Partners and Funders

This project is only possible thanks to collaboration with our project partners and support from our funders.

 

Partners

Cheshire Archives and Local Studies are home to thousands of seventeenth-century petitions to the county quarter sessions and to the Chester City Assembly. They are contributing to the project by supporting Sharon Howard’s research on these collections and facilitating the work of local volunteers who will be using the petitions as a starting point for further research.

London Metropolitan Archives hold a vast number of relevant documents for this project, including hundreds of petitions as well as other unique material about the petitioners and their communities. They are supporting the project by preparing and photographing a selection of manuscript petitions for transcription, facilitating the training of U3A volunteers to work on archival sources, hosting an outreach event, and integrating new data into their digital catalogue.

Derbyshire Record Office, The National Archives, Staffordshire Record Office, Parliamentary Archives and Worcestershire Archives and Archaeology Service are not formal project partners, but they have kindly supported the project by providing images of petitions and permission to publish the transcriptions.

IHR Digital, a department of the Institute of Historical Research, is supporting the project by preparing and publishing transcriptions of over 2,000 petitions as part of British History Online and by creating our project website. They will also be building a sophisticated search facility to extend the accessibility of the transcriptions and will be experimenting with Natural Language Processing to develop this still further.

The University of the Third Age (U3A) London Region, are collaborating with the project through a Shared Learning Project. A group of their members will contribute their time by using the transcribed petitions as a beginning for their own collaborative investigations of the petitioners and their communities.

The Raphael Samuel History Centre is dedicated to exploring public history and history from below across periods and regions. They will be contributing to the project by working with us to put on a major public-facing event at the end of the project designed to show its value to non-academic historians.

 

Funders

The Arts and Humanities Research Council awarded a Research Grant to Brodie Waddell and Jason Peacey for ‘The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England’ (AH/S001654/1) which runs from January 2019 to December 2020. This provides the primary funding for the project, covering the costs of staff time, transcription, web development and much else.

The Economic History Society awarded a Carnevali Small Research Grant to Brodie Waddell for ‘Seeking Redress in Early Modern England: Petitions to Local Authorities, c.1580-1750’ which funded research trips and archive photography for an initial pilot project in 2014-15. They awarded a further grant jointly to Brodie Waddell and Sharon Howard for ‘Poverty, Debt and Taxes: Petitions to Local Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century England’, which funded additional photography, transcription and online publication in 2019-20.