The early-Tudor English government oversaw the rise of various centralised courts offering the king's subjects access to extraordinary justice in their private suits. One such new arena was the ‘Court of Requests’, an early equity or conscience court long overshadowed in histories of the period by the better-known courts of Star Chamber and Chancery. This article analyses the little-studied Requests archives to ask who sued there and when/why the court became associated with specifically poor men's causes. Focusing on the formative decade of ‘popularisation’ between 1515 and 1525, it finds that whilst litigants appear to have been largely from the lower sectors of society compared to their counterparts in the other conciliar courts, most petitioners opted for imprecise, rhetorical and non-static descriptions of their relative poverty – defined not just economically, but also in terms of age, property, and kin – in comparison to their opponents, appealing to the specific interpretation of conscience in Requests. The article thus scrutinises the methodologies we use for uncovering the demography of early-modern central courts, and has implications for understanding litigants' legal strategies, recorded identification as distinct from self-identification, and the theory and practice behind commonly-held ideals about the provision of royal justice for the ‘poor’.

中文翻译：

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英国“穷人诉讼法院”或请求法院的诉讼人，1515-25

早期都铎王朝的英国政府监督了各种中央法院的兴起，为国王的臣民提供了在私人诉讼中获得特别正义的机会。一个这样的新领域是“请求法院”，这是一个早期的公平或良心法院，在该时期的历史上长期被著名的星庭和衡平法院所掩盖。本文分析了鲜为人知的 Requests 档案，以询问谁在那里起诉以及法院何时/为什么与特别穷人的原因相关联。着眼于 1515 年至 1525 年间“大众化”的形成性十年，它发现虽然与其他调解法院的同行相比，诉讼当事人似乎主要来自社会较低阶层，但大多数请愿人选择了不精确的，对他们相对贫困的修辞和非静态描述——不仅在经济上，而且在年龄、财产和亲属方面——与他们的反对者相比，诉诸于《请求》中对良心的具体解释。因此，本文仔细研究了我们用于揭示早期现代中央法院人口统计的方法，并对理解诉讼当事人的法律策略、记录身份与自我身份不同的身份以及关于为“穷人”提供皇家正义。