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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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...
Petitions in Early Modern England: A Very Short Introduction
10 June 2019
Brodie Waddell Until relatively recently, the word ‘petition’ had a much wider meaning than it does today. In the twenty-first century, a petition is a request or demand...
Uncovering the Lives of Seventeenth-Century Londoners: U3A Shared Learning Project
3 June 2019
The London Region of U3As and Birkbeck’s ‘The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England’ will be collaborating in a Shared Learning Project from September...