In the treatise on court ceremonial known as the Ryalle Book, its author, possibly John Hampton, usher of Henry VI's chamber, let slip a fascinating detail about court life under the first two Lancastrian kings in the moments that were not dominated by formality, ceremony and etiquette. According to these reminiscences, after dinner, when Henry IV and Henry V did not ‘keep state’, they would have a cushion laid on the cupboard – or sideboard – of the Great Chamber, and there they ‘wold lene by the space of an houre or more to ressaue [receive] billis and compleynts off whomesoeuer wold come’. The picture of the king being made comfortable whilst attending to the more mundane or routine business of kingship is as vivid as it is rare. It was, perhaps, its very ordinariness which made the king's audience of his subject's requests a subject which aroused little interest or comment by contemporary writers. And yet, receiving bills was clearly a regular, timeconsuming – and demanding – part of a king's duties: when he was not holding court, his evenings were spent meeting the unrelenting demand of his subjects to be given gifts, favours or some other act of royal grace that would improve their personal circumstances. The extract from the Ryalle Book shows to good effect how hard working a king in this period could be. This discussion considers the mechanisms that underlay the scene described in the Ryalle Book. In essence, it is about the bills that were presented to the king – in this case Henry IV – on a day-to-day basis in the relative privacy of his chamber, away from the more ‘public’ and better known (in modern historiography) petitionary forums of the council and parliament. The aim is to look more closely at what lay behind the presentation of these bills, and in so doing to shed further light on one of the most important ways for kings to display the quality of their rule: namely, the degree to which they listened and responded to the needs and aspirations of their subjects.

Since many of the bills presented to the king – perhaps the majority – sought an act of favour, the discussion is also more broadly about the distribution of royal patronage. In the last part of the paper the particular circumstances of Henry IV's reign and the way these affected the king's attitude toward the conferment of royal grace is addressed, but the principal focus of the discussion considers what can be learnt more generally about the roll of bills in medieval government, and in the processes which governed the distribution of patronage, by using the reign of Henry IV as a case study.