Definition
Receivers and Triers of Petitions were parliamentary officers and committees appointed to receive, sort, and adjudicate petitions presented to Parliament. The role was bifurcated: Receivers accepted and organized incoming petitions, while Triers examined and decided them through a quasi-judicial process. The function predates the modern legislative committee system and reflects a period when Parliament operated as a high court of justice as much as a legislative assembly.
In medieval and early modern English constitutional practice, petitions to Parliament—whether from subjects seeking redress of grievances, disputed claims against the Crown, or requests for legislative relief—required formal processing before the full body could act. Receivers and Triers were the mechanism through which this processing occurred, functioning as the gatekeepers and initial adjudicators of the parliamentary petition process.
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Common Confusion
The term "receiver" in this context bears no relationship to the equity court officer known as a Receiver (an agent appointed by a court to manage property in litigation). The shared label creates a false cognate trap. Similarly, "triers" here should not be confused with the "triers of the issue" in trial practice—the jury or factfinder. The Triers of Petitions were an administrative-judicial committee, not a fact-finding body in the common law trial sense.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
1. Receivers of Petitions: Officers charged with accepting petitions at the opening of Parliament and sorting them by subject matter or jurisdiction (e.g., petitions from England, Gascony, Ireland, or other territories were historically routed to separate committees).
2. Triers of Petitions: Committees composed of prelates, peers, judges, and (in later practice) members of Parliament generally, tasked with hearing and resolving petitions on their merits. Their function was explicitly judicial—examining evidence, hearing parties, and rendering determinations—rather than legislative.
3. Receivers of Wreck: A distinct office appearing in the same archival cluster in some sources, concerned with the administration of shipwrecked goods. This role has no functional connection to petitions and should not be conflated with the parliamentary receiver function.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is primarily relevant to researchers working in English constitutional history, parliamentary history, and the history of the petition process. Several navigational points deserve attention:
First, the function is essentially extinct as a formal parliamentary mechanism. Modern parliamentary petitions are handled through standing committees and procedural rules with no surviving version of the Receivers and Triers office. Researchers encountering this term in historical sources should not assume continuity with any modern body.
Second, the judicial character of the early parliamentary petition process is critical context. When researching the origins of parliamentary sovereignty, the development of equity, or the historical relationship between Parliament and the courts, the Triers of Petitions represent evidence that Parliament's judicial and legislative functions were not clearly separated in medieval constitutional practice. The gradual shift from judicial to legislative handling of petitions is itself a major theme in English constitutional development.
Third, the role of the Triers evolved over time. Early committees were composed of named prelates, earls, and justices—constituted fresh at each Parliament by royal appointment. Later practice became more generalized, with the membership drawn from the broader parliamentary body. This evolution tracks the broader democratization of parliamentary procedure.
Fourth, researchers should be alert to the separate entry for Receivers of Wreck, which appears in some dictionaries immediately adjacent to this material and may cause confusion in corpus searches. Receivers of Wreck administered salvage law and Crown prerogative over shipwrecked goods—a wholly distinct legal context.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence is the primary dictionary source here, and its treatment is terse. The entry synthesizes the function correctly: the mode of receiving and trying petitions was "formerly judicial rather than legislative," with Triers composed of prelates, peers, and judges, and later of members generally. The citation to Brown (presumably Brown's Parliamentary Practice or a comparable treatise) suggests this was standard constitutional history rather than contested doctrine at the time of the dictionary's publication.
What Rapalje & Lawrence does not supply is the chronological arc. The Receivers and Triers system was most active in the medieval period, particularly from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, when Parliament served as the highest court of the realm. The gradual absorption of petition functions into the Court of Chancery, the Court of Requests, and ultimately into modern legislative committee procedure is absent from the dictionary entry. Researchers relying solely on this source will have the label and a functional sketch but no developmental history.
Historical dictionaries generally treat this term as a matter of constitutional antiquarianism rather than live doctrine, which is accurate. No significant divergence between historical dictionary treatments is apparent in the available source material.
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Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to English parliamentary history and has no recognized counterpart in American, Scottish, or colonial legal systems. American constitutional design deliberately omitted the petition-adjudication function from Congress, channeling such matters to courts or administrative agencies. Researchers should not expect jurisdictional portability.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The closest available Law Mind Encyclopedia entry—Receiving Stolen Property (Criminal Law Encyclopedia)—does not bear on this term. No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry on parliamentary procedure, petitions, or constitutional history is identified in the matching sources. Encyclopedia cross-reference is omitted.
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