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.
Categories used most frequently by the blogger:
Now Online: Metadata for 2,847 petitions and nearly 10,000 petitioners, 1573-1799
30 August 2022
After publishing the full transcriptions of about 2,500 petitions and supplications on British History Online, we got a bit distracted with various other things. But we are now pleased...
Petitioners and supporters: A closer look at the people behind petitions
19 April 2022
This new post from Sharon Howard (@sharon_howard) is cross-posted on her own Exploring the Power of Petitioning site. Quarter Sessions petitioners I’m using data from TPOP’s transcribed...
New work on petitioning by early career researchers
2 August 2021
Over the first half of this year, the Many-Headed Monster – an early modern history blog – published twenty-five short pieces by early career scholars. These addressed topics that...
Petition topics: What were petitions about?
26 July 2021
This new post from Sharon Howard (@sharon_howard) is cross-posted on her own Exploring the Power of Petitioning site. Quarter Sessions petitions topics and themes The Power of Petitioning...