raruament 415
treatment, often an order which brought a dilatory pro-
cedure to a swift close, later many to the Court of
Chancery, and in the case of the more difficult bringing
them to Council or Parliament—the triers themselves, of
course, being a part of the Council, and the Council of
the great council or Parliament. Whether or not the
Commons ever really shared in this more routine work of
the High Court of Parliament it is impossible to say. It
was a work that declined as the developing court of
Chancery and later the Star Chamber drew large parts
of it away. And yet it has been estimated that as
late as the end of the middle ages nearly half the work
of Parliament was judicial. However from the early
fourteenth century this phase of Parliament's work
decreased while something else increased. It grew less
as a court, it grew more as a political body; the judicial
aspect waned, the legislative became more prominent.
But to see this we must return to petitions.
The right of every subject to petition the sovereign
had always existed. Early petitions may be divided
roughly into two classes: most petitions, as later, came
from individuals or very small groups and dealt with
individuals' wrongs and came to the king and his court,
either as the small or great council; but occasionally there
had beeii^etitions, or perhaps^ remonstrances, presented
by large bodies of men acting together and dealing with
matters of quite generafconcernr Such hacTBeen the
barons' artlcTeslipon^whlcIT Magna Carta was based, the
petition of J2S& which resulte3~Ti^
Oxford; and the Confirmatio^fjaQT* with its aU-nnport--
ant added•J^cleg^n Jggg^J£g> came from a peHEorT of
just thisType ancTma^rbelregarded as a sort of crowning
pre-Parliamentary instance. These movements had re-
sulted in documents, most notable and influential docu-
ments, but hard to classify. In the fourteenth and fif-
teenth centuries the individuals' petitions were dealt
with by triers and Parliaments as stated above. They
were in the judicial field, they were matters of private