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:
Letting the people speak: 2,526 early modern petitions on British History Online
16 November 2020
[This post by Philip Carter, Director of Digital and Publishing at the Institute of Historical Research, was original published on the IHR’s ‘On History’ blog on 11...
‘Infamus calumniations’, or, a petition goes awry at Rothwell Church, 1603
2 November 2020
[This post from Dr Andy Burn (@aj_burn) was previously posted on the Durham History Blog. It examines a dispute about a petition to King James I from a group of tenants against their...
Edmund Felton’s petitions for justice, 1621-53
15 September 2020
This post by Jason Peacey has also been posted on the UK Parliament ‘Petition of the Month’ blog and draws on petitions transcribed in our newly published volume of petitions...
27 August 2020
Alex Wakelam [This blogpost examines the petitions submitted by prisoners for debt in early modern England, especially their complaints against prison officials. It uses the case from...