wight and paid them to the chamber.84 Robert Southwell started his career as an auditor in the exchequer. He was a member of Lincoln's Inn and most likely gained the attention of Thomas Lovell and James Hobart there. He began assisting Bray in auditing the accounts of revenue officials, bypassing his old department and delivering money to the king's chamber.85 He became the chief butler of England and kept books of audit for royal lands, wards and butlerage. After Bray's death, Southwell headed up an audit function with the bishop of Carlisle, Roger Leybourn.86 He was also a receiver for several holdings of Cecily, duchess of York and delivered money directly to the king's chamber.87 Christopher Bainbridge, master of the rolls at chancery, took bonds and recorded them while acting alongside the working councillors; he was admitted to Lincoln's Inn when Lovell and Hobart where there. Finally, it would be remiss to exclude John Morton, the quintessential Tudor supporter, apologist and future chancellor and cardinal, who had experience in taking and administering bonds directly for the government since Edward IV's reign.88 The purpose of the above recitation regarding these royal officials and their experience and connections relates to what now should be quite evident: that the councillors responsible for administering Henry VII's bond policy from the start of the reign shared much in common, including the ability to facilitate that policy. They were likely to attract Henry's confidence and those of lifelong supporters such as his mother, Bray, Mordaunt and Lovell for the same reason. Most had household and financial experience, often through the graces of Margaret Beaufort, who clearly helped her son to form his government, or through their work at the duchy of Lancaster or exchequer. Most of them fought in one or more battles to win or uphold Henry's claim to the throne – Henry noticeably liked his ministers to fasten their swords alongside their ambitions, much as he was to do personally, beginning with Bosworth Field. Most had legal backgrounds, sometimes at the same inns of court, or arranged private business deals and familial marriages with each other, or worked in the same areas of government, often overlapping. The majority had experience in the administration of debts, revenue and obligations. Most served as M.P.s (Lovell, Empson, Mordaunt and Dudley were also speakers of the commons), which helped in the exercise of control by the central government over the gentry. They were on numerous commissions of the peace and special commissions throughout the reign, making their presence known in all corners of the realm on behalf of the king. These men were an interconnected, fiscally astute and politically seasoned group loyal to the leader – commonalities found long before and after the reign, although perhaps not always with experience so closely tied to the development and needs of royal policy.89 None were noblemen or ecclesiastics except the bishops of Lincoln and Carlisle, whose fiscal responsibilities lay away from Henry's court and whose activities were mainly administrative.90 They were picked for their loyalty to Henry and his family, their connections with each other and their experience in law, administration and finance, much of it stemming from household finance and expertise gleaned at the duchy of Lancaster or in the law courts.91 Not growing up in the household of an English monarch, Henry VII could afford to have an open mind as to how to rule England efficiently and effectively while exhibiting a willingness to follow and then to support and lead those who could help him attain financial and dynastic stability. From the beginning of Henry VII's reign, obligations and recognizances for all aspects of governance continued to be used as in the past at the various common law and conciliar courts and financial departments.92 Bray and Empson ran the council meetings and sessions of the duchy of Lancaster, which became one of the focal points for royal conciliar governance for both finance and law ex cathedra. They also worked with other councillors across courts, departments and jurisdictions to ensure that moneys due to the crown were accounted for, and that all bonds for the maintenance of justice – especially for keeping the peace and appearing at a court or commission – were either enforced or collected upon for default. Many of their cohorts sat on the assizes and at the sessions of the peace, where they could also keep track of the various writs of justice requiring bonds for appearance, good behaviour, payment and demands for written records. Bray, Hobart, Cutte and Empson were familiar with the roles of the J.P.s from their tenure at the duchy of Lancaster: it was the duchy chancellor who appointed judges and J.P.s and regulated the sessions of the peace.93 Hobart, Cutte and Empson also had been involved in the many commissions sent out during the last years of the Yorkists to enquire how best to ‘improve’ the king's revenue from the duchy estates – a concept used time and again in the first Tudor's reign for all his financial, judicial and prerogative rights. Edward IV had difficulty collecting payments due from duchy farmers and tenants, and more than any previous monarch he attempted to make this aspect of revenue generation more effective. Letters in the form of privy seals were sent to those held to be in arrears, and the duchy council put offenders in prison for non-performance: practices Bray and then Empson and his colleagues expanded during Henry VII's reign. Richard III recognized the potential of duchy efficiency and profit, and drew up a plan based on the duchy's 1399 charter for receivers to collect revenue from all forfeited lands and make their accounts directly to auditors appointed by the king, bypassing the exchequer.94 He called for these receivers to be of a different ilk than the traditional ‘lordes, knightes, and esquires’ who often kept revenue that was due to the monarch: Richard wanted people who would be ‘lerned men in the law’.95 The last Plantagenet did not implement his plan. Henry VII, Reynold Bray and a small group of working councillors did, and their activities centred on the use of bonds.96 They in effect fulfilled the last Yorkist's desire to rely on royal officials who were ‘lerned men in the law’. As has been seen, the duchy used bonds for various sources of income due to the king. These obligations even facilitated the collection of fifteenths, as when the exchequer was ordered by privy seal to discharge Andrew Buk and his fellow collectors from Cambridgeshire for their payments directly to the king's chamber. They had, in fact, been bound to Bray, Lovell and other councillors for £115 19s 8d‘to content theim at certain daies conteyned in their sevrall obligacons’ for the second fifteenth granted two years earlier – again, the never-ending quest to drive in overdue payments.97 This procedure was used outside the duchy as well.98 Emulating both duchy procedures and household finance, the working councillors – including the treasurer of the king's chamber (first Lovell and then John Heron) – utilized bonds and began keeping stacks of obligations for payment, or memoranda of them. They also created long lists of obligations and enrolled or filed recognizances that were noted as outstanding, paid or wanting in partial payment. The bond policy, which encompassed all obligations and recognizances involving finance and justice, began to bifurcate – placing people in new bonds and seeking out and examining old ones that were potentially in default for non-performance of conditions. The reason for this was first and foremost the inherent delay in obtaining moneys owed to the crown in the area that could anachronistically be called ‘accounts receivable’– a situation shared by all households and creditors. The king also wanted to ensure that those under bond to keep the peace or to appear at a court were in fact living up to the conditions imposed upon them, especially when it came to the issue of peace bonds as an attempt to thwart potential civil unrest. This was not difficult to implement since the processes and practices were already in place and functioning, both at the royal administrative level and at the local levels of finance, justice and government, especially for real debts owed to the crown for its ordinary and extraordinary income. Nor was it problematic to deduce that many of those previously under obligation might be in forfeit. All that was required to make the policy responsive was to ascertain if such conditions were either met or the amounts or penalties for non-performance had been prosecuted for payment to the crown and then collected.99 However, a caveat mentioned earlier bears repeating: those seeking set administrative procedures and the institutionalization of the policy need to be cognizant of the fluidity of government, past as well as present. Moreover, people living at the time were perhaps more aware of the confusion inherent in any policy put into execution than are today's historians. Robert, abbot of St. Mary's in York, expressed this view in a confidential communication to Reynold Bray. He reminded Bray that the abbot and another party entered an obligation to ‘send up before candlemesse next comyng’ three obligations with conditions under the convent seal, following the directions ‘of a papir signed wt the hand of maister mordaunt’. The abbot now sent both Mordaunt's letter and the obligations to Bray to be delivered to the king. He then pleaded with Henry VII's chief councillor that after making the delivery to the king Bray would have them cancelled and returned to the bishop of Durham, who administered such bonds in the north. Robert ended his letter asking of Bray to ‘know yor mynd to whome at my daies of payment I shall send up my paiements and of whome I shall receive my bounds for the discharge of me and this hens’.100 The first step for policy implementation involved identifying what non-performing obligations and recognizances were scattered throughout the central and itinerant courts, treasuries and repositories. It was next required that they be recorded or stored at fixed locations with easy access, such as the chancery, the duchy chambers, the king's chamber or with certain ministers. It was then essential that such bonds were prosecuted for payment or renegotiation where applicable, and for discharge when it was determined that conditions were fulfilled. These were procedures well known to private household accounting and to the machinery of the duchy of Lancaster. Privy seals became the instrument of choice for summoning parties before the councillors, whether at the duchy, star chamber or individually, or for ordering written discharge (acquittance) for a bond.101 The signet office was also used, especially for directives to government departments regarding bonds. Henry appreciated the work of the various clerks there. In 1497, he signed a signet letter noting that because the clerks of the signet had been diligent in the king's ‘manifold causes and besinesses’, as well as securing paper, parchment and wax at their costs, he rewarded them with £10 each.102 The king and his working councillors kept them very busy. The point at which the bond policy moved from initial implementation to fully-fledged operation is not self-evident. As seems to be the case throughout Henry VII's reign, documentation is a fickle servant of discovery. Chancery enrolments provide little indication of initial policy execution, although they offer strong evidence as to when the intensification of the bond policy occurred.103 The various rolls, memoranda, books, writs and lists stored at The National Archives are helping historians come to the realization that they do not necessarily conform to century-old classifications and, therefore, administrative or political solutions for Henry's statecraft.104 What has become clear is that this was a resolute effort on the part of the king and his working councillors – who together constituted his government.105 And while the first surviving books of receipts in the chamber, kept by Lovell and then Heron, begin recording obligations four years after the start of the reign, there is evidence that this policy commenced from the outset, with some changes from the past.106 Beginning in October 1485, pardons for outlawry were enrolled on the patent rolls for non-appearance before the ‘justices of the Bench’. They involved not only non-appearance during the first few months of the reign but also from the reigns of Edward IV and Richard III. Most of these were for pleas of debts between private parties, but recognizances would have been taken to guarantee appearance. Because paying for pardons was a sine qua non under Henry, it is likely that payment was required to vacate those bonds for appearance.107 Similar pardons for non-appearance, including those from offences under the Yorkists, continued to be enrolled throughout the reign. Many of those bonds for appearance were pursued for prosecution and collection by Edmund Dudley twenty years later. At the same time, those people who were potentially harmful to the stability of the new dynasty were forced to take out peace bonds, either because of their actions before or soon after Bosworth or because of their affinities – a procedure common before Henry VII's reign and until recently the central theme of the first Tudor's predilection for bond-taking among the upper echelons of society.108 Indeed, one might perhaps wonder if Henry ever heard stories about his grandfather, Owen Tudor, and one in particular pertaining to his release from Windsor castle after taking out a recognizance for £2,000 – the concept of bonds apparently ran in the family.109 Such control could and probably did help to quell potential revolts under the first Tudor by making them literally costly, and by hindering any local aristocratic intentions against the monarch not only through their obligations but also those of their affinities and would-be followers.110 This meant that Henry VII had to enforce the conditions of these bonds or they would be of no effect on the populace. He seems to have had great confidence in his position as king soon after Bosworth, and it is clear that he had no qualms about such enforcement throughout his reign, against both the principals and their sureties.111 Less than two months after Bosworth, memoranda of recognizances were filed at chancery for sureties to guarantee that their recognizors kept the peace and their allegiance to Henry VII. However, they involved parties from all walks of life and not simply nobles. They included a grocer, a cordwainer, a fuller, several yeomen, gentlemen, knights and a lord.112 That confidence also meant that Henry could be magnanimous if the occasion warranted, something often lost on the chroniclers of his reign. On 26 July 1498, Thomas Wotton, vicar of Chiswick, was bound in 50 marks as a surety for William Lound (Lund), a rector and chaplain, whom Wotton thought ‘would have bien [the king's] true and faithful liegeman’. Lund apparently ‘offended your grace’ and Wotton requested a pardon from paying the forfeiture because of his poverty by having the king sign a bill to that effect and give it either to the chancellor or the keeper of the rolls. Henry VII signed the bill and a note at the bottom stated that it was received by the master of the rolls on 1 May 1501 by the hand of James Hobart, the king's attorney, no doubt to grant the pardon since Lund also received one two days earlier.113 On 8 July 1489, John Radcliff, Lord Fitzwalter was under recognizance with three sureties ‘by him made in our Chauncerie’. There is no record of it being enrolled on the close rolls summarized in the Calendars but it was filed in chancery as a memorandum as ‘more plainely may appere of recorde’.114 However, a year after Fitzwalter was attainted (1495), the sureties were in forfeit of 1,000 marks each for this bond. One of them, John Wyndham, did not suffer the stigma of Fitzwalter's attainder because the king ordered a tally to be cut at the exchequer for the amount and given to the surety ‘by way of reward’. A second, Robert Drury, was also released by a signet letter with the king's sign manual.115 The third surety, Sir Robert Brandon, actually forfeited his 1,000 marks, and apparently there were eight sureties in other recognizances for the perfidious lord who were in forfeit, each for £1,000.116 Bonds were being taken and recorded early in the reign and it can be surmised that the working councillors were busy locating existing obligations and recognizances while taking new ones. Henry VII would become deeply involved in such searches. In 1498, he ordered an inventory of all the rolls and records ‘made in the courte of Chauncery of King Edwarde the iiijte’ during his first decade of rule – records going back thirty-seven years.117 The chancery files were constantly scrutinized throughout the reign since a large number of bonds or memoranda concerning recognizances were stored there. For example, on 29 November 1500, two sureties came to chancery and recognized debts of £20 for Thomas Blake's appearance in star chamber, plus his promise not to harm certain people named. Almost eight years later, Robert Rydon, clerk of the council, received a writ from the king summarizing the bond, which was in ‘filacus cancellar’. It enjoined Rydon to certify whether or not Blake appeared at the appointed time. Rydon replied that on 31 January 1501, Blake in fact had appeared at chancery, confessed to whatever allegations were before him, and was dismissed along with his sureties. The recognizance on file, however, was discovered uncancelled, which is why the king wanted to know its status.118 Henry started placing people high and low into bonds for traditional royal business. In various parishes in the hundred of Hoo in Kent, eighteen yeomen and two gentlemen entered into bonds to the king for £600 to observe conditions in indentures taken a year after the reign began.119 Henry also received payment on forfeitures on bonds directly into the chamber or into the exchequer throughout the reign, and again not just from those of high estate. When the king discovered that three yeomen from Suffolk forfeited their recognizances of 100s each that were taken before the justices of the peace for the appearance of one of them at the appointed day, a total of £15 was ‘paide unto us in oure Chambre’. They now required a discharge at the exchequer. The same was true of two yeomen and three husbandmen of Kent, forfeiting 100 marks ‘paide unto us in oure Chambre’, although the king ‘for divrse consideracons’ remitted part of the amount. Often these forfeitures would be collected at the exchequer for assignment to royal officials or servants. A ‘franklyn’ and a gentleman from Devon were bound by recognizance for John Splotte, also a gentleman, to keep the peace against all the king's liege people and specifically against a certain clerk, plus to appear at the next sessions of the peace in Exeter. A year later Splotte ‘made assaulte upon oon John Stabbot’, thereby triggering the condition involving all the king's liege people even though it was not against the named clerk. Indeed, any breaking of the peace against a private person was also a breach of the king's peace, and therefore involved potential forfeiture of money to the crown. All three men now surrendered amounts totalling £40, which went as royal rewards.120 Henry personally ordered special commissions not only to seek out the records of obligations and recognizances but also to take new ones and drive in old ones. Moreover, these commissions were charged with finding any and all revenue due to the crown.121 Towards the end of the reign, Henry entrusted his working councillors to draw up commissions that he authorized, such as the all-encompassing one described in a bill he signed that was based on articles authored by Richard Empson and John Hussey. It recorded the names of the commissioners followed by a list of ‘enquerry’ for a large number of potential offences, including all wards, marriages, lands without licence, special liveries, wastes, sales of woods, treasure trove, inquisitions by escheators, lands in-chief within the duchy of Lancaster or elsewhere, misprisions, extortion, all ‘usserers’, escapes, and ‘all forffayters off reconnyssance be fore the Justyces off pace sheryffs or othervyse in sessyons’. Empson, Lucas and Hussey signed the articles.122 These special commissions were an adjunct to the responsibilities of councillors and commissioners of the peace and the judges of the assize; the aforementioned bonds taken before J.P.s were clearly discovered by those hearing cases. For example, on 12 February 1502 it was recorded that two London gentlemen were in forfeit of their peace bond against all liege people and a named person that was taken during the assizes in 1491 – an eleven-year-old bond.123 The aftermath of rebellions provided a special opportunity for such commissions and the taking of bonds. Henry VII realized that by replacing retribution with reprieve, he could tap into a source of income and inculcate respect for the law and civil obedience at the same time: the king understood early on that most rebels were worth more alive than dead.124 Recognizances were taken by three royal officials in Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire ‘for the fynes of theim that offended wt the Lord Audeley the smyth & othr the hole sum where of was [£4,629 8s 8d]’. Additional recognizances for the same insurrection totalled £9,319 17s 6d. Notations in the chamber accounts indicated that payments were received. When other offenders beyond the commission entered into bonds, they were known to the king because he ‘hath a boke’.125 The king also used bonds as a preventative measure once a rebellion was in the offing. On 5 October 1501, he signed a warrant directing a commission to deal with the recent rebels supporting Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, who was still at large.126 Writs of dedimus potestatem were sent to the J.P.s in Oxfordshire, ‘for theym to take sureties by recognisance of the p[er]sonnes … resorting to or said countie for their true liegance unto us after the forme and condicon as is expressed in or said other l[ette]res’. Two days earlier, Henry VII had sent the chancellor ‘the names of suche p[er]sonnes as were srvnts of or Rebel’. Any man on the list failing to appear and enter into a bond was to be committed to ward ‘tyl they fynd suertie’.127 Henry went from accepting and then managing the bond policy to taking the lead, and he began to tell councillors how to write obligations and seek them out. In signing warrants to Humphrey Coningsby concerning parcels of land, he instructed the learned councillor and serjeant-at-law, who worked with Empson at the duchy of Lancaster, that ‘he must deliv[e]r t[e]rme mich[aelmas] anno xxjo[1505] p[ro]x[imo] ij obligacons as foloweth’. He then specified the names, the language and the amounts for the two obligations. The king also set policy by example, including what became the modus operandi of bond review: determining the status of a bond, learning the particulars of those involved, and negotiating for a final disposition. The recognizance taken on 28 December 1492 by several sureties, including Nicholas Nyens and William Campion of London, for 1,000 marks ‘evrych of theym’ for Henry Hudson's allegiance, lay filed at chancery for a decade. Then on 26 February 1502, Henry VII signed a bill ‘at our Maner of Richemonde’ ordering the cancellation of the recognizance ‘only touchyng the bondes of the seid Nicholas [and] William and for noon of the other p[er]sones named in the seid recognisaunce but that the seid recognisauce touchying the seid [other] p[er]sones to be and stond at all tymes in strength and vertue’.128 Forfeitures to the crown on various bonds, including old ones ‘on the books’, continued at a steady pace, involving people from every level of society. Because ordinary and extraordinary revenue and the profits of justice – and the difficulty in collecting it – were a main concern of the government, forfeitures by sheriffs for their misdeeds in office or their failure to collect revenue as spelled out in their recognizances were both a source of income and a check on incompetent or dishonest appointees.129 As the ‘conspicuous instrument of the royal will’,130 the sheriff was a key component for the king's bond policy for law and order and financial stability.131 Much of the effectiveness of the sheriff, or lack thereof, depended in part on the strength or weakness of the monarch: Henry V confronted the deficiencies in law and order through a strong effort to centralize law enforcement, with the sheriff as a keystone. In a recent study of the enforcement of statute staple recognizances by sheriffs from c.1355 to 1530, Henry VII seems to have had the greatest success in aligning sheriffs with the central will.132 That success was linked to bonds for office. But, as outlined above, it had been a major task to ascertain at the exchequer who was under bond, where the bonds were kept and what steps had been taken to ensure performance or payment on default. On 27 February 1500, Henry spelled out his bond policy regarding sheriffs to his chancellor, Cardinal Morton, reiterating that ‘it is ordeyned and provided that nomaner personne elected and chosen Shirif of any countie … shal have out our l[ett]res patents touching his shirifwik unto the tyme he shal have founde g[oo]d and suffisaunt suertie in our Eschequier to yelde ther a iust accompt for thesame’.133 Reynold Bray, with his positions at the duchy, the exchequer and as chief minister of the king, was afforded the flexibility needed to make sure that bonds continued to be taken of new sheriffs, and there is ample evidence to show that efforts were made to hold them accountable and to collect on forfeited bonds.134 Diligence was the key, whether for ensuring that bonds were taken or that appointments were made that benefited the king, without any political agendas on the part of the sheriffs. Bray and his successors seem to have had a great deal of success through their collective scrutiny. A signet from the king to the prior of Tynemouth and a clerk enjoined them to take a recognizance by writ of dedimus potestatem of Sir Humfrey Lisle and his sureties to be sheriff of Northumberland because he ‘hath dilayed hiderto to fynde sureties as in suche caas is accustumed’ in order to get his letters patent for office. The recognizance was to be drawn up by ‘our trusty counsaillor’ the bishop of Carlisle. The signet letter was returned to the chancery with an attached memorandum of a recognizance taken of Lisle and four sureties for his office.135 When it was bruited that Thomas Hasilrig, named sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire, was ‘suposd that he had been reteyned with soom lords ther’, his appointment was cancelled. However, Hasilrig appeared before the king and ‘shewed that he is nat reteyned nor bilonging to any p[er]sonne but merely unto us, and would endevor hym with al effect to s[e]rve us truly in the said rowme’. The king signed a signet to this effect, addressed to Reynold Bray and the bishop of Salisbury.136 The political ramifications were stunning. The county sheriff, once all-powerful in his dual roles in local justice and in revenue collection, was becoming more closely linked and beholden to the monarch, not the magnate.137 The king's plans were carried out with alacrity by other working councillors. In one telling privy seal given to Edmund Dudley and John Cutte late in the reign, Henry VII noted that since 1485, both sheriffs and escheators had forfeited – and continued to forfeit –‘divrs theyr recognisaunces’ that they and their sureties entered into before the barons of the exchequer to the late John Dynham, lord treasurer, and ‘Sr Reynold Bray knight to our behouf’. These included bonds for both the execution of their responsibilities in office and for any accounts due on revenue collections.138 Cutte succeeded Bray in this role, and the king now gave him full power to ‘assesse compounde & agre for us & in oure name wt all & evry the seid recognisors & their mayn[per]nors for their fynall ends & discharges of evry the seid recognisaunces’. Cutte was also empowered to assign the moneys collected for fees and wages for the king's servants or for other purposes, and to provide acquittances to those paying their debts; Dudley was to work with him.139 Although a learned councillor who was later referred to as one who ‘had no lernyng in the lawe other then a litill exp[er]iens’, Cutte nonetheless became a key figure in the bond policy that extended into Henry VIII's reign.140 The exchequer was ordered by the king to forward tallies to those making payment without ‘other charge to be sett uppon theym or eny of theym for the same’, including pardons they would receive for discharging their bonds. Henry also stated that the warrant would act as a discharge for Cutte and Dudley for these responsibilities by both the current and future monarchs. This is a glimpse of one role in the area of bonds that Bray pursued from the outset, in this case for those bringing revenue to the exchequer. It was passed on to his executor, John Cutte, and to his successor as the king's personal finance minister for bonds, Edmund Dudley. It must have become obvious to Henry VII that this component of bond policy needed attention. A privy seal to the exchequer the previous year noted that ‘where abouts ten yeres past’ the sheriff of Lincoln kept a felon in jail ‘according to thordre of or lawes’. The felon escaped and the sheriff now forfeited his recognizance in the sum of 100s from his goods and lands, to be given as reward to one of the king's servants.141 Although one historian considered this prosecution of bonds for erring sheriffs to be ruthless, it was in fact putting into effect the will of a monarch bent on making royal officials accountable and culpable – and at a level not seen before his time.142 When Edmund Dudley succeeded Bray as the chief royal official for taking and collecting bonds, he continued this policy of reviewing shrieval recognizances for possible forfeitures.143 He even notched it up by often requiring sheriffs, under-sheriffs and escheators to pay for the discharge of their bonds for office at the end of their tenure, although as just noted in Henry's directive such officials were not in theory subject to other fines once they executed their responsibilities.144 While an argumentum ex silentio is never proof of any position, it might be assumed that those sheriffs and under-sheriffs involved with collecting revenue from various land and judicial sources who were not in Dudley's book or the chamber books and lists of bonds were in fact doing a good job in bringing cash and bonds to the chamber. This could especially be true given the close scrutiny of exchequer records by the king's councillors. There was also a steady closing of the gap between chancery administration of old and new bonds and direct royal involvement by the king, his chamber and his working councillors. Searches through the records were assisting in this endeavour. A series of recognizances enrolled at chancery in November 1496 involving a large number of laymen for the loyalty and ‘good aberyng’ of Thomas Warde, a merchant of the staple, and his appearance before the king was brought to light in May 1501. Henry signed a bill cancelling the recognizances of two of the sureties (a salter and a ‘pasteler’) and it was sent to William Warham, keeper of the chancery records and rolls and the future chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury. Both bonds were marked cancelled on the close rolls. Then a separate petition to the king to release another surety at least four years later noted that Thomas Warde had now ‘dyed in the towre’. That surety, a ‘pewterer’, was ‘att [the] poynt of owtlawry’ because of the ‘force of the said recognisaunce’. He successfully pleaded poverty ‘and havyng wyf and chyldren lyke to be perisshed for defaute’ if he had to pay on the bond, and the king signed the petition as sufficient warrant for the recognizance to be cancelled at chancery.145 Prosecutions on bonds were taking place because they were being scrutinized in the rolls and files. Henry VII personally directed the intensification of bond administration, consolidation and prosecution, with the chancery as a central point for a process that moved to the working councillors and the king and his chamber. At the end of 1499, he informed all chancery officials that recognizances in cases of treason and misprision by ‘subjects or strangers’ were to be enrolled, perhaps a reaction to the uncertain intentions of the earl of Suffolk and the final act in the Perkin Warbeck revolt.146 The king noted that these bonds had not hitherto been enrolled and he now ordered those working at chancery to enrol them within eight days of receipt. Failure to do so meant a fine of 20s to the officers, with two-thirds going to the king and one-third to the chancellor: an incentive for the chancellor to keep tabs on his clerks. In true policy fashion, Henry ordered that those forfeitures also had to be enrolled – most likely as recognizances! – under a further penalty of 10s within a month after the infraction was incurred. Failure to do so meant the loss of office. The king made sure his chancery clerks had the means to do his will, stating that, ‘to avoid any excuse’, all chancery officers would have access to every recognizance on file for enrolment within the eight-day period. To make the point stick – as if it were somehow missed – each clerk was to be bound to Henry VII in 20s for ‘each day after the eight that he fails to enrol the same, with a further fine of 10s for failure to subscribe his name to the same’. Although some have argued that this command had little immediate effect with regard to bonds for treason and misprision, there clearly was an increase in administrative activity, but not necessarily on the close rolls.147 In the surviving corpus cum causa writs, which included memoranda of recognizances taken at chancery, such bonds were filed throughout the reign but with increased frequency.148 During the period 1498–9, old recognizances found among these eighty documents were now beginning to be prosecuted with some regularity.149 For the period 1499–1502, the number of writs filed came to 315 documents, and from 1502 to the end of the reign a total of 815 were filed, with a large number as memoranda of recognizances.150 The 1499 enrolment directive may have been the result of the continuing escalation of the bond policy, but a large jump in enrolment occurred later on because of particular circumstances and the decisions made by the king. Those circumstances, with their potential for instability for the crown, emerged over time while the working councillors followed the king's determination and Bray's conciliar leadership in increasing their activities regarding bond policy. They included Henry VII's intermittent illnesses after 1499, which became more serious by 1507; the death of Cardinal Morton in September 1500; and the loss of Henry's heir and his wife within a ten-month period (2 April 1502 and 11 February 1503 respectively). But perhaps the biggest prospective blow to his statecraft was the death of Sir Reynold Bray on 5 August 1503. Henry had relied heavily on this architect of both his governance and his magnificent chapel. Fortunately, the king possessed councillors who for the most part had been executing his financial and judicial activities through his bond policy for eighteen years with Bray. Ever cautious, Henry did not immediately elevate anyone to replace Bray and even took his time before giving John Mordaunt the chancellorship of the duchy of Lancaster in 1504. Whether the king saw this trusted official and councillor to his mother as Bray's eventual replacement may have become moot because of two occurrences that year: the recognition of Edmund Dudley as a capable and loyal councillor who was made speaker of the Commons in January; and the death of Mordaunt on 11 September.151 Interestingly, Dudley dated the first time he ‘entered the service of or said sovraigne lord’ to the same day Mordaunt died, which does beg the question of whether he received his position by default.152 Within a month of Mordaunt's death and Dudley's elevation, Richard Empson was named keeper of the duchy seal, and its chancellor a year later. Empson would thus preside over the working councillors to pursue the bond policy that included prosecuting the king's financial and judicial rights using the various duchy chambers, as Bray had done. Henry VII therefore had made up his mind to continue the same polity and policy established in 1485, except that Bray's dual roles were now assumed by two men who would forever be linked with the first Tudor's mode of governance and its amplification: Empson and Dudley. Dudley and the king began working closely together. Numerous bills were signed by both of them for a variety of actions.153 When William Halls was approved to be the clerk of the peace in Devon, a bill for his letters patent was signed by Dudley and Henry VII; unsurprisingly, Halls had to pay 40 marks cash to Dudley for the office. Dudley most likely had his book of bonds with him when he signed the bill, and perhaps he and the king decided on the amount together.154 They also perused the same book of recognizances, and Henry VII signed every page of Dudley's own book. The king relied on Dudley to pursue all avenues of potential revenue and possible forfeitures on bonds for those failing to adhere to the law or to administer their offices competently. As noted above, Henry also gave Dudley, and Empson, great latitude in drawing up commissions for that purpose. Dudley may well have been the prime mover in discovering not only these shortfalls related to bonds but also inefficiencies and oversights elsewhere in government. For example, the king sent a signet letter to the chancellor after learning that those administering the royal forests were ‘suche symple p[er]sonnes [who] as in tyme passed have been promoted therunto and nowe occupie those rowmes’. Because of these incompetent officials ‘the game wtin or forrests be gretely diminisshed and destroyed’. Henry now told the chancellor that ‘fromhensfurth take thadvise of or right trusty counseillour Edmonde dudley, Justice of oure said forrests’ in making out any writs or warrants by his command to remove any officials and replace them ‘as he shall thynk moost expedient’. Dudley was undoubtedly the source to whom Henry referred when he spoke of ‘learning’ about the problem. As if to ensure that his chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury would indeed bow to the will of an esquire, the king concluded ‘ffaile ye not to conforme you thus to doo as we trust you and as ye tender our pleas[ure]’.155 Henry VII invested more power and authority in Dudley. In a letter to the chancellor, the king commanded ‘for ye bishop of Winchestr’ to make out under great seal writs of ‘Ne exeas Regnum (not to leave the realm)’‘after [such] maner forme and effecte as our trusty Counsaillor Edmund Dudley shall shewe unto you’.156 It is not difficult to see how animosity towards Dudley could have built up over time as other royal officials had to bend to the will of an over-mighty esquire solely because of the king's unwavering support. Part of the increase in bond policy activity can be attributed to this decision by Henry VII that Dudley should pursue obligations and recognizances as Bray had done, only with greater assistance from the king. One example of this shift after 1504 can be seen in recognizances involving Sir Henry, Lord Clifford. Three years earlier, the king received payment on one of ten recognizances for £100 entered into by Clifford for yearly receipts for the farms and issues of certain manors in York.157 The money was originally to be paid to four of the working councillors for the king's use: Mordaunt, Hobart, Empson and Lucas. Henry later signed a warrant to cancel that one bond at chancery because the money was paid to the king ‘fforseyng alwayes that al the othr recognisancs remayne in ful strength and effect as it apperteigneth’.158 Nevertheless, after Dudley's activities on behalf of the crown were well under way, a new set of bonds for Lord Clifford marked a different procedure. The king sent a list of recognizances to chancery via Thomas Routhale, the king's secretary but also one of the masters in chancery – yet another blur of ‘offices’ that helped in the implementation of policy.159 The list included four bonds entered on 22 April 1506 by Lord Clifford and his sureties for the total payment of 1,300 marks. These recognizances were taken by Routhale and subsequently signed by Henry VII. A signet letter by the king was also sent with the recognizance list to the master of the rolls at chancery, Christopher Baynbridge, who had recently succeeded William Barons at that position; Dudley had been Barons's patron.160 The king ordered the bonds to be ‘spedely and suerly entred and enrolled amongs other Rolls and Records in our Chauncery’. However, Henry VII further commanded that the master of the rolls was then ‘wt all diligence [to] sende unto our right trusty counsaillor Edmund Dudley the true copyes of the said recognisaunces subscribed with your hand’.161 In fact, the recognizances were enrolled, Dudley received the bonds, and Clifford compounded these and other recognizances with Dudley for a pardon for numerous offences.162 There was no involvement with the other councillors; Dudley was doing the king's bidding on his own when he was not working with his colleagues, much as Bray had done. He had become an important conduit between the king and his chancery when it came to bonds. This did not preclude other councillors from continuing the execution of the bond policy with chancery involvement, whether Dudley worked with them or on his own. Joanne Pickering's recognizance for 500 marks taken in chancery on 10 July 1503 required her to find sureties for a bond of 400 marks ‘such as our Counsell lerned shuld accept’. The bond, which was ‘in our Chauncry remaynyng of recorde’, was ordered cancelled in November 1504.163 Dudley also became involved with determining possible forfeitures on judicial bonds, many of which had been in abeyance at the various law courts since the beginning of the reign. This was to be accomplished either through his own searches or through lists of obligations and recognizances compiled by others and given to him to prosecute, and he had help from the king. Indeed, on the inside cover of a book listing the recognizances forfeited at king's bench from the beginning of the reign, Henry VII wrote a note in his own hand: ‘A declaracon of all the recognicions forfait in the kyngs bench from Anno prmo of or Reign [1485] unto mich[aelmas] Anno 20o[1504][and?] yt E Dudley hath [further] charge to make out proces for all thoes yt be unpaied’.164 The twenty-folio book, written in Latin and organized by court terms, noted that the recognizances were kept at the exchequer. Several months later (1 February 1505), Dudley received another book of obligations by order of the king, based on records from the start of the reign ‘towching dyvrse o[the]r matyers’. The twenty-seven folios listed everything from bonds for appearance at common pleas or the king's ‘counsaill’, keeping the peace and good behaviour to obligations for hunting hawks in the king's forest, keeping allegiance, prohibiting Calais merchants to sail in certain waters or the making of bricks. It was delivered to Dudley and his servant, John Mitchell, by John Heron to prosecute the bonds on behalf of the king.165 Heron signed almost every page, mimicking the monarch he served. Most revealing is that, of the large number of obligations for ‘good abearing’, a majority involved non-nobles. Besides seeking out old bonds for prosecution, Dudley and the king kept a close eye on potential new ones that related to both finance and law and order. One example is the signet signed by Henry VII to the chancellor, asking for a commission under the great seal involving the bishop of Exeter, Robert Willoughby, Lord Broke and John More ‘according to a bill of certain Articles signed wt or hand’. Although Henry signed it, at the bottom of the three articles is found ‘p[er] me Ed[mund] Dudeley p[ro] Rege’, the obvious author and perhaps the discoverer of the matters. The first article involved a Devonshire man ‘which is lunacy and hath be oute of his mynde by [the] space of xxv yeres’. He was seised of lands worth 200 marks per annum, without permission from any king, past or present. The second article involved ‘a grevous and heynous murdr’ in Devon by a man and a woman. The man was hanged, but the woman escaped with the help of John Lilbert, one of the justices of the peace, although he knew ‘that she was p[ar]tie to the said murdr’. The third involved a man who robbed his mother of gold and silver and was later captured. However, the justice of the peace decided ‘to lett hym goo by maynp[ernours]’, which the article states ‘shuld not have byn doon by the law & good discrecion’.166 No doubt Henry VII and Edmund Dudley saw financial possibilities, including the taking of new bonds. Although obligations or recognizances relating to the last two articles may not have been very lucrative, the surviving lists and files of such bonds for the reign show numerous very small amounts. The king was focused on upholding the law and making sure that the justices were accountable and the populace was aware of their monarch's commitment to law enforcement. Henry VII was unequivocally the force behind this policy of prosecuting bonds, both to activate the somnolent process of law and to collect money from those who disrespected it or ignored it, or who might potentially break it. Although Dudley acted as his personal bond minister, with Empson in a similar position overseeing the working councillors for day-to-day activities, the king directed the overall policy. He accomplished this through his councillors, who like Dudley worked from books and lists of obligations due to the crown, usually in specific areas of prerogative rights or judicial fines owed to the king.167 Henry also ruled through his directives that encompassed the realm, mainly through letters he signed personally – a signature that was sought after as the ultimate royal stamp of approval.168 Sheriffs and justices were well aware of their king's commitment to maintaining the laws and to acquiring what was deemed his just due as monarch. They could expect to hear from him frequently: a not uncommon communication was the signet letter he signed at Richmond ordering a commission in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire to inquire about wards, lands in capite, livery, marriages, loans, murderers, idiots, unlawful acquittals and ‘all forfaictures of recognisaunce takyn bifore the Justicis of peax Shiriffs or othrewise in sessions’.169 While historians have sometimes been sceptical about a shift in policy or priority under Henry, especially when it came to increasing the prosecution of old bonds, what actually occurred was an intensification of, and procedural change in, a bond policy that commenced at the outset of the reign. Elton denied any effort to collect on old bonds when he wrote his articles, concluding that ‘the alleged evidence for a marked deterioration in the last years rests either on statements of interested parties or can be paralleled from the earlier years’. He did concede that ‘it does look as though the last years of Henry VII witnessed a more particular attention to the collection of debts and fines owed the king’.170 But his use of fifteen extant scire facias writs to show that all but one of the ‘old’ debts put for recovery were taken by 1499 missed most of the surviving evidence, or the fact that searches, and collections, on old bonds began from the start of the reign. Overlooked as well were the bonds on file and Dudley's lists and books of bonds taken since 1485 and handed to him by the king for prosecution and collection. Then there are the close rolls that survive from the reign, the summaries of which, as noted above, seem to suggest a huge increase in bond enrolment (and therefore bond activity) after 1500 or 1502.171 The plethora of recognizances appearing on the dorse of these rolls later in the reign has led to an optical illusion that needs to be recognized. Henry VII's chancery did begin to enrol recognizances on the close rolls with greater frequency when compared to surviving rolls from the Yorkist period. But what appears to be a boutade of new obligations and recognizances towards the end of the reign was in fact a purposeful, concerted and expanded effort to discover, list, scrutinize and act upon any and all records involving bonds old or new ad usum regis, whether for actual debts or future behaviour. There was a jump in enrolments on the close rolls from 1500 to 1501, from nineteen recognizances due to the king or his councillors on his behalf to sixty-nine, and as discussed above, it may have been related to a 1499 proclamation involving bonds for treason. In 1502 the number was sixty-eight but it then dropped to thirty-six in 1503. It was in 1504 that the number of bonds enrolled spiked to 122, with many enrolled later in the year; and from 1506 to 1508 the number never dipped below 213 per year. This coincided with Edmund Dudley's employment and the appointment of Richard Empson as successor to John Mordaunt at the duchy of Lancaster. But it involved an administrative enhancement for the bond policy: using the close rolls as a source of documentation for potential or real money due to the crown on recognizances. The jump in enrolments was an archival move for record consolidation of an ongoing bond policy that resulted in the steady growth of the taking and prosecuting of recognizances and obligations after 1485, not 1502 or 1504. It is difficult to ascertain the magnitude of bonds being taken, prosecuted and cancelled upon payment as the reign progressed. Almost a half century ago, R. E. Latham noted in the 1500–9 volume of the Calendar of Close Rolls: ‘It is clear from the original recognizances surviving in unsorted Chancery Files that the great majority were not enrolled’.172 One complication lies in the probability that bonds were enrolled but that the actual rolls have not been identified or are missing. For example, the C 255/8 series (4, 5, 7–12) at The National Archives have the ‘Mo’ enrolment mark on them yet are missing from those close rolls that have been identified for the reign and printed in the two-volume calendars. File four has 169 memoranda of recognizances, mostly for good behaviour, that cover the first ten years of the reign: ‘old’ bonds. File five contains 105 memoranda, with about a third from the last nine years of the reign and the majority from earlier years. Sean Cunningham has discovered a ‘missing’ chancery roll that in fact contains the enrolment of the majority of these bonds.173 It is the circular argument that we do not know what we do not know. Another challenge involves the lists and books of bonds kept by councillors that cannot be accounted for either in the chancery and exchequer records or in the chamber account books. Dudley's books of old bonds, two of which have been mentioned, may represent a combination of bonds filed at various royal repositories, as well as within the king's chamber. This loose tracking of bonds is what led to more and more of them being entered on the close rolls as part of the effort to consolidate their administration and prosecution. Moreover, they were not simply those taken by the inner circle of councillors who predominated in the entries, such as Lovell, Empson, Mordaunt, Dudley, Hobart and Lucas. When, in January 1507, Hugh Kedinghale petitioned for the farm of Lewesham for twenty-one years, he paid £10 for the privilege. A bill to this effect was signed by Henry VII, Robert Southwell and Roger, bishop of Carlisle. But it also noted that six sureties ‘standeth bounden’ to Southwell, Carlisle and John Heron since 1505 for 200 marks to pay a lesser sum in three instalments. This was gleaned from locating the recognizance on the close rolls, most likely through the efforts of Heron.174 How many ‘bonds in boxes’ Southwell and Carlisle kept may never be known. In a list of recognizances from Henry VII's reign created by the command of his heir, Henry VIII, it was noted that the entries came ‘out of divrse boks signed wth thand of or derrest fadre’.175 The first Tudor's signature or sign manual ‘H R’ (‘Henricus Rex’) could also be found on warrants, pardons, lists, nominations for office and a variety of other documents, suggesting that he spent an inordinate amount of time involving himself in all aspects of finance and law.176 Indeed, Henry put his name to every act of parliament after 1497 – the date of the earliest known original act. He signed each membrane, a practice emulated by all three of his grandchildren once they became the monarch.177 The king was scrutinizing and signing documents even after being observed as very ill in the spring of 1507.178 He was well enough that September to cross out the words ‘for term of life’ and sign his name to a petition for letters patent requested by Richard Empson for certain manors.179 Henry continued to sign bills and letters, often with Dudley or Empson, well into 1508 and 1509.180 True to his micro-management style, he was working at least a week before his death when he signed a general pardon in a shaky hand at both the top and bottom of the document.181 Henry VIII tried to emulate his father as the ultimate royal administrator, but the seventeen-year-old's world view was closer to that of Henry V than Henry VII. He initially began signing John Heron's accounts, but he also purchased a collar of ‘Esses’ (SS) reminiscent of Lancastrian lore with a focus on the reclamation of a lost France.182 With the advice of his grandmother and certain of his father's councillors, he also issued a pardon two days after his father's death that encompassed recognizances and other offences, although the exception of ‘detts and accompts’ clearly signalled that the bond policy was not going to vanish along with Henry VII.183 And it certainly did not. John Heron continued to list both recognizances and obligations owed to the crown, beginning eight days after the death of Henry VII.184 Henry VIII signed almost every page of the recognizances, and many were annotated as paid or vacated. For the rest of the reign, bonds continued to be taken, filed, prosecuted and collected upon as before. Thomas Wolsey's rise to power included his personal involvement in seeking out money owed on debts to Henry VII, beginning in August 1514.185 In a collection of books and records for the exchequer, compiled late in Henry VIII's reign (1541–2), it was noted that anyone taking an obligation to his own use in the name of the king would suffer imprisonment – an attempt to avoid the abuses that occurred in the previous reign under the direction of Empson and Dudley, which may still have been a problem. It also noted that obligations owed to Henry VIII that went unpaid were nonetheless viable and due ‘to the heirs or executors of the kinge’. Regarding bonds taken at the various financial courts for payment by sheriffs and officers of the crown (for example, exchequer, duchy of Lancaster, court of wards), it stated: And where sundrie p[er]sons stand bounden to the kinge in divrs great sumes of money by recognizaunce, or other bonds in the said sevrall Courts for debts due the kinge for purchase of lands and goods, p[er]formance of condycons and sundrie other Causes, And albeit the same p[er]sons have well and trulie satisfied the same debts, or p[er]formed the Condicions of the same Recognizaunces, or other bonds, yet the same Recognizaunces or other bonds cannot be made void wth out the kinges speciall warrantt wch shoud be greate unquietnes, to the kinge and verie Chardgable to his subiects, to suie from tyme to tyme for the same. Because people in the past had lost their official acquittances, ‘whereby greate daunger maie growe to them’, it was ordered that as the written discharge was given to the debtor the recognizance should be cancelled and made void at the same time.186 This showed that more than thirty years after Henry VII's death, bonds were still a cornerstone of finance and justice and the dominant credit instrument for debt, trade and acquisition. The exchequer, as it was wont to do during a new reign, reverted to storing obligations and the ready money paid upon them. This forced Henry VIII, through the recommendations of his father's experienced councillors, to rein in both the bonds and the cash. And once again, it was John Cutte who was asked to fill the role of royal liaison between the exchequer and the chamber. It took not only privy seals but acts of parliament to ensure that obligations and recognizances were delivered to the king's chamber, with the tellers of the receipt at the exchequer assisting in this endeavour. But while there remained instances where money and bonds still stayed at the exchequer, it was evident that the new king agreed to maintain the role of his chamber as the national treasury, at least as far as bonds were concerned.187 Given his proclivities for war, this fitted well with his need for large amounts of cash expeditiously. Finally, it should be pointed out that for ordinary English men and women, entering into obligations continued unabated as a way of life. Between 1550 and 1580, disputes on non-performing obligations rose to hundreds of thousands of suits per annum.188 However, most were no doubt filed to force arbitration and settlement, a practice well established since long before the first Tudor became king. Recognizances continued to be used throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to ‘bind over’ people to keep the peace and behave themselves. By 1600, recognizances for the peace were acknowledged as a means to coerce antagonists into avoiding brutal acts at a time when there was a growing sense of abhorrence of violence – arguably a concern throughout Henry VII's reign and one reason he intensified their administration and prosecution.189 A study of recognizances for peace and appearance extant for the borough of Colchester during Elizabeth I's reign noted that ‘the recognizance not only aided in the prevention and control of crime but also provided a ready to hand means to supervise and to regulate the lives of persons considered undesirable or dangerous to the community’– conclusions at which Elizabeth's grandfather and his councillors arrived almost a century earlier, but overlooked in this review.190 There could also be a malicious use of bonds, as in the days of Empson and Dudley, but bonds and sureties had a continuous role in private and public transactions and matters of law. As one author has noted, ‘the simple recognizance, that laconic, much neglected and undramatic instrument of law enforcement, was arguably crucial to the keeping of the public peace at every social level’.191 What about the recognizances and obligations from the old reign that were viewed as illegal, harsh or even spurious by the new reign? J. R. Lander concluded that numerous bonds were cancelled and vacated at the beginning of Henry VIII's reign without payment upon them, a deduction based on the summary entries in Letters and Papers in the reign of Henry VIII where the word ‘cancelled’ was printed: forty-five recognizances the first year, 135 more over the next five years.192 Indeed, many bonds were cancelled without payment, and Lander noted that fifty-one of them were said to have been extortionate, although one might argue that any debtor to the crown hearing of a general pardon on bonds might plead this story.193 These cancellations suggested a change in policy from the previous reign, or at the very least a recognition that the policy was unjust and in need of remedy. But an examination of the actual chancery warrants for vacating recognizances shows that a large number were cancelled upon payment, and not simply cancelled as printed in the summaries. In fact, only weeks after Henry VII's death, bonds were prosecuted for payment with new ones taken by many of the same ministers and officials who worked closely with Empson and Dudley.194 This is gleaned by comparing some of the printed summaries of bonds listed simply as cancelled in Letters and Papers with the actual warrants upon which they were based. For example, Elizabeth Strykland and her sureties were bound in a recognizance of £100 taken in the old reign to pay 100 marks to Thomas Lovell, Richard Empson, John Hussey, Edmund Dudley and Thomas Lucas on behalf of the king on 3 May 1509, twelve days after the death of Henry VII; she in fact paid so that she could have her bond cancelled. A recognizance taken on 30 November 1506 of Sir Richard Woderove and his sureties for £100 to pay 100 marks to certain working councillors was cancelled after being ‘paid & p[er]formed’. Sir Robert Drury and others were bound in a recognizance on 20 November 1504 for £250 for Drury to pay two instalments of £100 each, one on 15 February 1508 (which he did) and later on 24 June 1509. He made that payment and his bond was then cancelled. Robert Brudenell, a ‘learned councillor’ of Henry VII, and his sureties owed 50 marks in a bond to Lovell and others to the use of Henry VII taken in July 1506; he paid it on 24 June 1509 to have it cancelled. Thomas Cokayne and three sureties were bound to Thomas Lovell and others for £100 on 14 July 1506 to pay 100 marks the same day Brudenell's bond was due; the bond was cancelled on 26 October 1509, but after the money was received by the treasurer of the king's chamber. Sir Thomas Curwen and two others were bound by recognizance on 13 July 1507 in 100 marks to pay £50 at a certain date; Curwen paid the amount to John Heron and his bond was cancelled on 14 November 1509. The same was true of Edward Jerningham, bound to Henry VII and paid in full in the new reign to have his recognizance voided. The recognizance of Thomas Troyes and two others, taken on 20 February 1505, were paid in full and then cancelled on 9 November 1509.195 In a review of surviving chancery warrants two years after Henry VIII's reign began, recognizances were still being cancelled upon payment. This cannot be determined solely from reading the summaries in Letters and Papers. Meetings were in fact held by Henry VIII's councillors about the myriad bonds owed his father to see how many of them should be respited and how many should be either collected or compounded.196 The reviewers were for the most part his father's men: Thomas Lovell, Richard Fox, John Heron, Thomas Lucas, James Hobart and Thomas earl of Surrey among them. Heron delivered the bonds to the various parties involved, although it was clear that not all money was returned – there were also books ‘of the recepts of their first paiements signed wt the kings hand’, referring to Henry VII.197 By 1530 – more than twenty years later – there were at least four files of old obligations kept in the chamber, mainly from Henry VII's reign; the last file was annotated as ‘desperate’.198 The thirteen folios read like Edmund Dudley's account book, with annotations against each name and sums of money due on bonds from both reigns. There were listed Tom White and a surety in an obligation for £10 to ‘save harmeles’ another party; Sir William Parker in an obligation of £26 13s 4d, made to Empson; £500 worth of obligations entered into by collectors of an aid and a subsidy to make a true payment; and a recent obligation of 400 marks to be paid ‘when the kings lerned counsail shulde determyn the title & possession of certein lands’.199 A separate section listed bonds to Sir Robert Southwell for the payment of farms and the ‘good abering appara[n]ce and suche like condicion not appering bifor the treasourer of the chamb[e]r whether they war observed or not and the most p[ar]ts of them void & expired’. These were similar to those taken at the duchy of Lancaster and later in Henry VII's chamber and represented the bond policy in full force during his reign. They were also comparable to those listed in books given to Dudley for collection, and the suggestion here is that while these were very old, some of them had been paid or most likely compounded for lesser amounts. But what is striking are the number of bonds noted as ‘put to be sued’, or those marked ‘sol’ (‘paid’). Clearly, after more than two decades, the bonds taken in Henry VII's reign were viewed as in full force and actionable – Tudor history was repeating itself, with ministers of the king prosecuting ‘old bonds’. They probably included bonds taken by Empson and Dudley that were questionable but nonetheless now prosecuted and not simply cancelled. As if to distance the first Tudor from his ministers, one bond for £10 entered into by Richard Warrings was annotated ‘a bil[l] on pap[er] to Edmonde Dudley no me[n]cion of the king. It is put to be sued’.200 There was also reference to another book of obligations, given to that great Tudor organizer, Thomas Cromwell. Next to several listed for the duke of Buckingham was written ‘Thise be mencioned in an other boke geven to m[aster] cromwel’. In his remembrances when he was Henry VIII's principal secretary, Cromwell wrote ‘Recognisances forfeited for non observance of the peax or for apparance bifore iustices’, and he involved himself with their collection. He also made a note about taking sureties from men in the Tower, not unlike the behaviour seen in Henry VII's reign. Cromwell similarly reminded himself to ‘speke wt the kynges lerned Counsaill for the fynisshing of the boke of the Staple’– the same procedure of consulting with the king's working councillors, who were men learned in the laws and processes administering obligations and recognizances and charged with prosecuting them for collection or fulfilment.201 These were words and actions familiar from the first Tudor's reign. Henry VII's bond policy literally ‘bound’ a large number of English men and women of high and low birth to the centre through the administration of law, the enforcement of peace and the collection of revenue and debts due on financial arrangements, offices and responsibilities. While all of these measures existed before his time, they were never utilized by an English monarch with such intensity, or determination. The influence of his working councillors, who were brought together largely through their connections with the king's mother and uncle and their own colleagues, cannot be overemphasized.202 Nor can the experience they offered the king from working in households, whether of a lord or lady or the largest household in the land – the duchy of Lancaster. Where G. R. Elton saw a developing bureaucracy, culminating in the work of Thomas Cromwell and the birth of the modern state under Henry VIII, David Starkey rejected this view and replaced Elton's state bureaucracy with a departmental state run by the privy chamber. Ironically, both admitted that proximity to the king was the decisive factor in how the government worked, yet resisted the notion of the ruler's friends as all-important for state development in favour of the creation of institutions.203 Henry VII knew better, and he was fortunate to have men qualified and well versed in the use of legal instruments who could serve his purposes regardless of what ‘offices’ or ‘departments’ they occupied. He was pragmatic more than bureaucratic, and his willingness to work with his councillors to stabilize his reign and ensure a viable dynasty bore fruit. He was also astute enough to realize that as king it did little good to wait for cash to come in; credit worked well in the form of obligations and recognizances, and negotiations through compounding and drawing out payments even better. Relying on well-established procedures at the exchequer for payments on bonds did not result in timely cash flow; administering those debts through his trusted councillors and in person offered a quicker response time, especially when collectors such as sheriffs could be made accountable. The same was true with the profits of justice from old, inactive recognizances. The first Tudor also realized that while the monarchy was the historic centre of the realm it did not always appear that way to ‘foreign’ interests in the shires, especially when local or seigniorial courts overshadowed the central courts, or judicial commissions were headed by local magnates. Henry's numerous commissions of the peace and special commissions were peopled with trusted officials, many from the gentry, who may or may not have had power bases in a locality but who nonetheless represented the king first. Such close scrutiny of the shires from Westminster also meant a careful search into records for any prerogative rights of the king in abeyance, or any forfeitures on peace or appearance bonds uncollected or lacking in prosecution. People could complain about an old bond suddenly surfacing, but they did not question its legitimacy or viability after centuries of acceptance.204 This recognition of legal instruments, and therefore a ‘national’ force of law behind them, helped to move England to become a more law-accepting if not law-abiding nation.205 It was an important step towards a nation state and a sense of linkage to the centre, and it is often lost in the discussions about state development. When the law as a precursor to the state is addressed, it usually turns to the growth of parliament.206 This view led Christopher Brooks to suggest why legal studies have made little impact on the general and political history of England during the three centuries following 1500: there has been no ‘analytical perspective capable of doing justice to the complex and multi-faced role of law in society’.207 The present discussion is an attempt to offer one aspect of this perspective, and to suggest answers to key questions. If it was the law that bound the commonweal together over time, what was the actual mechanism that allowed this to happen? If this was a bottom-up process, what was taking place in the villages, towns and shires, how did it work, why was it working and how did it influence the procedures of law, order and justice at the top? The development of equity courts or statutory law alone cannot explain adherence to, and belief in, a national law, especially the latter when so many statutes were for particular groups or individuals, and not a few of them had little means of being enforced. Henry VII and his working councillors found that mechanism to suit their own purposes, and it was in fact one that had been operating for centuries: the written obligation. It allowed him to become the most solvent king since the Conqueror; and it permitted him to bequeath a realm with a developing national law, and respect for it, that would prevail over local influences. Nonetheless, it was a process – something the first Tudor king could appreciate when he stepped into his chamber for the very first time. Appendix An England under obligation To understand how Henry VII's bond policy could even materialize beyond the experiences of his working councillors, it is essential to recognize that all of these bonds, and the procedures to create and prosecute them, were well-established instruments of administration, finance, law and politics long before 1485. Furthermore, written, sealed obligations (‘writings obligatory’) between private parties or with the royal government were in use before the Conquest. The ‘surety’ or pledge became both an acceptable guarantee for performance of an agreement and a customary legal component of the written obligation. The origins of such guarantors dated back to private feuds between families when hostages were required to assure peace and co-operation.208 In early Norman England, sureties were offered to guarantee the payment of a debt by the debtor, who would seek out such persons to trust him to fulfil his obligation. This included keeping the peace and allegiance to the king, both political requirements for the maintenance of law and order.209 One of the earliest contracts enforced by law was the bailment of a prisoner and the finding of ‘mainpernors’ to ensure his appearance for trial, this an extension of the practice of taking hostages.210 But although the procedure was traditionally viewed as ‘putting up a body’ for another, liability only extended as far as a fine for non-performance, or confiscation of lands and chattels, and not the actual punishment due to the defendant. If change occurs from the bottom up or from the localities to the central authority – and Penny Tucker's discussion in this present issue regarding the influence of the London constitution on that of royal government is suggestive of this observation211– there is perhaps no better example of the effect of local customs and procedures on the centre than the written bonds between private parties, which formed the basis of a credit society to allow judicial and economic processes to flourish.212 This was recognized by the thirteenth-century legalist Henry Bracton. His comprehensive work, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Anglie, set down in writing the laws and opinions of his time, codifying precedents for future generations and future lawmakers.213 In a revealing discussion on why written obligations were originally devised, Bracton simplified the theory behind the custom: ‘Stipulations and obligations were devised to enable everyone to acquire that which is to his interest’. The crux of the agreement binding people together was the written instrument, ‘as where one states in writing that he owes; … It is not that the letters themselves or the written characters bind (nor) the meaningful language they express, but both the language and the written letters unite to effect the obligation’.214 Bracton's discourse on the various types of covenants and actions at law for non-performance were perceptions of his time, often confused by the lack of precedent in Roman law that he obdurately sought in vain, or by a misunderstanding of English custom.215 But his mission was the message: bonds were a way of life, and he sought to fit them into a central body of law governing the realm. One weak point in a written obligation was the means to identify it as the defendant's should a judicial action ensue. This problem was met by the use of seals.216 Seals became the final proof of a written agreement in England and northern France, while on most of the continent the notary provided the mechanism for validating a document.217 As Tout observed, ‘England ever remained emphatically a land of seals, the employment of which became essential to the authentication of all public and private documents’.218 In an action at law, loss or defacement of a seal led to the vacation of an action on a written obligation.219 This stance remained firm throughout the late medieval period, summed up by a case before king's bench in 1527, which concluded that if a seal fell off a written obligation it could render it valueless and not actionable.220 Conversely, it was critical for the debtor or bound party to have an obligation cancelled or discharged upon fulfilment. This process sometimes got sticky, and often reprehensible, in at least two major areas of contract law with a long tradition and acceptance by English society. The first was when the condition of a debt was fulfilled by the debtor but the actual written debt itself was never cancelled by the creditor or debt-recording agency or official, for example, a local court, the chancery, the exchequer or one of the ministers of the king. Problems could also arise if an original obligation was converted into a new one, without the first one being cancelled.221 Many debts were cancelled orally, but by 1485 the law had evolved to the point where a contract stood viable forever unless it was cancelled by some form of written acquittance; destroyed after the condition was met; or renegotiated into a new bond that had language annulling the previous one.222 When four men entered a bond on 10 March 1496 for Sir Charles Somerset as part of his indenture for an office in Cardiff, it was superseded by a new bond with different sureties (guarantors for the bond) seven years later. However, the old bond was never cancelled, which meant that it was still viable. Henry VII ordered the keeper of the rolls at chancery to enrol ‘the newe recognisaunce’ and to have ‘the old recognisance to be uttrely annulled made voide and cancelled furthwt’.223 Although Edmund Dudley has been cast as the belligerent bond-master for the reign, he in fact spent a great deal of time not just taking, renegotiating and collecting on bonds, but also discharging them with written acquittances. One example is the seven-line ‘Recepi’ dated 26 September 1506 stating that Sir John Arundell of Lanherne paid £80 for the king's use, £40 in gold and £40 by obligation. It was written in a hand similar to an entry in one of the king's chamber books, and it was signed ‘Ed[mun]di Dudeley’.224 The fact that it was preserved among the Arundell papers in Cornwall attests to the great concern for keeping such acquittances safe to prove that a bond had been cancelled. The second area of contention involved conditions for future actions or behaviour, such as keeping the peace or appearing at a court of law or before a king's councillor at a certain time and place, or a place to be determined. Not only did Henry and his councillors often force people to take out written bonds for a future behaviour or action, they also ordered that the files and rolls of such recognizances kept at the various royal, itinerant and local courts be actively searched, seeking to prosecute overdue or unfulfilled conditions in those bonds for collection, sometimes many years after they were contracted.225 The courts grappled with the distinction between ‘good behaviour’ and ‘keeping the peace’, but did not stand in the way of the king's prosecution of such bonds.226 In more sinister circumstances, a bond for future behaviour could be interpreted as an actual debt for payment due to the crown. Technically this was illegal but nonetheless might be prosecuted by over-animated ministers, with or without the king's knowledge.227 Henry VII and his working councillors crafted a national policy for royal finance and justice based on centuries of private transactions between parties and the various remedies at law afforded to them. That it worked and worked well attested to the acceptance by English men and women of procedures that they had been using in their daily lives – indeed, six London parishes today still retain receipts for ‘hocking’, an apparently old rural Easter ritual where men and women bound each other ‘in order to extract playful fines’.228 Less-than-playful excesses and dubious or illicit exactions occurred during Henry VII's reign, and people were harmed by the misuse of both the bond policy and the power to enforce it. But no recognizance revolt resulted, in part because the national policy was congruent with local experience, although greatly intensified by the first Tudor king. Footnotes 1 S. B. Chrimes, Henry VII (Berkeley, Calif., 1972); S. Cunningham, Henry VII (2007). 2 C. Carpenter, ‘Henry VII and the English polity’, in The Reign of Henry VII, ed. B. Thompson (Stamford, 1995), pp. 11–30, at p. 22. Carpenter seemingly undermined her understanding of what Henry VII actually accomplished by noting that her views were ‘not based on any original research on the reign’ (p. 11, n. 1). 3 Carpenter, pp. 14, 19. She also castigated those who utilize government records to determine what the government was doing. Such statements as wondering why Henry VII used chamber finance ‘when there was a perfectly good exchequer’ (p. 28) demonstrate the need to study and understand government records and documents within the context of the political and economic realities of the time. However, explorations into central archives nonetheless must be supplemented with local evidence to show the interplay between the realm at large and the royal government. The present study hopes to illustrate how longstanding customs and practices throughout the shires and towns of England became a centrepiece of royal statecraft. 4 See, e.g., D. Grummitt, ‘Henry VII, chamber finance and the “New Monarchy”’ , Hist. Research , lxxii ( 1999 ), 229 – 43 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at pp. 241–2; M. R. Horowitz, ‘“Agree with the king”: Henry VII, Edmund Dudley and the strange case of Thomas Sunnyff’ , Hist. Research , lxxix ( 2006 ), 325 – 66 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at pp. 325–6; and various writings and papers by Grummitt, Steven Gunn, John Guy, Dominic Luckett, John Watts, Margaret Condon and Sean Cunningham, among others. 5 It more or less began tangentially with the Elton-Cooper debate of a half-century ago ( G. R. Elton, ‘Henry VII: rapacity and remorse’ , Historical Jour. , i ( 1958 ), 21 – 39 ; Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close J. P. Cooper, ‘Henry VII's last years reconsidered’ , Hist. Jour. , ii ( 1959 ), 103 – 29 ; Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close G. R. Elton, ‘Henry VII: a restatement’ , Hist. Jour. , iv ( 1961 ), 1 – 28 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ). Of interest is that, as Chrimes observed, of the 75 pages of discussion barely two were devoted to recognizances (Chrimes, p. 310). 6 Of note is that both men signed their surnames differently from the spellings given to them for centuries. Dudley signed his name ‘Dudeley’; Empson wrote ‘Emson’. There are numerous samples of both in the various documents for Henry VII's reign housed at The National Archives. 7 G. R. Elton, ‘A restatement’, pp. 27–8. 8 F. C. Dietz, English Government Finance 1485–1558 (Urbana, Ill., 1920; New York, 1964); W. C. Richardson, Tudor Chamber Administration 1485–1547 (Baton Rouge, La., 1952). 9 The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, ed. D. Hay (Camden 3rd ser., lxxiv, 1950), p. 131. 10 Although there are varying definitions of a recognizance and its relation to an obligation, this author views the former in its legal description as an obligation of record, which was entered into before a court or record or an authorized official or magistrate, with a condition to complete a specific act (appearance, keep the peace, pay a debt). It differed from an obligation because it was witnessed only by the record and not by a party's personal seal (see appendix). Medieval English society knew the difference, although sometimes circumstances could dictate. In an entry of debts in Henry VII's chamber account for 31 Oct. 1504, Anne Tropnell was recorded as owing the king £66 13s 4d‘opon an oblig’– with the word ‘oblig’ crossed out and ‘recoig’ written next to it. The next time she was listed for the same amount, on 2 Apr. 1505, it was called a recognizance. It was enrolled at chancery as a recognizance on 28 March 1504, with payments due by instalments. This was for a wardship (The National Archives of the U.K.: Public Record Office, E 101/413/2/3 fos. 165, 213; Calendar of Close Rolls 1500–9 (hereafter C.C.R.), no. 314; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1494–1509 (hereafter C.P.R.), p. 432). The same correction occurred for George and Walter Herbert (T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/413/2/3 fo. 198). Recognizances usually required sureties, which was not often true for an obligation: ‘John Treguram and Pieter de Opuciis are bound in an obligation to pay [100] li. by Hallowtide next coming or else to find sufficient sureties by that day to be bound in a recognizance to pay the same [100] li.’ (quoted, with modernized spelling, in M. R. Horowitz, ‘An early-Tudor teller's book’ , Eng. Hist. Rev. , xcvi ( 1981 ), 103 – 116 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at p. 105 and n. 2, from British Library, Additional MS. 21481 fo. 290). However, see the obligation discussed below recorded by William Mordaunt, acting as a surety. 11 See Sean Cunningham's article in this issue, ‘Loyalty and the usurper: recognizances, the council and allegiance under Henry VII’. J. R. Lander's article on bonds related to the nobility (‘Bonds, coercion and fear: Henry VII and the peerage’, in Florilegium Historiale: Essays Presented to Wallace K. Ferguson, ed. J. G. Rowe and W. H. Stockdale (Toronto, 1971), pp. 327–67) overshadowed what was actually taking place throughout the realm, although it has been touched upon since, e.g., M. M. Condon, ‘Ruling elites in the reign of Henry VII’, in Patronage Pedigree and Power in Later Medieval England, ed. C. Ross (Gloucester, 1979), pp. 109–42, at pp. 119–20. 12 It has become clear that, under Henry VII, fiscal policy affected all groups in society, and that it was based on precedent and tradition (e.g., P. K. O'Brien and P. A. Hunt, ‘The rise of a fiscal state in England, 1485–1815’ , Hist. Research , lxvi ( 1993 ), 129 – 76 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ). 13 C.C.R. 1476–85, no. 449. 14 In London, written obligations were purchased and assigned to third parties early on, and by the 15th century the courts acknowledged this practice and provided purchasers with the same rights as the original bondholders (C. M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 61–2). 15 Margaret Condon wrote of the ‘conscious’ and purposeful policies of Henry VII during his reign that separated him from the Yorkists and the past: the large-scale secularization of clergy appointments, who were now not so much theologians as administrators; the paucity of peer creation, in part a reflection of the strength of the king as opposed to Edward IV's rule; the shift in power at the local level to the gentry from the nobles, straining and minimizing the inherent gentry-lord relationship (Condon, ‘Ruling elites’, passim). The bond policy of the royal government went far beyond these targeted actions to pervade and encompass the entire realm. 16 ‘By the later Middle Ages the use of credit was ubiquitous’ (J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy, 1150–1500 (1980), p. 303). 17 J. Watts, review of S. Cunningham, Henry VII (review no. 624) <http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/watts2.html> [accessed 21 Nov. 2008]; and J. Watts, ‘“A New Ffundacion of is Crowne”: monarchy in the age of Henry VII’, in Thompson, pp. 31–53, at pp. 35–6; G. L. Harriss, ‘Political society and the growth of government in later medieval England’ , Past & Present , cxxxviii ( 1993 ), 28 – 57 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at pp. 32–7. 18 E.g., Hall's Chronicle, ed. Sir H. Ellis (1809) (hereafter Hall's Chronicle). Such a view was echoed by Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (6 vols., 1807–8), iii; A Survey of London by John Stow, ed. C. L. Kingsford (3 vols., Oxford, 1908–27), i; Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry VII, ed. J. Rawson Lumby (Cambridge, 1885). 19 G. R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1953). 20 This is discussed in the duchy of Lancaster section below. John Guy proffered the terms ‘counsel’ and ‘consall’ as the consultative process and ‘council’ or ‘consaill’ as a deliberative institution, but noted that from the earliest times to Elizabeth I ‘the two usages were utterly confused’ (J. A. Guy, ‘The rhetoric of counsel in early modern England’, in Tudor Political Culture, ed. D. Hoak (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 292–310, at p. 292). The confusion may, in part, be our own. E.g., historians might consider treading lightly on the notion of a ‘council learned in the law’ for Henry VII's reign, as opposed to ‘learned counsel’ (lawyers and learned men) doing the king's bidding in certain areas involving the law and finance ( R. Somerville, ‘Henry VII's “council learned in the law”’ , Eng. Hist. Rev. , liv ( 1939 ), 427 – 42 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ). This is discussed below. In Henry's time, the modern definition of office was often referred to as a ‘room’, and ‘finding an office’ sometimes meant discovering an action at law. 21 For an example of a ‘casket’, see T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 244/156 no. 138, a casket where letters, writings and muniments were kept. For ‘coffin’, see the following section on the duchy. There are printed examples as well: in 1464–5, a servant of Sir John Howard paid 16d for a ‘lyttle coffere’ and 1d was ‘paid fore a box’ (The Household Books of John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, 1462–71, 1481–3, intro. by A. Crawford (Stroud, 1992) (hereafter Household Books of John Howard), p. 487). 22 P. Nightingale, ‘The intervention of the crown and the effectiveness of the sheriff in the execution of judicial writs, c.1355–1530’ , Eng. Hist. Rev. , cxxiii ( 2008 ), 1 – 34 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at p. 5. For king's bench, see P. C. Maddern, Violence and Social Order: East Anglia, 1422–42 (Oxford, 1992), p. 40. 23 M. K. McIntosh, ‘Money lending on the periphery of London, 1300–1600’ , Albion , xx ( 1988 ), 557 – 71 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at p. 560. McIntosh studied the manor of Havering, Essex, and noted that the obligations for delivery of goods or cash often accumulated, forming an internal system of ‘stored or owed credit’. She found obligations with penalties running between 150% and 200% (p. 563). 24 See, e.g., D. Youngs, ‘Estate management, investment and the gentleman landlord in later medieval England’ , Hist. Research , lxxiii ( 2000 ), 124 – 41 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at p. 140. There are, of course, other accounts which demonstrate how obligations were used. George Monoux, draper and alderman of London, began a ledger in 1507, soon after his election, that included indentures he entered into involving the use of obligations to ‘bind’ the parties to the agreement (Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 18783 fos. 3v–4, 6v–7; A. B. Beaven, The Aldermen of the City of London (2 vols, 1908–13), ii, found online at <http://genealogy.patp.us/aldermen_1400.shm> [accessed 21 Nov. 2008]). 25 T.N.A.: P.R.O., CP 40/87 fos. 61, 115; Chrimes, p. 150. Mordaunt sued for the government in king's bench as well (C.C.R. 1500–9, no. 298). Queen Elizabeth of York, referring to him as ‘attourney in the Commen place’, gave him 20s for services rendered, as she did to his brother (40s) and other learned counsel of the king (privy purse expenses, Elizabeth of York, 8–15 March 1503, excerpted online at <http://www.r3.org/bookcase/wardrobe/ward15.html> [accessed 21 Nov. 2008]). 26 Reed and Mordaunt were justices on the same gaol delivery (T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/85, 1 May 1505). 27 Northamptonshire Record Office (hereafter N.R.O.), Stopford-Sackville MS. 3689. There is no pagination. The book, partially destroyed and difficult to read, is 70 folios in length and runs from 1499 to 1516, with headings indicating term times. It is indexed as an official account book of the Middle Temple, although there are many private dealings within the folios. 28 For mentions of acquittances recorded in an account book, see The Estate and Household Accounts of William Worsley, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral 1479–97, ed. H. Kleineke and S. R. Hovland (2004), pp. 51, 53, 66, 76, 83. 29 It would be interesting to learn if this loan was related to the two obligations for £50 each owed to the king by the Mordaunt brothers and William Gascoign ‘hanging opon the said lord Grey’. The amounts were recorded in the king's chamber book as paid on 19 Nov. 1502 and 4 Dec. 1503 respectively (Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 59899 fo. 130v). William also acted as a surety for John regarding a fine of 4 marks owed to the Middle Temple (Middle Temple Records, ed. C. H. Hopwood (4 vols, 1904–5), i. 6). 30 C. E. Moreton, The Townshends and their World: Gentry, Law and Land in Norfolk, c.1450–1551 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 104–6, 112, 120–2. 31 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 41305. All references are to this document. 32 Inquisitions Post Mortem, Hen. VII, i, no. 1143 (pp. 487–94). For that date, Alianore noted it as the day of Sir Roger's ‘dessessyng’. There is an enlightening non sequitur about Sir Roger's demise: although Townshend's will reads like most late medieval endeavours, replete with bequests of alms to the poor and funds for masses for his soul, he added a personal, seemingly proto-Calvinist conviction regarding his salvation, ‘which is above all werkes unto whom it is appropured to have mrcy as by all holy scripture plainly it apperith, and that in everich our [hour] that the sinner soroweth his synnes the which cõmyth oonly of the grace, charite and infynite mercy of our savyour crist Jhu of the wych numbir of contrite synners I mekely and humbly besechith him that I may be oon and come of the numbir predestinate to be savid’ (T.N.A.: P.R.O., Prerogative Court of Canterbury (Register: Vox 2), PROB 11/10). 33 It should not be thought that a woman partaking in ‘business’ affairs in Tudor England was unusual. It was not, as per the example of Katherine Nerbourne who petitioned the king for a licence to buy 100 tuns of Gascon wine (T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/232, June 1502). Women ruling the roost predated Alianore (see the brief discussion on Alice de Bryene of Acton, Suffolk, who kept a daybook of household expenses and died in 1435 having run her estates as a widow for 49 years, in M. R. Horowitz, The Monumental Brasses of England (Urbana, Il., 2002), pp. 30–1). 34 Moreton, p. 107. Nynes later became a sheriff in London (T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/85, 2 May 1505). 35 A few notations indicate that arrears were collected, putting the residue owed into new obligations for future payments (fo. 15v) – a common procedure that was emulated vigorously by Dudley, Empson and their fellow councillors. 36 Two interesting notes show that Dame Alianore also dealt with the government. A list of documents kept in a box by the writer of her account book included ‘a quietans of the kyng of C merke’ and an acquittance of ‘Sr Raynald Bray’ (fo. 21v). Both acquittances may have related to obligations she fulfilled. She was listed in one of the king's chamber books on 10 Apr. 1495 as owing the crown £30 upon an obligation (T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/413/2/2 fo. 84v). Sir Roger was on several commissions with Bray and must have known him (W. Campbell, Materials for a History of the Reign of Henry VII (2 vols., Rolls ser., 1873–7), ii. 477–8; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1485–94, pp. 502–3). 37 One entry in John Heron's list of recognizances kept in his chamber book noted that two men forfeited their recognizances for the breaking of an arbitration before the lord chancellor (Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 21480 fo. 169v.) 38 E.g., the head of Llanthony priory in Gloucestershire entered an indenture with three people to let a farm. Two of them, a mercer and a weaver, entered bonds for £20 to perform the covenants in the lease (A Calendar of the Registers of the Priory of Llanthony by Gloucester, 1457–66, 1501–25, ed. J. Rhodes (Bristol and Glos. Archaeol. Soc., 2002), nos. 196–7, 23/26 June 1508). 39 D. J. Guth, ‘Enforcing late-medieval law: patterns in litigation during Henry VII's reign’, in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. J. H. Baker (1978), pp. 80–96, at p. 87. At king's bench, where 20% of crown pleas reached a verdict, just 1% did so for private suits ( E. Powell, ‘Arbitration and the law in England in the middle ages’ , Trans. Royal Hist. Soc. , 5th ser., xxxiii ( 1983 ), 49 – 67 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at p. 51, citing M. Blatcher, ‘The workings of the court of king's bench in the 15th century’ (unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1936); C. Whittick, ‘The role of the criminal appeal in the 15th century’, in Law and Social Change in British History: Papers Presented to the Bristol Legal History Conference, 14–17 July 1981, ed. J. A. Guy and H. G. Beale (1984), pp. 55–72, at p. 72). 40 D. Tilsley, ‘Arbitration in gentry disputes: the case of Bucklow hundred in Cheshire, 1400–65’, in Courts, Counties and the Capital in the Later Middle Ages, ed. D. E. S. Dunn (Stroud, 1996), pp. 53–70; M. T. Clanchy, ‘Law, government and society in medieval England’ , History , lix ( 1974 ), 73 – 8 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; Moreton, p. 194. 41 C. Briggs, ‘Seignorial control of villagers' litigation beyond the manor in later medieval England’ , Hist. Research , lxxxi ( 2008 ), pp. 399 – 422 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at p. 421. 42 S. J. Gunn, ‘Sir Thomas Lovell (c.1449–1524): a new man in a new monarchy?’, in The End of the Middle Ages? England in the 15th and 16th Centuries, ed. J. L. Watts (Stroud, 1998), pp. 117–53, at p. 133. 43 ‘Most, if not all, of the great magnates retained a group of legal specialists known collectively as “the council learned”, some of whom also held administrative posts on their employer's estates, and were therefore constantly on hand to offer professional advice’ (C. Rawcliffe, ‘The great lord as peacemaker: arbitration by English noblemen and their councils in the later middle ages’, in Guy and Beale, pp. 34–54, at pp. 37–8). See additional discussion in her article ‘Baronial councils in the later middle ages’, in Patronage, Pedigree and Power, ed. C. Ross (Gloucester, 1979), pp. 87–108, at pp. 90–4). 44 Westminster Abbey Muniments (hereafter W.A.M.), MS. 16075. See also a reference to the earl of Northumberland's ‘lernyd Councell’ (Corporation of London Records Office (hereafter C.L.R.O.), repertories of the court of aldermen (hereafter REP) 2 (1505–13), fo. 24 (4 March 1507)). Oxford noted that a privy seal now moved the case to the ‘Councill of the king’, most likely the lawyers and learned councillors headed by Bray, and not the larger council of which the earl was a member. The ‘council learned’ of Henry VII should be viewed this way, as they were at the time. So a memorandum of a recognizance dated 8 July 1502 involving payment of a farm for the king's use to Reynold Bray, Thomas Lovell and John Mordaunt – all referred to as part of the ‘council learned’ by Somerville – simply called them the ‘kings moost noble counsail’ (T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 244/150 no. 62.) 45 M. K. Jones and M. G. Underwood, The King's Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge, 1992), p. 87. 46 For a history of the duchy, see R. Somerville, History of the Duchy of Lancaster, i: 1265–1603 (1953). Somerville did not discuss obligations or the various ways they were utilized by the duchy and its councillors and officials, although he gave a slight hint of their existence (p. 201). 47 Somerville, ‘Henry VII's “Council learned in the law”’, pp. 427–42. 48 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 255/8/5 no. 63, 29 March 1504 (author's italics). Additional bonds were required (nos. 64 and 79, the latter using the same phrase). The matter involved the wardship of two daughters, for which payments were made to the king's chamber (Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 21480 fo. 46). For the phrase ‘lerned Counsell for the tyme being’, see also T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 244/157 no. 21. The phrase is not mentioned in the printed summary of its enrolment on the close rolls (C.C.R. 1500–9, no. 535). 49 T.N.A.: P.R.O., DL 41/34/1 fo. 46. For John Fitzjames and John Bonham, see Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, pp. 402–3, 407. 50 T.N.A.: P.R.O., DL 25/3631; Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, p. 391, where he noted the delivery but not the contents. This was but a small part of the records being conveyed. The new chancellor also received 15 keys ‘in a ledder bagge’ which opened chests kept at St. Bartholomew's in London, ‘wherin remaigne the kings evidences belonging to ye duchie of Lanc’. 51 T.N.A.: P.R.O., DL 41/34/1 fos. 158–164v. There are a large number of obligations listed in this document from the reign of Edward IV to the time of Henry VIII. On the last page, among the doodles the name ‘heydon’ is written nine times. 52 T.N.A.: P.R.O., DL 41/34/1 fo. 161v; C.P.R. 1494–1509, p. 373; Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, p. 373. 53 Rawcliffe, ‘The great lord as peacemaker’, pp. 38–9. 54 Pleadings and Depositions in the Duchy Court of Lancaster, i: Time of Henry VII and Henry VIII, ed. H. Fishwick (The Record Soc., xxxii, 1896) (hereafter Pleadings and Depositions in the Duchy Court), pp. vii–viii. 55 T.N.A.: P.R.O., DL 41/11/26, 4 Sept. 1505. 56 The Charters of the Duchy of Lancaster, ed. W. Hardy (1845), pp. 337–9; Rotuli Parliamentorum, vi. 208. 57 J. Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, vi: 1483–1558 (Oxford, 2003), p. 221. 58 Pleadings and Depositions in the Duchy Court, p. v. Of course, such records from earlier times could be missing, but the pervasiveness of record-keeping and record-retention throughout Henry VII's reign suggests otherwise. 59 Pleadings and Depositions in the Duchy Court, p. 48. 60 The paucity of direct evidence, including the lack of chamber books, has plagued a detailed study of Yorkist chamber administration, such as it was, since discussed early on by F. C. Dietz and later W. C. Richardson (Dietz, p. 67; Richardson, Tudor Chamber Administration, p. 109). The well-known letter of Richard III (26 Apr. 1484) – appointing Edmund Chaderton his treasurer and receiver of the chamber and ordering him to ‘render faithful account or reckoning to ourselves only and to no other’ for all the ‘receipts paid or delivered by our officers or minister or by any other persons whatsoever to the said Edmund to our use’– is suggestive of early Tudor administration and procedure (‘Topic 4. Restoring effective royal government, 1471–1509’ <http://www.dur.ac.uk/r.h.britnell/SEMINAR%204.htm> [accessed 21 Nov. 2008]). 61 Michael Jones, who has written on the first Tudor's experiences pre-Bosworth, suggested to this author that if Henry learned anything with regard to household finance it was by observing, not by doing (see his article, which lists most known references to date about Henry in Brittany: ‘“For my lord of Richmond, a pourpoint … and a palfrey”: brief remarks on the financial evidence for Henry Tudor's exile in Brittany, 1471–84’, The Ricardian, xiii (2003), 283–93). Perhaps Henry's closest brush with personal finance while in exile involved signing his name, ‘henry de Richemont’, to a loan of 10,000 crowns of gold from Francis, duke of Brittany, dated 29 Oct. 1483, promising to repay it ‘on the word of a prince’. Nonetheless, Francis required a co-signer, which role was undertaken by Henry's uncle, Jasper Tudor (Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 19398 fo. 33). 62 Edward IV was initially viewed as the panacea for the instability of Henry VI's reign, a hope that went unfulfilled. One assessment of his tenure states that the people of England were not sorry to see him go in Sept. 1470 and ‘lacked enthusiasm for his return’ in March 1471 (C. Richmond and M. L. Kekewich, ‘The search for stability, 1461–83’, in The Politics of 15th-Century England: John Vale's Book, ed. M. L. Kekewich and others (Stroud, 1995), pp. 43–72, at p. 50). The authors quote an observation made at the time from Warkworth's Chronicle: ‘The people looked after … prosperyte and peece, but it came not’ (p. 46). 63 What follows is based on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, Sept. 2004; online edn., Jan. 2008) <http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info> [accessed 21 Nov. 2008]; History of Parliament, 1439–1509, ed. J. C. Wedgwood (1936); and information gleaned from the various works of R. Somerville, W. C. Richardson, S. B. Chrimes, S. J. Gunn and D. Grummitt, unless otherwise noted. 64 Margaret never recognized her contracted marriage to John de la Pole (dissolved in 1453). 65 The accounts include several housed at St. John's College, Cambridge (D91.17, D102.10, D102.2, D102.6, D91.20, D91.21, D91.16, D91.19, D102.1, D91.14, D91.13, D92.11, and a book of inventories – D91.15 – which include 19 obligations due at her death) and several at the W.A.M. repository relating to the time when she was married to Lord Stafford (e.g., W.A.M., MS. 5472). The author wishes to thank Malcolm Underwood, archivist, St. John's College, Cambridge and Richard Mortimer, keeper of the muniments at Westminster Abbey Library, respectively, for their kind correspondence and insight regarding these documents. 66 M. K. Jones, ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort, the royal council and an early Fenland drainage scheme’ , Lincolnshire Hist. and Archaeol. , xxi ( 1986 ), 11 – 18 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at p. 11. 67 Rawcliffe, ‘The great lord as peacemaker’, pp. 39, 53. 68 M. Condon, ‘From caitiff and villain to pater patriae: Reynold Bray and the profits of office’, in Profit, Piety and the Professions in Later Medieval England, ed. M. A. Hicks (Gloucester, 1990), pp. 137–68, at pp. 138–9; M. R. Horowitz, ‘Richard Empson, minister of Henry VII’ , Bull. Inst. Hist. Research , lv ( 1982 ), 35 – 49 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at p. 39. It should not be lost that Margaret Beaufort's third husband, Thomas Lord Stanley, was a well-seasoned administrator of both personal and royal household finance, having served as receiver-general in Lancashire for the duchy of Lancaster in the reign of Edward IV (C. Ross, Edward IV (Berkeley, Calif., 1974), p. 382). 69 J. H. Baker, ‘The legal education of Richard Empson’ , Hist. Research , lvii ( 1984 ), 98 – 9 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; T.N.A.: P.R.O., DL 5/2 fo. 2; Horowitz, ‘Richard Empson’, passim. 70 T.N.A.: P.R.O., DL 5/2 fo. 15; Records of the Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn: the Black Books, i: 1422–1586 (1897) (hereafter Lincoln's Inn: the Black Books), pp. 100, 109, 119. The black books kept by the Inn included bonds. Hobart's patent for office was enrolled 3 Nov. 1486. (C.P.R. 1485–94, p. 138). 71 B. P. Wolffe, The Royal Demesne in English History: the Crown Estate in the Governance of the Realm from the Conquest to 1509 (1971), p. 296 (app. D); C.P.R. 1494–1509, p. 424; A. F. Pollard, Reign of Henry VII from Contemporary Sources (3 vols., 1913), i. 153. An example of payments to the chamber: in May 1503, John Cutte, the receiver-general of the duchy of Lancaster, delivered to the chamber £5,062 6s 2d for one year's revenue in the duchy (T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/413/2/3 fo. 99). There are many mentions of Cutte delivering money to the chamber or to individuals, e.g. the £2,303 14s 5d‘received of Sr R Bray by the hands of John Cutte’ for money lent to the king's cofferer (T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/413/2/2 fo. 84v). Cutte was also an executor of Bray's will, and in his own will (1521) he asked for prayers for the souls of Henry VII and Reynold Bray (T.N.A.: P.R.O., P.C.C. (Register: Maynwaring), PROB 11/20). 72 Both the councillors of the duchy of Lancaster and the members of the prince's council met at St. Bartholomew's for their deliberations – the same place various evidences for the duchy of Lancaster were housed (discussed earlier). By the 15th century, recognizances for the peace dominated enrolments at the Chester exchequer court (T. Thornton, ‘Local equity jurisdictions in the territories of the English crown: the palatinate of Chester, 1450–1540’, in Dunn, pp. 27–52, at p. 40). 73 Brit. Libr., Cotton MS. Titus B. XII fo. 53v, pub. in M. J. Bennett, ‘Henry VII and the northern rising of 1489’ , Eng. Hist. Rev. , cv ( 1990 ), 34 – 59 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at p. 36. Lovell entered private business deals with his fellow councillors, from whom he also found opportunities, e.g. he succeeded Empson as high steward of Peterborough monastery. A signet for his appointment as chancellor of the exchequer for life was dated 9 Oct. 1485 (T.N.A.: P.R.O., PSO 2/1). 74 Chamber finance began almost immediately. Five days after Bosworth, Sir John Guildford delivered payments for customs to the chamber and required a written discharge at the exchequer (T.N.A.: P.R.O., PSO 2/1 (30 [sic] Feb. 1486)). John Currin used evidence of payments to diplomats from the chamber to suggest that the shift from the exchequer began in Nov. 1486 (‘“Pro expensis ambassatorum”: diplomacy and financial administration in the reign of Henry VII’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cviii (1993), 589–609, at p. 597). 75 Lincoln's Inn: the Black Books, p. 148. Lovell also gave money towards completing a new building. In 1489, he and Hobart were joint stewards in the duchy of Lancaster in East Anglia charged with increasing duchy rents, an exercise Empson also pursued. A book of Empson's ‘improvements’ for the north parts for 1505–8 has annotations and changes in rent value that are in his hand (T.N.A.: P.R.O., DL 41/29/10). For the farm of Highrilley (or Horleyhead), rented at £6 13s 4d annually, it was now increased to £8 (a rise of about 21%), which nonetheless was noted as ‘to[o] dere’ and the renters could only pay an additional 10s or ‘[th]ey will lose it’ (fo. 14). 76 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/84, 12 Nov. 1503, 20 Nov. 1503. 77 See T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 43/1 nos. 30(b), 32, where Dudley signed the documents, as did Hobart and his successor as attorney-general, John Ernley. 78 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/413/2/3 fo. 19 (July 1503), Bray and Dudley together pursuing an obligation of statute merchant for certain lands of Sir John Turbervile in Sussex – Dudley's home county – valued at £313 6s 8d. See also D. M. Brodie, ‘Edmund Dudley, minister of Henry VII’ , Trans. Royal Hist. Soc. , 4th ser., xv ( 1932 ), 133 – 61 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 79 Jones, ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort’, p. 14; Horowitz, ‘Richard Empson’, p. 44 and n. 82. 80 E.g., the £200 delivered to the king's chamber by the hands of Edmund Dudley and ‘Harry Wiott’ in partial payment of £600 owed by the earl of Devonshire (T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/413/2/3 fo. 227 (20 May 1505)). 81 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 21480 fos. 175v, 177. 82 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/413/2/2 fo. 44. He took bonds as part of his pursuit of moneys owed to the king, and he often worked with Empson, Dudley and Heron in administering them (T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/517/15 fos. 3r–v, 5r–v; E 101/517/14 fos. 3, 5). His patent for office dated 1 July 1508 is missing, but an enrolment on 19 Aug. explains his authority and the procedures he was to follow (C.P.R. 1494–1509, p. 591). W. C. Richardson noted that the enrolment allowed Belknap to appoint deputies (‘Surveyor of the king's prerogative’, Eng. Hist. Rev., lvi (1941), 52–75, at pp. 63–6). In fact, a petition signed by Henry VII not only listed 31 proposed deputies representing all the counties but also authorized Empson, Hussey, Southwell and Dudley to ‘take sureties of [all] of the seid deputies by obligacons’ for £40 each unless they were joined with ‘any other Counties’; then the bonds were to be for £20 (T.N.A.: P.R.O., PSO 2/3, n.d. but after 1 Aug. 1508). 83 C.P.R. 1494–1509, p. 168. 84 C.P.R. 1494–1509, pp. 168–9; T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/413/2/2 fo. 58v. 85 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/413/2/2 fo. 45. See the article in this issue by Margaret McGlynn about Southwell. 86 See M. R. Horowitz, ‘Cash and kings: Henry VII's land revenue management’, paper read at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, 1983, p. 4 and n. 8; J. A. Guy, ‘A conciliar court of audit at work in the last months of the reign of Henry VII’ , Bull. Inst. Hist. Research , xliv ( 1976 ), 289 – 95 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . Leybourn succeeded William Sever as bishop of Carlisle. Sever received a commission as surveyor of the king's prerogative on 12 Apr. 1499 and collected grants from parliament in the north on behalf of the crown (T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/83). Condon correctly posited that Sever's appointment was made in the spring of 1499 (‘Ruling elites’, p. 117 and n. 40). He was translated from Carlisle to Durham in 1502 (Hatfield House, Cecil Papers (hereafter C.P.), 207/1 fos. 9–10). The author wishes to express his gratitude to the 7th marquess of Salisbury for permission to peruse the account books of William Sever, and to Mr. Robin Harcourt Williams, librarian and archivist to the marquess, for providing copies for review. 87 E.g., T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/413/2/3 fo. 59, 16 Apr. 1503. 88 Morton was master of the chancery rolls under Edward IV from 1472 to 1478, the first civil lawyer in that office ( C. S. L. Davies, ‘Bishop John Morton, the Holy See and the accession of Henry VII’ , Eng. Hist. Rev. , cii ( 1987 ), 2 – 30 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at pp. 3–4). He had first-hand knowledge of bonds (see, e.g., C.C.R. 1468–76, nos. 1088–9, 1210, 1452). 89 See S. J. Gunn, ‘The structures of politics in early Tudor England’ , Trans. Royal Hist. Soc. , 6th ser., v ( 1995 ), 59 – 90 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . Gunn discusses the importance of the ‘interrelationships of the political actors’. 90 Richard Fox, a university-trained councillor under Henry VII referred to as ‘of excellent wit and learned’, was bishop of Winchester and lord privy seal. He entered into bonds on behalf of the king (Chrimes, pp. 34–5). Fox was a protégé of Margaret Beaufort. 91 Bureaucrats worked together and conducted private business with each other throughout the 15th century, and they gained experience in the various departments of state. Henry IV introduced several duchy of Lancaster servants into his new government. They were schooled in the principles of administration: ‘Secretarial, financial and with a strong injection of law’ ( R. A. Griffiths, ‘Public and private bureaucracies in England and Wales in the 15th century’ , Trans. Royal Hist. Soc. , 5th ser., xxx ( 1980 ), 109 – 30 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at pp. 119–21, 123). 92 Richardson, Tudor Chamber Administration, p. 141. 93 R. Somerville, ‘Lancashire justices of the peace in the 15th and 16th centuries’ , Trans. Hist. Soc. of Lancs. and Cheshire , cii ( 1951 ), 183 – 8 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 94 Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, pp. 248–51, 257; Dietz, pp. 65–7, discussing Richard III's plan, styled ‘A Remembraunce made, aswele for hasty levy of the kynges revenues’, pr. in Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII, ed. J. Gairdner (2 vols., Rolls ser., 1861–3) (hereafter Letters and Papers of Richard III and Henry VII), i. 81–5. Even as late as 1508, Lovell, Hobart, Lucas and others continued on duchy commissions (Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, p. 267). 95 Letters and Papers of Richard III and Henry VII, i. 84. 96 Richard III probably did not see any advantage to pursuing a bond policy, although there are glimpses that he was familiar with their use in government (see the author's article, ‘Henry Tudor's treasure’, in this issue). The keeper of a privy seal book for his reign noted that ‘iij obligacions of marchaunts of london’ were kept in ‘my maister[s] casket’– a notation similar to John Heron's reference to boxes of such bonds stored in Henry VII's chamber. There were also entries of obligations, including an order to the exchequer to discharge a former sheriff's bond for office ‘by reason of a recoignaunce’ (Brit. Libr., Harleian MS. 433 fos. 1v, 42v). 97 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/83, 4 Feb. 1499. The money was received in the chamber. It continued to be collected throughout the reign and forwarded to the chamber. A privy seal dated 9 Dec. 1506 noted that collectors in Lancs. alone owed the king £1,650 13s 4d for ‘sundry’ fifteenths and tenths from previous grants. Miles Gerard had now given John Heron £825 6s 8d and required a discharge at the exchequer as money paid directly to the chamber (T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/86). 98 In an account book for 1501–2 of William Sever, bishop of Carlisle (and later Durham), involving the collection of moneys on behalf of the king in the northern parts, a notation of payment was made for £256 13s 1d as part of the fifteenth and aid due from the West Riding of Yorkshire. An entry was added ‘Besides and above lxxjli iijs xjd[£71 3s 11d] that the forsaid collectors be bounded by obligacon to content and pay unto the kings grace as above’ (C.P., 212/9 fo. 10). Henry VII wrote his sign manual in the book four pages later. In another version of the account, the bishop received £66 9s 4d from several collectors for the second fifteenth in the West Riding as partial payment for the total due. Three of the men were now bound ‘to Maister Bray and me the forsaid Bishope in sevrall obligacions to the kings behouf and use’ to pay £53 3s 6d on a specified date (C.P., 207/1 fos. 7–8). Sever was no doubt beholden to Bray for his advancement. In a letter to Bray regarding his yearly accounts he referred to himself as ‘yor own Man W duresme’ (W.A.M., MS. 16028). 99 The intimidating penalty written into a bond for non-performance was not a Tudor invention. The money penalty clause (sub pena) was used in writs dating back to at least 1363, if not earlier ( W. M. Ormrod, ‘The origins of the sub pena writ’ , Hist. Research , lxi ( 1988 ), 11 – 20 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at p. 11). 100 W.A.M., MS. 16050, n. d., but between Dec. 1502 and Aug. 1503. Robert Wanhope's election to the abbacy was enrolled 5 Dec. 1502; he received his temporalities by patent 3 Feb. 1503 (C.P.R. 1494–1509, pp. 302–3). Bray died 5 Aug. 1503. Procedures were quite fluid. In the bishop of Durham's account books previously mentioned, he noted that in borrowing money from Henry VII for his temporalities, he was required to have the abbot and convent of the Blessed Lady next to York enter into obligations for the debt ‘wyth paynelty’. These bonds were to be delivered to Humphrey Coningsby, one of the king's working councillors, by Easter 1502 for subsequent delivery to Henry VII ‘wthowt any fayll or ffawt’ (C.P., 207/1 fos. 9–10). 101 E.g., the two privy seals for appearance before Edmund Dudley, printed in Horowitz, ‘“Agree with the king”’, pp. 365–6. See also Horowitz, ‘Richard Empson’, p. 46; J. A. Guy, The Cardinal's Court: the Impact of Thomas Wolsey in Star Chamber (Hassocks, 1977), p. 83. 102 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/82, 9 Oct. 1497. 103 Horowitz, ‘Henry Tudor's treasure’. 104 The various lists, books and rolls of obligations and the chancery writ series at The National Archives (especially C 244) suggest a large increase in bond-taking during Henry VII's reign, as do the various chancery rolls and, of course, the numerous obligations recorded in the chamber books. But one must always be wary of the fact that conclusions are being drawn from surviving documentation and even from the way in which they are classified. Nonetheless, that documentation and some of the conclusions suggested from it are congruent with the commentaries during the reign about the increased usage of bonds over time (see Cunningham, ‘Loyalty and the usurper’). 105 John Watts observed that Henry VII and his close advisers were in fact the government running England (Watts, ‘“A Newe Ffundacion of is Crowne”’, p. 50). 106 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/413/2/2, entitled ‘the kinges Boke of his Receiptes. heron.’; S. Cunningham, ‘“To keep all Englishmen obedient through fear”: Henry VII, the council and rule by recognizance, 1485–1509’, paper read at All Souls' College, Oxford (Nov. 2002) regarding T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 54/375–6, a recognizance roll; and his article ‘Loyalty and the usurper’. 107 C.P.R. 1485–94, pp. 1–4. 108 Lander, pp. 267–300; Condon, ‘Ruling elites’, pp. 119–20; Cunningham, ‘Loyalty and the usurper’. 109 R. A. Griffiths, ‘Tudor, Owen (c.1400–61)’, O.D.N.B. (<http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27797> [accessed 21 Jan. 2009]). 110 Cunningham, ‘Loyalty and the usurper’. 111 A. Cameron, ‘Complaint and reform in Henry VII's reign: the origins of the statute of 3 Henry VII, c. 2?’ , Bull. Inst. Hist. Research , li ( 1978 ), 83 – 9 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at pp. 83–6. 112 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 255/8/4 nos. 167–9, dates ranging from 14 to 18 July 1486. Thirteen other memoranda of recognizances were dated between 17 Oct. 1485 and 18 Aug. 1486 (nos. 152–4, 156–66; C 255/8/5 nos. 59–61). 113 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/218; C.P.R. 1494–1509, p. 237. Wotton said his benefice was valued at 13 marks annually, plus the houses were in ‘ruyn & decaye and [he] hath no frends to helpe hym’; he also had a ‘poor modre’. One can only wonder if the king smiled sardonically as he affixed his sign manual to the bill after reading it. Since Lund's pardon was enrolled, it is most likely that he paid for it, a ‘fee’ demanded frequently by Dudley later on. 114 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 255/8/5 no. 100. It nonetheless has an enrolment mark on it, and Sean Cunningham has informed the author that it is found on T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 54/376 m. 10, dated 28 July 1489, noting the three sureties to be discussed. 115 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/82, 26 Nov. 1496; C 255/8/5 no. 100; Chrimes, p. 139. Fitzwalter was referred to as ‘oure rebell the late lord ffitzwater’ (T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/245). He was the only noble involved in Sir William Stanley's treason, and it has been suggested that unlike Edward IV, who had a propensity to side with the stronger of two parties in a dispute, Henry VII did the opposite – in this case siding against Fitzwalter in a star chamber suit which may have pushed the lord into rebellion (T. B. Pugh, ‘Henry VII and the English nobility’, in The Tudor Nobility, ed. G. W. Bernard (Manchester, 1992), pp. 49–110, at pp. 53–4). Fitzwalter was executed and his son placed in a £5,000 bond, which according to Lander was the cost for obtaining a reversal of his father's attainder (Lander, p. 334). See David Grummitt's article in this issue, ‘Household, politics and political morality’, where he notes that Fitzwalter's relation with Henry VII was in ‘terminal decline’. 116 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/414/16 fo. 127v. In a chamber book of payments for 1495–7, a list of memoranda included a note that eight sureties forfeited their £1,000 recognizances but also stated that Wyndham, Drury and Brandon forfeited their 1,000 marks each for Fitzwalter's treason (E 101/416/6 fo. 122). The fact that the names of Wyndham and Drury were crossed out, but not Brandon's, suggests that this list was the original and required updating and recopying into E 101/414/16. 117 The inventory, ordered on 7 Oct. 1498 (and not 1499 as printed), is found in The Egerton Papers (Camden Soc., 1st ser., xii, 1840), pp. 1–3. It included all the records on file at chancery. 118 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 244/147 no. 105(a)(b)(c). Henry VII was just as diligent with the exchequer. On 18 Nov. 1505 he informed the barons there that because ‘we have certayne knowleige by you’ of various sums of money received at the exchequer the previous year, he wanted it assigned for specified purposes. This privy seal, signed by Henry, went into great detail, listing sums collected from parliamentary grants, sheriff's accounts and other payments going back not only to ‘the second yere of or raigne’ but also to the 12th year of the reign of ‘or noble p[ro]genitor king Edward the iiijth [1472–3]’, more than 30 years earlier (T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/85). 119 A Descriptive Catalogue of Ancient Deeds, ed. H. C. Maxwell Lyte (1900) (hereafter Ancient Deeds), iii, A. 9509. 120 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/83, 12 Jan. 1501; E 404/84, 13 Nov. 1502; E 404/84, 11 Feb. 1502. See the note in John Heron's account book that a vicar in Devonshire forfeited 40 marks by recognizance ‘for breking of peax opon the p[ar]isshe clerke’ (Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 21480 fo. 180). 121 Developed in the 14th century, the commissions of the peace were created to enforce statutes of the peace, receive indictments and conduct jury trials. Henry VII transformed the commission, making it an agency of the government for administration and fiscal policy, with one or more councillors sitting in every county (see D. Loades, Power in Tudor England (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 72–3; Harriss, ‘Political society’, pp. 46–9). 122 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/294 (8 Dec. 1506). A summary of the commission recorded on the patent rolls does not mention the councillors or their involvement (C.P.R. 1494–1509, pp. 507–8). For other commissions drawn up specifically by Empson or Dudley, see M. R. Horowitz, ‘“Contrary to the liberties of this city”: Henry VII, English towns and the economics of law and order’, Hist. Research (forthcoming). One example was the signet to the chancellor for two commissions to be drawn up by the squire for the body and Edmund Dudley, ‘concernyng oure right and Interesse as by or said Counsaillor’ will show you (T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/313 (20 May 1508)). 123 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/84. As will be discussed, bonds could be decades old (see the example of a bond prosecuted almost 20 years later in Horowitz, ‘Richard Empson’, pp. 47–8). 124 E.g., after the northern rebellion in 1489, Henry VII had small groups of rebels executed. Yet while in York, ‘the king pardont some day iii C [300] knelyng on their knees and some day ii C [200] some day mor and some day lasse so that season his grace pardont upon a xv C [1500]’ (Brit. Libr., Cotton MS. Titus B. X II fo. 55v; Bennett, p. 58). Those who were reprieved paid for this act of mercy. In an earlier disturbance in Oxfordshire, John Sant, abbot of Abingdon, was indicted for treason, summoned before the king's council and bound in 2,000 marks to pay two instalments of £800 each (21 May 1486). He rebelled yet again and on 27 Sept. 1490 he entered an obligation for 2,000 marks to pay £1,000 in instalments, for which he made several payments to the king's chamber. He lost his lands by act of parliament of 13 Jan. 1489, but had his abbacy restored in 1492. His pardon, enrolled on 2 Feb. 1493, apparently cost £31 11s, paid in the hanaper – this before the service of Edmund Dudley ( D. Luckett, ‘The Thames Valley conspiracies against Henry VII’ , Hist. Research , lxviii ( 1995 ), 164 – 72 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at pp. 166–8; C.P.R. 1485–94, pp. 403, 316, 421; C.C.R. 1485–1500, nos. 99, 540, 672). Bacon noted cynically that ‘the less blood he drew, the more he took of treasure’ (Bacon, p. 213). 125 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 59899 fos. 116v, 200v. This was for the Cornish rebellion. Its leaders were Lord Audley, Michael Joseph and Thomas Flamank, who were executed. The rebellion ended at Blackheath on 17 June 1497. 126 Suffolk was finally captured and, beginning on 24 Apr. 1506, spent the rest of his life in the Tower (Chrimes, pp. 290, 344). He was executed in 1513. 127 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/223, 5 Oct. 1501; C 82/332, 3 Oct., with no year given, but clearly 1501. This last document should be reclassified and stored in C 82/223. For another source related to these bonds, see Cunningham, ‘Loyalty and the usurper’. 128 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 59899 fo. 189v; T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 255/8/4 no. 74(a)(b)(c). Hudson soon entered a £1,000 bond for allegiance. 129 This included the care Henry VII took in appointing sheriffs, with many examples seen in the chancery warrants, e.g. a slip of vellum stating simply that Peter Bevyll was to be sheriff in Cornwall, signed by Henry VII (T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/230, 30 Apr. 1502, listed in the Calendar of Fine Rolls 1485–1509, no. 740). The same was true for escheators, e.g. John Blyke's appointment for Oxfordshire and Berkshire, signed by Thomas Surrey, treasurer of the exchequer, and sent to chancery with a note (in the same ink as the signature) stating ‘My lord the kings pleasure is that this man for grete [con]sideracons be admyttid eschetour and the othir last maid to be dischargid’. It was enrolled on the fine rolls on 30 Dec. 1504 (T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/267, Dec. 1504 (Cal. Fine Rolls 1485–1509, no. 811)). 130 R. Gorski, The 14th-Century Sheriff: English Local Administration in the Late Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 3. Gorski discusses the sheriff in terms of wealth, status and locality but makes no mention of how he was literally ‘bound’ to the centre by recognizance for his performance in office (ch. 3). 131 Cunningham, Henry VII, p. 170. 132 Nightingale, pp. 18–19, 25ff. It was concluded that Henry departed from the Yorkists in his diligence to control sheriffs through legislation and central direction by the chancellor: ‘Thus Henry VII was able to enforce statute staple recognisances to a degree never before achieved … No longer, it seems, did it depend on the individual personality of the king, or on his ability to terrorise his subjects. Instead, its effectiveness had been institutionalized’ (p. 25). Nightingale notes that sheriffs could be held accountable by entering bonds for office, which Henry had no qualms about prosecuting. 133 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/201. 134 E.g., the E 404 warrants for the reign at T.N.A. and the copy of Dudley's account book (Brit. Libr., Lansdowne MS. 127). 135 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/330, n.d., but most likely the first quarter of 1506. Lisle was originally committed to the county on 1 Dec. 1505, but his appointment was vacated for failing to enter a recognizance for office. He finally obtained it on 9 Apr. 1506 (Cal. Fine Rolls 1485–1509, nos. 843, 845). 136 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/332, n.d. Hasilrig was appointed on 15 Nov. 1500 (Cal. Fine Rolls 1485–1509, no. 708). 137 Local lords historically had some influence in the choice for both sheriff and justice of the peace (G. L. Harriss, ‘The dimensions of politics’, in The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society, ed. R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard (Stroud, 1995), pp. 1–20, at p. 6; Gorski, pp. 16–19). 138 Under-sheriffs could be culpable as well, and sheriffs paid to name them. Sir John Warburton paid Dudley £40 cash for the right (Brit. Libr., Lansdowne MS. 127 fo. 5). They would then enter into bonds or contracts with their under-sheriffs, such as Sir John Howard's retention of an under-sheriff by obligation (Household Books of John Howard, p. 472). An indenture drawn up on 6 Dec. 1501 noted that the sheriff of Wiltshire deputed Christopher Nicholas ‘to be his undershreve’ (Ancient Deeds, vi, C. 5196). Indentures could include bonds for performance. The one made on 15 Nov. 1499 between Thomas Cotton, sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, and Walter Lorkyn, to be his under-sheriff, stated that Lorkyn had to perform all his duties faithfully and account for all profits to Cotton, as well as enter a bond to this effect ‘in the sume of xx li.’ (Huntingdon Record Office, Conington Estate Papers, 3/15/1). The folded strip that held the now missing seal was made from a writ that cannot be read except for the date (13 March 1499) and the name ‘mordaunt’ at the bottom. One might surmise it was a directive from John Mordaunt to the sheriff, but the brittle strip would have to be removed and unfolded for content identification, which the author hesitated to undertake. 139 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/85, 16 Apr. 1506. 140 Brit. Libr., Cotton MS. Titus B. IV fo. 112, n.d., letter from Thomas Denys to Cardinal Wolsey asking for the office of under-treasurer of the exchequer previously held by Cutte. 141 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/85, 30 Nov. 1504. 142 Nightingale, p. 33. She nonetheless concluded that ‘Henry VII achieved some real improvement in the administration of local justice in ways that people wanted, that is by making the sheriffs better servants of the people as well as of the crown’ (p. 34). 143 Other councillors also pursued forfeitures on the recognizances of sheriffs who did not perform their duties. E.g., Sir Walter Griffith, sheriff of York, forfeited £100 to Humphrey Coningsby on behalf of the king for the escape of a prisoner. The money went to the chamber and a tally for payment was cut at the exchequer, where Griffith's bond most likely resided (Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 21480 fo. 186v). 144 From Dudley's account book: Henry Tey paid £100 (40 marks in cash, the rest by obligation) to John Heron for a pardon for his offences as sheriff; Sir William Say paid £100 (100 marks by obligation) for the discharge of his ‘shrefwike’; John Parys paid £10 in ready money and £10 by obligation to discharge his office of three years; John Maynwaring paid £40 (£20 in cash, £20 by bond) for a discharge (Brit. Libr., Lansdowne MS. 127 fos. 4, 5, 13v, 19). It is possible that these sums were renegotiated forfeitures on bonds. 145 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/218, 6 May 1501; C 82/329, n.d. but after 27 Nov. 1505; C.C.R. 1485–1500, no. 957; C.C.R. 1500–9, no. 447. Warde required a pardon with many others in 1505 for possible trade violations (C.P.R. 1494–1509, p. 449). 146 C.C.R. 1485–1500, no. 1199, enrolled 8 Dec. 1499. Warbeck was executed on 16 Nov.; the earl of Warwick on 29 Nov. Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, had fled to Calais the previous May. 147 McFarlane noted a rise in bond enrolment on the close rolls after 1500, and Lander felt that while recognizances for the nobility did not rise until 1502, he agreed with McFarlane that perhaps all bonds were now recorded ‘as a precaution’ by the chancery clerks (McFarlane, review of C.C.R. 1500–9, Eng. Hist. Rev., lxxxi (1966), 153–4; Lander, p. 335). See Horowitz, ‘Henry Tudor's treasure’ regarding enrolments at chancery. 148 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 244 series. 149 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 244/146. 150 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 244/147–50 (1499–1502); C 244/151–9 (1502–9). A few of the 21 documents in the last batch of writs (C 244/159) were dated from 1510 to 1511. 151 Horowitz, ‘Richard Empson’, pp. 40–1. Henry VII's last parliament began 26 Jan. 152 Brit. Libr., Lansdowne MS. 127 fo. 1. A petition signed by Henry VII and Dudley addressed to the treasurer, barons and chamberlain of the exchequer, rehearsed the terms of an annuity of 100 marks for Dudley since Sept. 1504, for ‘our trusty and right welbeloved Consaillor’ (T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/278, 29 Oct. 1505). Steven Gunn suggested that Bray may have been Dudley's patron (‘Edmund Dudley and the church’, Jour. Eccles. Hist., li (2000), 509–26, at p. 523). 153 It should be noted that Henry signed numerous writs and letters with other working councillors as well, usually pointed to their particular activities. This is evident in the various privy seal and signet warrants found in the C 82 and E 404 series of documents at The National Archives. 154 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/293 (2 Nov. 1506); Brit. Libr., Lansdowne MS. 127 fo. 31, dated the same day. Payments for offices varied in amounts, e.g. clerkship of Hull (£106 13s 4d); auditorship in Cornwall (£40) and in the exchequer (40 marks); clerkship of the peace in Lincolnshire (50 marks) and in Leicestershire (20 marks) (Brit. Libr., Lansdowne MS. 127 fos. 31–33v). Empson probably possessed a similar book, for which an entry was reconstructed along the lines of Dudley's activities (Horowitz, ‘Richard Empson,’ p. 42). 155 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/320 (8 Oct. 1508). 156 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/286 (21 June 1506). 157 C.C.R. 1500–9, no. 114. A notation in the summary states that all bonds were cancelled by successive warrants down to 18 July 1518, but fails to mention that cancellation occurred because payments were made. 158 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/246, 26 July 1503. 159 Routhale, like so many other working councillors, took recognizances and obligations on behalf of the king before Dudley's entry into royal service. See, e.g., John Hussey's bond of 1,000 marks to keep his two brothers, William and Robert, on their good behaviour and on time to appear ‘byfore the kings seid secretary’ to take out £500 each for their allegiance (T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 255/8/5 no. 95, 9 Jan. 1502). 160 Gunn, ‘Edmund Dudley and the church’, p. 523. Barons, a graduate of Oxford and Bologna, became bishop of London. 161 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/284 (27 Apr. 1506). 162 C.C.R. 1500–9, no. 622; Brit. Libr., Lansdowne MS. 127 fo. 22v; C.P.R. 1494–1509, p. 466. The pardon did not exclude payment of the 1,300 marks or the payment of £700 on other recognizances owed by Clifford. 163 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/252. The recognizance was for semi-annual payments, most likely for a wardship, and it was not enrolled. 164 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/516/17. An ultraviolet light was required to bring out the notation and the handwriting was compared to four pages of script written by Henry VII during the timeframe 1502–4 (E 101/413/2/3 fos. 1–4). Despite Henry's reference to recognizances through the autumn of 1504, when Dudley entered his service, the book apparently ends in the summer of 1503, suggesting that it had been prepared for (or by) Bray just before his death and was now assigned to Dudley. 165 T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 101/517/11, cover and fos. 3, 7v. The book is mentioned in Condon, ‘Ruling elites’, p. 133 and n. 10; it is discussed in Horowitz, ‘Henry Tudor's treasure’. 166 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/294 (28 Dec. 1506). It was enrolled at chancery on 16 Jan. 1507, but the printed summary only lists the three commissioners and the reason for the commission, being ‘to enquire of lands and idiots, murders, homicides, escapes of felons in the county of Devon’ (C.P.R. 1494–1509, p. 507). There is then a notation that the commission was vacated by writ of supersedeas, although it appears to have been reinstated with additional commissioners the following March (C.P.R. 1494–1509, p. 546). 167 One can only wonder how many files of obligations and recognizances must have existed. There is a reference to another repository for bonds in one of the surviving council books at the duchy of Lancaster: ‘Thobligacon of Willm Ap Rys & divrs other r[e]mayneth in the kings box of obligacons in the Ambry’ (T.N.A.: P.R.O., DL 5/2 fo. 104). An ambry was a small cupboard or closet for storage. There were boxes of obligations in the king's chamber, and Dudley had them all over his house (Horowitz, Richard Empson, pp. 47 n. 103, 42). 168 People at the time understood the weighty authority of these various missives and the king's propensity for signing documents. A typical example was when the abbot of Woburn petitioned the king for a patent a half year after Perkin Warbeck's execution. He requested Henry's signature, ‘and that this bill signed wt your moost victorious hand may be sufficient warrant to your Chaunceller of Englond’ for a patent under the great seal ‘wtout sueng prive signet prive seale or other warrant’ (T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/205, 12 June 1500). 169 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/330, 30 Nov., n.d., but after 27 Aug. 1492, when the king changed his sign manual. 170 Elton, ‘A restatement’, pp. 28, 12. 171 C.C.R. 1485–1500 and C.C.R. 1500–9; see Horowitz, ‘Henry Tudor's treasure’, for an analysis of enrolled bonds summarized in these calendars. 172 C.C.R. 1500–9, pp. viii–ix. 173 Cunningham, ‘Loyalty and the usurper’. 174 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/295, 29 Jan. 1507; C.C.R. 1500–9, no. 523. As if to make the memory of the bond perfectly clear, after the words ‘standeth bounden’ Henry VII wrote in ‘b[y] reco[g]nysance’. 175 T.N.A.: P.R.O., SP 1/1 fo. 104; Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, i. i, no. 309. 176 Steven Gunn felt that occurrences of Henry's signature on accounts diminished after 1504 along with his eyesight, which clearly was a factor (‘The courtiers of Henry VII’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cviii (1993), 23–49, at p. 24). But the number of accounts that the king scrutinized had also multiplied, perhaps limiting the use of his sign manual. The king's ministers also began signing documents on his behalf, with or without his being present. 177 J. I. Miklovich, ‘The significance of the royal sign manual in early Tudor legislative procedure’ , Bull. Inst. Hist. Research , lii ( 1979 ), 23 – 36 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at p. 24. 178 Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, suppl. to vols. i and ii, no. 14 (p. 90). 179 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/304. 180 E.g., T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/310, 314, 319, 324. 181 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/326 (delivered 16 Apr. 1509). For a discrepancy on the date of Henry's demise, see S. J. Gunn, ‘The accession of Henry VII’, Hist. Research, lxiv (1991), 278–88. Chrimes thought that neither Henry VII nor his son could have had much personal input to the pardon issued two days after the first Tudor's death, but this document suggests a king involved in his administration to the end (Chrimes, p. 315). 182 See Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 21481, passim, and fo. 31 (2 June 1510) for the purchase of a collar of SS, a badge worn by the supporters of Lancaster since the days of John of Gaunt. A secular cult of Henry V, hero of Agincourt, came about early in Henry VIII's reign (C. S. L. Davies, ‘Henry VIII and Henry V: the wars in France’, in The End of the Middle Ages? England in the 15th and 16th Centuries, ed. J. L. Watts (Stroud, 1998), pp. 235–62, at p. 237). 183 Horowitz, ‘“Agree with the king”’, p. 356. 184 See Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 21481 fos. 289–305v for recognizances, fos. 318–352v for obligations. 185 S. J. Gunn, ‘The Act of Resumption of 1515’, in Early Tudor England: Proceedings of the 1987 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. D. Williams (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 87–106, at pp. 93–4. 186 Brit. Libr, Cotton MS. Titus B. IV fos. 57, 58v–59. 187 Horowitz, ‘An early-Tudor teller's book’, passim. 188 C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: the Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 3. Muldrew is much too late in suggesting that the ‘culture of credit’ began in the mid 16th century or that written debts could be exchanged for other debts and started to be recorded in account books in the 16th and 17th centuries (pp. 3, 100, 109). 189 S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 97ff, 105. 190 J. B. Samaha, ‘The recognizance in Elizabethan law enforcement’ , Amer. Jour. Legal Hist. , xxv ( 1981 ), 189 – 204 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at p. 189. Samaha concluded that the peace bond's main purpose was the prevention of violence and serious threats to public order, and it was effective since most people in recorded recognizances honoured their conditions (pp. 194, 197). Unfortunately, he disregarded the fact that these bonds had been in use for centuries, especially at the local level for appearance at court, law enforcement and keeping the peace. His assertion that ‘the criminal trial must yield its exalted place [to recognizances] as the centerpiece of the administration of justice’ misses the pervasive usage of bonds for this purpose in the reign of Henry VII, who is never mentioned. (p. 204). E.g., such statements as the recognizance being called upon ‘to do the job’ of maintaining order in Elizabethan alehouses by binding the keepers to have a licence ignored Henry VII's ‘national’ licensing of alehouses in 1495, which gave J.P.s the authority to take sureties for good behaviour from those who kept such houses (<http://www.camulos.com/inns/3licence.htm> [accessed 21 Nov. 2008]). 191 Hindle, The State and Social Change, pp. 111–15. To Hindle, recognizances were an overt demonstration of the participatory nature of state formation in England. 192 Lander, p. 352 and n. 170. He did note that many bonds from the old regime were paid or compounded, and that the practice continued into the reign of Henry VIII. Brodie and Elton previously came to this conclusion (Horowitz, ‘“Agree with the king”’, n. 134). 193 Hall noted that in the first year of the new reign, ‘executours made restitucion of great sommes of money, to many persons taken against good conscie[n]ce to the sayde kynges vse, by the forenamed Empson and Dudley’ (Hall's Chronicle, p. 514). Dudley admitted that many people were dealt with harshly, if not illegally ( C. J. Harrison, ‘The petition of Edmund Dudley’ , Eng. Hist. Rev. , lxxxvii ( 1972 ), 82 – 9 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ). 194 Lander made the same judgement regarding notations of ‘vacated’ or ‘cancelled’ recognizances printed in the summaries of the Calendar of Close Rolls. E.g., two recognizances were entered into by four men for £100 each to pay £80 at Martinmas in 1505 and in 1506 to Hobart, Empson, Hussey, Dudley and Lucas for the king's use. In the Calendar, they are annotated as ‘cancelled by warrant’ with no mention of payment, drawing the conclusion that no money was ever paid (C.C.R. 1500–9, no. 418(ii)). Yet the two warrants for cancellation for the two recognizances state that £80 was paid on 3 Nov. 1505 and again on 7 Nov. 1506 to the treasurer of the king's chamber (T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/279; C 82/293). The Calendar entry also lists the bonds under 3 Dec. 1504, with no mention of the dates of discharge in the successive two years. 195 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/338 (L. & P., i. i, no. 132(34)); C 82/336 (L. & P., i. i, no. 54(3)); C 82/337 (L. & P., i. i, no. 94(99)); C 82/338 (L. & P., i. i, no. 132(18), which only states the £40 penalty, not the 50 marks actually due – this omission occurs in other L. & P. entries); C 82/341 (L. & P., i. i, nos. 218(59), 381(108)); C 82/342 (L. & P., i. i, no. 257(63), (84), (34)). 196 L. & P., i. i, no. 1493. 197 T.N.A.: P.R.O., SP 1/2. 198 T.N.A.: P.R.O., SP 1/59, inventory of old obligations temp Henry VII kept by Sir Brian Tuke, treasurer of the chamber (found in L. & P., iv. iii, no. 6798). The original document is used for this discussion. 199 T.N.A.: P.R.O., SP 1/59 fos. 16, 17, 20. 200 T.N.A.: P.R.O., SP 1/59 fo. 20. 201 Brit. Libr., Cotton MS. Titus B. I fos. 157v, 427, 436. Richard Riche also took recognizances, including those for behaving in a desirable way toward the king and realm (T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 315/352). 202 Nevertheless, Henry VII did not simply clean house, an action most competent rulers avoided; he kept many of the ‘bureaucrats’ in place to maintain continuity. Moreover, at least 35 of his councillors also served as councillors to Edward IV (S. J. Gunn, Early-Tudor Government, 1485–1558 (New York, 1995), p. 23). 203 See D. Starkey, ‘Court history in perspective’, in The English Court: from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. D. Starkey and others (1987), pp. 1–24, for the arguments pro and con concerning Elton's Tudor revolution. For a good summary of the political historiography of Tudor England, see S. Alford, ‘Politics and political history in the Tudor century’ , Hist. Jour. , xlii ( 1999 ), 535 – 48 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 204 E.g., the exchequer warrant dated 18 March 1504 concerning William Chapplayne of Norfolk, bound by recognizance on 14 Oct. 1491 in £40 in chancery to keep the king's peace. When he broke the peace 13 years later, the king learned of the bond ‘as we bee p[er]fitely enformed’– undoubtedly from a search. Chapplayne now forfeited the £40 (T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/84). 205 Horowitz, ‘“Contrary to the liberties of this city”’. 206 E.g., A. Harding, Medieval Law and the Foundations of the State (Oxford, 2002). Harding does note that local justice was the main political dialogue between the monarch and the realm, and that law was the ‘state of the realm’ (pp. 185, 263). 207 C. W. Brooks, Lawyers, Litigation and English Society Since 1450 (1998), p. 179. 208 O. W. Holmes, Jr., The Common Law (Boston, Mass., 1881), p. 248. Numerous examples exist in the 12th-century histories of Henry of Huntingdon (c.1080–1160) and Orderic Vitalis (1075–c.1143), where the early Norman kings used hostages to guarantee an agreement (Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, trans. Thomas Forester (1853; repr. 1968); Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy, trans. M. Chibnall (Oxford, 1969–80) (hereafter Orderic Vitalis)). The practice dated back to Roman law when a body was bound in ropes and chains and turned over to the creditor (R. Zimmerman, The Law of Obligations: Roman Foundations of the Civilian Tradition (Capetown, 1990), p. 5). 209 At the local level, breaking an oath was seen as a threat to law and order and an assault on both traditions and the law ( J. Lee, ‘“Ye shall disturbe noe mans right”: oath-taking and oath-breaking in late medieval and early modern Bristol’ , Urban Hist. , xxxiv ( 2007 ), 27 – 38 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at p. 36). 210 Orderic Vitalis, pp. 249–50; T. F. T. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law (3rd edn., 1940), p. 341. 211 P. Tucker, ‘The contribution of Henry VII's reign to the emergence of constitutional monarchy in England’. 212 Horowitz, ‘“Contrary to the liberties of this city”’. 213 Trans. Samuel E. Thorne (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), vol. ii. See also F. W. Maitland, Select Passages from the Works of Bracton and Azo (Selden Soc., viii, 1895). 214 Bracton, ii. 287. For stipulations, see A. Watson, The Laws of Obligations in the Later Roman Republic (Oxford, 1965), ch. 1. 215 Maitland, who was openly hostile to the ‘Romanist’, attacked his confusion, concluding with the terse statement ‘we can hardly attribute to Bracton a full knowledge of what he is about’ (Maitland, p. 147). 216 Holmes, p. 261. For creating a seal and the hazards for its survival, see D. Marcombe, ‘The confraternity seals of Burton Lazars Hospital and a newly discovered matrix from Robertsbridge, Sussex’ , Trans. Leicestershire Archaeol. and Hist. Soc. , lxxvi ( 2002 ), 47 – 58 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at pp. 53–4. 217 T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England (6 vols., Manchester, 1920–33), i. 122. Notaries were nonetheless used in England. On 26 Apr. 1481, a London grocer gifted a draper his goods, chattels and debts for a consideration (a piece of silver) ‘and in token thereof he has affixed his seal and that of William Campe notary for greater corroboration of the premises’ (C.C.R. 1476–85, no. 791). Such enrolments included a second person to validate a document if a party's seal was not well known. 218 Tout, i. 123. 219 Plucknett, p. 348. This prevented spurious contracts: ‘the courts were prudently suspicious of any signs of monkey business’ (A. W. B. Simpson, A History of the Common Law of Contract: the Rise of the Action of Assumpsit (Oxford, 1975), p. 90). 220 Cited in Simpson, p. 267. The courts wrestled with the ‘lost seal’ during Henry VII's reign. In a case before common pleas in 1488, two debtors sealed an obligation but one seal either fell off or was removed. The plaintiff argued that the debtor whose seal remained on the obligation owed him money; the defendant pleaded that it was ‘not his deed’ because of the missing seal of the other debtor. Chief Justice Bryan said that the defendant could plead that it was ‘not his deed’, but it was argued that since one debtor's seal remained, the debt was good. Bryan reiterated that the missing seal meant the obligation was no longer the one the debtor originally sealed (Yearbook, Hil. 3 Hen. 7, plea 20 fo. 5a). 221 The legal concept of novatio involved an old obligation converted into a new one – the former became inoperative ipso iure and was not enforceable (Zimmerman, p. 758). However, that was not always the case and care was given to cancel the original bond. 222 Donne vs. Cornwall (1485), quoted in Simpson, pp. 99–100. The defendant paid money owed on a bond and then received the actual instrument, although he ‘foolishly failed to destroy it’. The defendant claimed that the plaintiff wrongfully recovered the written obligation and brought an action on it, but the court decided that the defendant's plea regarding the circumstances was not good: the bond existed, so it was viable, or in modern parlance ‘a contract is a contract’. It was a person's own fault if he or she failed to obtain cancellation of a bond and it was sued upon (Baker, Oxford History of the Laws of England, vi. 41–2). 223 T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/250, 11 Sept. 1503; C.C.R. 1500–9, no. 211. 224 Truro, Cornwall Record Office (hereafter C.R.O.), MS. AR3/384. Arundell was a knight of the body and entered into numerous recognizances and obligations as party to land transactions and moneys owed to the crown (T.N.A.: P.R.O., C 82/364 (L. & P., i. i, no. 784(30)); C.C.R. 1485–1500, nos. 83, 399, 945; C.C.R. 1500–9, nos. 209, 959; C.P.R. 1485–94, p. 332; C.P.R. 1494–1509, pp. 107, 552, 567). Dudley made an entry in his account book related to this payment (Brit. Libr., Lansdowne. MS. 127 fo. 32v, 11 Nov. 1506). The O.D.N.B. states that by 1508, Arundell was a receiver in Cornwall; he paid Dudley 450 marks (350 in cash) for the privilege on 1 Nov. 1507 (P. Y. Stanton, ‘Arundell family (per. 1435–1590)’, O.D.N.B. (<http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/41331> [accessed 21 Jan. 2009]); Brit. Libr., Lansdowne MS. 127 fo. 50). This Sir John should not be confused with Sir John Arundell of Trerice from another branch of this ubiquitous Cornish family (see C.R.O., MS. AR/24/16, where both Johns acted as arbiters in a matter). 225 See, e.g., Lander, pp. 328–67; C. Rawcliffe, ‘Henry VII and Edward, duke of Buckingham: the repression of an “over-mighty subject”’ , Bull. Inst. Hist. Research , liii ( 1980 ), 114 – 18 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 226 A year into Henry VII's reign, all of the justices, the chancellor, the treasurer and various lords of the king's council gathered at Whitefriars to discuss the case of two knights, each bound to the king in £3,000 for their ‘good behaviour’ (de bene gerendo). The knights – Sir Richard Crofts, treasurer of the king's household, and Sir Richard Corbet – were accused of displaying swords, daggers and other weapons openly in Westminster hall, raising the question of whether they forfeited their bonds. The justices were undecided (the reason for the meeting), although they expressed the view that surety of the peace could not be breached without fighting but that it could be forfeited by an assembly of people or the actual weapons, even without breaching the peace. They also argued that if the bound parties behaved themselves, it was not a breach of the peace (Yearbook, Mich. 2 Hen. 7, plea 7 fos. 2v–3). Corbet was later in breach of a recognizance of the peace (T.N.A.: P.R.O., E 404/82, 3 Dec. 1496). 227 That is apparently what happened to Thomas Sunnyff, haberdasher of London, as detailed in Horowitz, ‘“Agree with the king”’, pp. 325–66. 228 ‘Ecclesiastically-sponsored theatre in London, 1422–1642’, Guildhall Library Manuscripts Section Newsletter, x (Winter 2007/8). The author wishes to thank Penny Tucker for this reference. © Institute of Historical Research 2009 This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © Institute of Historical Research 2009
TI - Policy and prosecution in the reign of Henry VII
JF - Historical Research
DO - 10.1111/j.1468-2281.2009.00506.x
DA - 2009-08-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/policy-and-prosecution-in-the-reign-of-henry-vii-dwz1j1HQh0
SP - 412
EP - 458
VL - 82
IS - 217
DP - DeepDyve
ER -