Petitions to the papal curia have long been recognised as a valuable source for the religious, social and political history of later medieval Europe. They requested a wide variety of papal favours, ranging from marriage dispensations to provisions for benefices. They are important, firstly, for what they reveal about relations between the papacy and different parts of Europe. As far as England is concerned, J.A.F. Thomson argued that they epitomised a view of the late medieval papacy as chiefly a source of spiritual favours, what Sir John Paston called ‘the welle of grace’. Indeed most of these favours were a papal monopoly and therefore helped to bolster the central authority of the papacy within the Western Church. This was particularly important by the mid fifteenth century following the crises of the Great Schism (1378–1417) and the subsequent conciliar movement, which had severely undermined papal authority. In addition these crises had led to the papacy losing many of its traditional sources of revenue, both from local churches and the papal states; hence papal favours brought welcome income to the curia (even if the expense of obtaining them prompted criticisms that Protestants later exploited). But petitions to the curia are not only significant to historians of the papacy. They also give useful insights into contemporary religious sensibilities, particularly in the fifteenth century, on the eve of the Reformation.