Project blog
How can people without official political power push the authorities to act? Historically, one of the most common tactics was to create a petition or supplication.
In seventeenth-century England, petitioning was ubiquitous. It was one of the only acceptable ways to address the authorities when seeking redress, mercy or advancement. As a result, it was a crucial mode of communication between the 'rulers' and the 'ruled'. People at all levels of society – from noblemen to paupers – used petitions to make their voices heard.
The project will create a valuable new resource by transcribing and digitising a corpus drawn from seven key collections of petitions held at national and local archives, totalling over 2,000 manuscripts. This corpus, when combined with careful contextualisation, allows us to offer new answers to crucial questions about the major social and political changes that unfolded in this formative period.
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Now Online: Hundreds of Petitions to the Magistrates of Staffordshire and Derbyshire, 1589-1799
4 November 2019
Full transcriptions of 333 local ‘petitions’ from two Midland counties have just been published on British History Online. The first volume includes 239 requests submitted...
Now Online: Hundreds of Petitions to Local Magistrates, c.1570-17
9 September 2019
Our first 572 full transcriptions of petitions from Elizabethan and Stuart England are now freely available to read and search at British History Online. One volume includes 297 requests...
Gathering, transcribing, sorting and thinking: the first six months
16 July 2019
In January, we officially began our project on ‘The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England’. The funding only runs for two years, so it seemed sensible to take...
The Power of Petitioning … in Eighteenth-Century England
24 June 2019
Brodie Waddell and Sharon Howard In eighteenth-century England, ordinary people regularly petitioned county and city magistrates about personal calamities or local problems. These requests...