The Ancient Indictments of the King’s Bench in the Public Record Office are not a wholly neglected class of records, though until recently their value for political history, particularly of the fifteenth century when chronical sources are so inadequate, had not been fully recognized.¹ The three groups of these documents printed below are intended to illustrate the history of Kent in the mid-fifteenth century, and also to throw some light on the political history of the kingdom at this period.
   (i) By the fifteenth century the great majority of criminal cases in the king’s courts were begun by an indictment certified by a grand jury as a "true bill ". They could begin as a formal indictment drawn up by the crown lawyers on which the grand jury was expected to pronounce a verdict, or as presentments initiated by the jury itself and later engrossed in Latin. The documents which follow contain both these types, the former normally commencing with the words "it is to be inquired for the king" (inquiratur pro domino rege), the latter with "the jurors present "(juratores presentant). There is, however, no practical difference between the two types, and the distinction may be ignored for most purposes.²
   Indictments were normally taken before a commission of 

the peace, or of oyer and terminer or a similar body, and they were eventually sent, often with the subsidiary documents of process, to the King’s Bench, where those dating from the reign of Edward III to that of Charles II now form the class of Ancient Indictments.³ They are grouped in files numbered consecutively from 1 to 932 : each of the first 184 contains proceedings relating to a single county or group of counties, while the
   ¹ They were used extensively to reconstruct the history of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 by W. E. Flaherty, "The Great Rebellion of 1381 ", in Arch. Cant., iii, pp. 65-96; also by A. Réville, Le soulèvement des travailleurs d’Angleterre en 1381 (Paris, 1898), and by others. C. T. Flower published a selection dealing with public works in the Selden Society publications, Vol. xxxii, and they have been used more often recently, notably by K. B. McFarlane in John Wycliffe and the beginnings of English Non-conformity (1952).
   ² It is interesting to note, however, that the documents in File 46 below, which were only theoretically the responsibility of the Crown, are all of the second type, whereas those in the other two files, especially those dealing with treason, are of the first type.
   ³ The series is and probably always was very incomplete, for many commissions neglected to send in their indictments; and, as Miss Putnam pointed out, exactly analogous documents returned by the justices of assize and others appear in the class "Assize Rolls" in the Public Record Office (English Historical Review, xxix, 1914, pp. 479-505).