In the year 1641, pamphlets flew off the London presses like a flurry of snow. Some pamphlets were pro-Puritan tracts attacking the authority of the church, while others countered with satirical sermons intended by their Royalist authors to portray their adversaries as buffoons. Several used pornographic or scatological imagery to slander public figures. Scores of pamphlets reported on the massacres and atrocities of the Irish rebellion with a sensationalist flair, telling tales of rape and murder committed by the papists in Ireland. Many more advocated for the cause of the Long Parliament against Charles I’s personal rule. And in so doing, some brought the past to bear on the present. One pamphlet in particular recounted the ruthless proceedings of another parliament in opposition to another king centuries before. First printed as An Historical Narration of the Manner and Forme of that Memorable Parliament, which Wrought Wonders. Begun at Westminster 1386 in the Tenth Year of the Reigne of King Richard the Second, it was rapidly reprinted with a supplementary account of Richard II’s life and death under a slightly different title, and once more in a much abridged form in ‘the yeare of much feare, 1643’.

It was an acerbic, vitriolic, and satirical text in keeping with the tastes of the day, and by all appearances it seemed to be a contemporary work as the prose made ample use of the vocabulary of seventeenth-century politics – words like ‘commonwealth’, ‘public affairs’, ‘confederates’, ‘citizens’ and ‘conspirators’ are peppered throughout.

Despite the tone of its language it was not a seventeenth-century text, for its author had been dead for some 237 years. It was a ghost of parliaments past come to rally support for John Pym and the parliamentarians. The pamphlet’s title page attributes authorship to Thomas Fannant, but there was no such person – the writer’s real name was Thomas Fovent, and he wrote his pamphlet in Latin sometime shortly after June 1388. Unsurprisingly, he wrote it for much the same reason as those later pamphleteers who backed the cause of the Long Parliament, for he believed parliament was the most effective way to expose and correct the rampant corruption of Richard II’s administration.