During the reign of Charles I, the king and his councillors received hundreds of petitions every year. Then, after civil war broke out in 1642, the new Parliamentary regime in London began receiving petitions as well. As part of ‘The Power of Petitioning’ project, we have transcribed and published almost 400 of these manuscripts from across the seventeenth century on British History Online.
We also completed a six-month Shared Learning Project with a large group of amateur researchers from the London Region of the University of the Third Age. Each of these researchers wrote one or more reports about the petitioners and their requests or complaints.
These short pieces of research are now online and we are very pleased to share them with you …
‘Investigating the Lives of Seventeenth-Century Petitioners’: The main site for the U3A project, including information about the research methods and important caveats about accuracy and interpretation. Here you will find links to each of the sets of reports as they are published, including the previous set from 1600 to 1625.
‘Petitioners in the reign of Charles I and the Civil Wars, 1625-1649’: The set of 36 reports by the U3A participants, covering the second quarter of the seventeenth century. Each report also includes a professional transcription of the original petition and links to further sources of information.
