One act allowed the possibility of bail for suspected felons - that was new - and protected their property from seizure.
Eh. I certainly don't subscribe to the "Richard III was an evil dictator" school but this idea that he somehow invented the concept of bail - or even introduced it - (as the oh-so-reliable Wikipedia says) is a huge misconception. Bail had been a part of the English justice system as early as Edward III reign because, in short, it saved both courts and defendants alike a lot of trouble. Now, what Richard III did do was concede to the insistence of the Commons to extend Edward III's statute to include the Justices of the Peace as an authority to grant bail (previously, local courts were the ones with this authority). It's hardly a bad thing, but Richard III didn't exactly invent this 'groundbreaking new concept'. Like all people in positions of power who want to maintain power and legitimise their rule, what Richard did was to make a concession to the Commons for the sake of politics.
As for him "preventing the seizure of property", I'm pretty sure the elderly dowager Countess of Oxford would disagree. Here was an old widow, retired to a convent and left essentially defenseless upon the deaths of her husband and eldest son and the attainder of the second (John de Vere of Bosworth fame), who was forced out of the convent by Richard's retainers and dragged from place to place until she was coerced into selling her inherited lands to Richard at a much lower price than their worth. Seeing as this episode doesn't do anything for Richard's saintly image, I'd wager you probably won't see
this in any of your Paul Murray Kendall books.
Look, I'm all for revealing the truth about Richard ("truth" being the key word here), but he was hardly the romantic, chivalric figure of modern creation. This was not a man who lived and breathed
"liberté, egalité, fraternité" or
"All Power to the Proletariat"; this was a medieval man living in the medieval times. So, if you want to excuse in such a way as to still maintain academic integrity, the best thing to do would be just to judge him on the same level as his contemporaries. None of this anachronistic rubbish.
"To you, Baldrick, the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people, wasn't it?"
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