Suggested preparatory reading:

John Guy, ‘Wolsey, the Council, and the Council courts’, English Historical Review 91 (1976), 481- 505

Richard Hoyle, ‘Petitioning as popular politics in early sixteenth-century England’, Historical Research 75 (2002), 365-89; Laura Flannigan, ‘Litigants in the English “Court of Poor Men’s Causes”, or Court of Requests, 1515-1525’, Law and History Review 38 (2020), 303-37