Lords Appellant

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The Lords Appellant were a group of nobles in the reign of King Richard II, who, in 1388, sought to impeach five of the King's favourites in order to restrain what was seen as tyrannical and capricious rule. The word appellant — still used in a legal context in modern English — simply means '[one who is] appealing'. It is the older (Norman) French form of the present participle of the verb appeler, the equivalent of the English 'to appeal'. The group was called the "Lords Appellant" because its members invoked a legal procedure called an "appeal" to begin prosecution: the favourites were charged under an "appeal of treason", a device borrowed from English civil law, which led to some procedural complications.