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We recently published The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain, an open access collection of essays available to read for free from UCL Press. One of the contributors is Brodie Waddell, Reader in Early Modern History at Birkbeck, University of London. We asked him about his chapter on ‘Shaping the state from below: the rise of local petitioning in early modern England’ and its place in his wider research.

 

How did you get interested in early modern petitioning?

It feels sometimes like I have always been interested in the history of petitioning. The idea of petitioning as a key tool for redress was a major theme in my PhD research which I completed about fifteen years ago, and I used a small sample of petitions to Yorkshire magistrates in one of the chapters of my first book. However, it was when I began talking to colleagues about it after starting at Birkbeck about ten years ago that petitioning became a real obsession. What I quickly learned is petitioning turned up everywhere in the early modern period, whether you were studying high politics and religious policy or neighbourhood relations and poor relief. That convinced me that some sort of collaborative project would be worthwhile, and this book – along with various other publications – has been the result.

 

What is the most interesting petition or petitioner that you came across while researching this chapter?

That prize has to go to Margery Glover, who submitted a petition for a poor relief order to the Worcestershire magistrates in 1605. There is nothing especially exceptional about her situation or her petition, but I think it wonderfully encapsulates the way local petitioning worked at the time. In the text, she appealed to very traditional ideas of paternalist mercy and protection, but also forcefully denounced the local parish officials for failing to fulfil their legal responsibilities to provide her with poor relief funded by local taxation. Her appeal was, according to the petition, ‘for their releefe and for the advauncment of justice’, that is to say it was as much about enforcing legal entitlements as about charitable pity. This widow’s complaint was successful and she was awarded four pence weekly, which is not only convenient in reinforcing my argument but also nice to discover when so much history of the early modern poor is profoundly grim.

What do you hope readers will take away from reading your chapter?

The main argument is very simple: local petitions were part of what might be called ‘state building from below’. They allowed many people without an official role in governance to put pressure on parish and county officeholders about issues that mattered to them, shaping the implementation of policies governing housing (cottage licences), sociability (alehouse licences), welfare (poor relief), taxation (parish rates), litigation (pardons), and much else. This was not entirely new, but there was a vast expansion in the practice of local petitioning in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England, which suggests that we need to account for it in our narratives of state formation.

 

How does your work on this chapter fit into your current and future research?

In one sense, this collected volume was the culmination of several years of collaborative work on petitioning, and thus an ending of sorts. However, I’m afraid this isn’t the last you’ll hear from me about early modern petitioning. I am currently writing a monograph on the subject – almost fifty percent very roughly drafted! – and I have a recent article which looks more at the ‘political’ side of local petitioning.

I am also part of another collaborative project which, as I have discovered, has some overlaps with my work on petitioning. I’m currently working on Written Worlds: Non-Elite Writers in Seventeenth-Century England, and perhaps unsurprisingly, some petitioners were also involved in writing other sorts of texts and, conversely, some non-elite authors were involved in petitioning. So I’m now learning more about how petitioning fit into the wider culture of writing among people without an elite education or wealthy background.

 

We recently published The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain, an open access collection of essays available to read for free from UCL Press. One of the contributors is Elly Robson, Lecturer in Early Modern History at Birkbeck, University of London. We asked her about her chapter on ‘The edges of governance: contesting practices and principles of justice in seventeenth-century fen petitions’ and its place in her wider research.

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How did you get interested in early modern petitioning?

Petitions are difficult to avoid when researching early modern England! They are one of the most important sources we have for exploring interactions between a huge spectrum of society – ranging from poor widows to wealthy officials – and overlapping political structures, operating from hyper-local institutions to Parliament to individual patrons. My wider research examines the contested politics of environmental change in seventeenth-century England, arising from one of the first projects of large-scale environmental engineering: ‘improving’ the English fens. The overwhelming number of petitions produced by long-running and entangled conflicts about wetland improvement provide unique insights into how this environmental politics functioned in practice.

What fascinated me most about these petitions was that they were written by almost every stakeholder in the process – from Dutch entrepreneurs who enjoyed royal favour to large crowds of rioting commoners. My chapter asks what insights might arise when we look at the complexities and contradictions of petitions as they emerged from local contexts, rather than tracing broader patterns of petitioning from the perspective of central governors or a single archive. In the tumultuous political landscape of the mid-seventeenth century, fen petitioners moved nimbly between unstable national and regional institutions and energetically exploited newly-emerging languages of authority.

What is the most interesting petition or petitioner that you came across while researching this chapter?

One of the most interesting petitions I discuss in my chapter was written in November 1633. Communities strung along the River Eau in Nottinghamshire complained directly to the king about new patterns of flooding that had emerged since drainage five years earlier. Their commons had previously been ‘without annoyance of waters except in times of floods’, but were now ‘covered with the water’ of the Eau even in the summertime. This petition was not exceptional. Many similar petitions were written by other flooded communities in the aftermath of drainage in Hatfield Level, with some villages ‘drowned’ thirty times in five years.

This petition is interesting for three reasons. Firstly, it illuminates the negotiation of environmental risk. The petitioners were unequivocal that these catastrophes were anthropogenic in origin, not natural or divine. Their petition reflected fluency in methods of water management; local communities were active and long-standing participants in the constant work of decision making and material maintenance that waterways and wetlands demanded. Rather than eliminating flood risk, the petitioners argued, drainers had redistributed it by blocking and diverting one of the river’s branches, protecting their newly-drained lands at the expense of drowning others. They told a story of anthropogenic degradation that countered promises of improvement.

Secondly, this petition highlights how water could transcend the administrative lines that defined communities in early modern England. The petition travelled along the River Eau, gathering the signatures of up to a dozen men from each of the eight flooded townships. With fifty-two signatories in total, it is a rare example of mass petitioning in the locality – preceding by a decade more famous mass petitions orchestrated by new political groups like the Levellers during the civil wars. Floodwaters demanded collective action and generated political association in wetlands.

Finally, this petition shows how something as material and mundane as water was imbricated in structures of power. Flood petitions arose from a crisis of governance: who was empowered to make decisions about the competing interests that flowed through waterways and how? The Eau petitioners appealed to the crown, perhaps feigning ignorance of Charles I’s financial interest and political support for the improvement project. Central governors proved surprisingly receptive to flood complaints, but they were ill-equipped to resolve complex issues of flood risk and water responsibilities hundreds of miles away and drainers repeatedly evaded their orders to implement correctives. Flooding was therefore shaped by access to justice and petitioners often sought to redress failures of governance.

What do you hope readers will take away from reading your chapter?

Revisionist studies of the English civil wars produced a series of binary divisions, which continue to leak into the way that petitions are often categorised – between ‘bread-and-butter’ issues and constitutional concerns, communal grievances and mass politics involving print and the ‘public’. These divisions are muddied by fen petitioning, which arose from political encounters between local, national, and even transnational interests during wetland improvement. Petitioners not only sought to reshape floodwaters and land rights in the fens; they could also mobilise highly-politicised languages of ‘commonwealth’, ‘delinquency’, and ‘tyranny’ to weave local grievances into the fabric of national conflict. Within the supplicatory constraints of petitioning as a genre, we can find petitioners stretching and reforging plural political languages as they navigated the distributions of power that underwrote redistributions of land and water.

More recent scholarship has located petitioning as a mechanism of ‘state building from below’, whereby ordinary people made demands on the state and, in doing so, expanded its administrative capacity and political authority. My hope is that readers will take from my chapter a greater sense of the jurisdictional pluralism, fractures, and limits of governance in early modern England. Improvement projects led to institutional dislocations by transferring management of large tracts of wetland commons and waterways from local communities to cohorts of drainage investors. When problems emerged, there was a lack of administrative infrastructure to mediate conflict and petitions served as one strategy to address this gap – alongside riots, litigation, patronage, and informal influence.

How does your work on this chapter fit into your current and future research?

Writing this chapter has opened up questions for me about what other types of ‘environmental’ petitioning we might find in early modern England; whether the ‘nuisance’ of coalsmoke in London or food scarcities in rural England. What kind of action did individuals and communities demand when faced with these problems, and from which people and institutions? How did they understand the causes of environmental problems and what political languages did they use – for instance, collective rights or economic damage and compensation – to make their case?

I’m also interested in where petitioning did not take place. My new project explores large-scale projects of anthropogenic environmental change that unfolded across the seventeenth-century British Atlantic, aiming to cultivate English fens, Irish plantations, and American colonies. How far did Gaelic and Indigenous communities, who faced dispossession or new risks at the hands of colonists, have access to the methods of political negotiation used so vigorously by fen petitioners? Or did they mobilise alternative tools that relied on different models and mechanisms of political authority and negotiation? Broadly speaking, I’m interested in what looking at petitioning from Atlantic perspectives might tell us about environmental justice and injustice in the past and about the interrelated development of states and empires.

 

We recently published The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain, an open access collection of essays available to read for free from UCL Press. One of the contributors is Imogen Peck, Assistant Professor in British History at the University of Birmingham. We asked her about her chapter on ‘‘For the dead Fathers sake’? Orphans, petitions and the British Civil Wars, 1647-1679’ and its place in her wider research.

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How did you get interested in early modern petitioning?

My first encounter with early modern petitions was during my PhD research. I was working on a thesis on the memory of the British Civil Wars and doing a lot of ferreting about in quarter sessions records. Initially, I was looking for depositions and informations that concerned seditious speech and other evidence of people evoking the memory of the Civil Wars in criminal proceedings. While much of that material went on to form a chapter of my thesis (and eventually my book, Recollection in the Republics), time spent in the quarter sessions records also yielded many hundreds of petitions, including petitions by war widows, war orphans, and maimed soldiers.

As a rare insight into the voices and experiences of non-elite women, I was particularly interested in the petitions of war widows: how did they interpret and narrate the death of a spouse? How did they receive this information and how trusty-worthy was it? How did they position themselves as a worthy recipients of relief? And, perhaps most intriguing, what happened to those women who husbands later returned, Martin Guerre-style, very much alive? This wasn’t an entirely uncommon occurrence, I discovered! The first proper article I wrote, in Northern History, explored those themes and I’ve been writing things about petitions – by war widows, by maimed soldiers, by civilians, and now by war orphans – on and off ever since!

What is the most interesting petition or petitioner that you came across while researching this chapter?

That award must go to the Townend orphans: a rare example of a petition framed as the direct request of its child subjects that slips from the third to the first person. Such ‘unstable pronouns’, to use Lloyd Bowen’s excellent phrase, have long been deployed as evidence that petitions were not purely constructed by scribes but were documents that reflected the words and narrative of their subject. This, however, was the first time I’d seen such a slip in a petition presented by children. It really got me thinking about whether some older children might, perhaps, have had as much of a hand in crafting their petitions as adults and about the potential that kind of insight might have for histories of both childhood and petitioning.

What do you hope readers will take away from reading your chapter?

First, the ways in which existing petitioning strategies and conventions intersected with, and were reshaped by, the experience of civil conflict and the changing relationship that the wars engendered between the state and its citizens. Second, the enduring, intergenerational impact of the wars on the lives of soldiers’ families and the crucial role that petitioning played in forging and reinforcing partisan identities, entrenching wartime divisions across generations. Third, that even children might have some grasp of the petitioning process and that taking children seriously as potential agents in the petitioning process might open new avenues for research in the history of petitioning and childhood more broadly.

How does your work on this chapter fit into your current and future research?

This chapter was, in some ways, a Covid project for me: it involved a lot of material I had amassed and which was sitting on my hard drive, but which never made it into the book! However, it also speaks to the interests of my current research project, on family archives in the long eighteenth century, which explores issues of intergenerational memory and has illuminated a lot of material that suggests the ways Civil War identities were (re)produced within families across generations. I’m working on an article specifically on family memory and the Civil Wars, and it’s also sparked my interest in the experiences of children during and after the conflicts: so perhaps that is another direction for me to pursue in the future…

We recently published The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain, an open access collection of essays available to read for free from UCL Press. One of the contributors is Karin Bowie, Professor of Early Modern Social History at the University of Glasgow. We asked her about her chapter on ‘Gathering hands: political petitioning and participative subscription in post-Reformation Scotland’ and its place in her wider research.

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How did you get interested in early modern petitioning?

For my PhD, I researched popular politics and the making of the 1707 Union in Scotland. I found a cache of petitions sent to the Scottish parliament in 1706 against the treaty of union. Amazingly, only one historian had looked at these closely, and only in an article-length study. Across the literature, they either were mentioned as evidence of national opposition to union or dismissed as the product of aristocratic machinations. I was fascinated to find over 20,000 signatures on dozens of petitions, ranging from urban magistrates and landowners to illiterate craftsmen and farm tenants whose names were recorded by church elders and notaries. Further research showed that the petitions were part of a strikingly modern attempt to influence the Scottish parliament with mass expressions of public opinion. These petitions launched 20 years of research on petitioning in early modern Scotland.

What is the most interesting petition or petitioner that you came across while researching this chapter?

In the Scottish national archives, I found a letter written in 1637 by a noblewoman, Margaret Douglas, Lady Lorne, encouraging her husband’s kinsman to sign a petition against a controversial prayer book. Her heartfelt letter urged Sir Colin Campbell of Glenorchy to prove his Christian commitment, regardless of the dangers. This letter is significant for so many reasons: in relation to the history of petitioning, it shows female involvement in an early large-scale petitioning campaign; it reveals real concern for the dangers of petitioning and, conversely, the importance of religious beliefs in encouraging subscription. For Scottish history, it exposes hitherto unknown copycat petitioning activity in 1637 and reveals the involvement of Lady Lorne in this campaign before her husband Archibald Campbell, Lord Lorne (later the earl and marquis of Argyll) committed himself to the Covenanting cause. This single letter addresses so many dimensions of history by giving us a rare glimpse of female political activism.

What do you hope readers will take away from reading your chapter?

In talking to friends and colleagues about petitioning, I find that most of us have never thought about when or why petitions were first signed in large numbers. We don’t have a collective understanding of the origins of modern petitioning.

My chapter shows that signing a petition was not an obvious thing to do. Before the establishment of a modern right to petition, it could be dangerous to sign your name on a petition–the king could execute you for sedition. The idea of gathering the signatures of ordinary people would have been counter-intuitive: their opinions held little weight and many did not know how to write, so why would you bother? It took a special combination of circumstances to generate large-scale petitioning in Scotland. These included a hope that large numbers would provide safety, a desire to express religious convictions, a need to draw together a movement and a wish to hide local differences of opinion among elites by collecting lots of signatures from ordinary people. The surviving sources in Scotland provide a detailed case study that I hope will provide insights to researchers in other national contexts.

How does your work on this chapter fit into your current and future research?

This paper developed from a previous article that showed how a constitutional right to petition the monarch was created for Scotland through a revolution against James VII and II in 1688-89. It underlines the point that petitioning prior to 1689 operated under a customary liberty, not a right. Scottish monarchs tried to block large-scale petitioning when their opponents started to experiment with these methods in the late sixteenth century. This paper provides more detail on these contestations and considers why signatures were gathered despite the dangers.

Having explored Scottish petitioning up to the 1707 Union, my future research will explore petitioning after the Union. I’d like to understand how these early Scottish practices combined with English approaches in the new context of the Westminster parliament to produce British campaigns.

We recently published The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain, an open access collection of essays available to read for free from UCL Press. One of the editors and contributors is Jason Peacey, Professor of Early Modern British History at University College London. We asked him about his chapter on ‘‘The universal cry of the kingdom’: petitions, privileges and the place of Parliament in early modern England’ and its place in his wider research.

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How did you get interested in early modern petitioning?

My interest in petitions relates to a concern that drives much of my research: the relationship between structures of power and ‘ordinary’ members of the political nation. I am interested, in other words, in the interactions between the state and the citizen (or subject), and in how power dynamics changed across the early modern period. This has involved research into the impact of the print revolution, in terms of how novel forms of media provided access to ideas and information, and facilitated political participation, not least in relation to Parliament, the power and importance of which has been central to historiographical debates for a long time. Petitions, like elections, provide a valuable means of analysing perceptions of, as well as interactions with, Parliament, and a way of assessing how peers and MPs reacted to being more closely observed, and to the ‘clamour’ of petitioners, whether individually or collectively.

Indeed, for a period when the franchise remained somewhat restricted (if not perhaps as restricted as some would assume), petitioning can be said to have been crucial to how contemporaries understood the role of Parliament as a representative institution, in terms of how far it could and should respond to pressure from ‘without doors’, and perhaps even to public opinion. In all sorts of ways, people in the early modern period grappled with thorny political issues, and petitions provide a wonderful tool for any historian who is interested in analysing the messy struggles to establish appropriate practices and protocols regarding the conduct of public life.

What is the most interesting petition or petitioner that you came across while researching this chapter?

My chapter is based upon a wealth of apparently obscure petitioners, who collectively reveal what seems to me to be an important story. Necessarily, few of these characters proved easy to contextualise, in terms of how they ended up as petitioners, although it is tempting to think that each and every one of them had an amazing story which cries out to be recovered. One of them, however, was already known to me from my previous research. Benjamin Crokey was a fairly obscure Bristol merchant, whose life and tortuous legal battles can be reconstructed from a remarkable – if tangled – body of surviving documentation.

He was one of the protagonists in a long-running dispute (a kind of early modern Jarndyce vs Jarndyce) over a small estate in rural Gloucestershire, which appears to be somewhat mysterious, but which can be shown to have been driven by serious issues, not just in terms of the conduct of litigation, but also in terms of political and religious conflict. Crokey is a bit-part player in my chapter, but his back-story helps to make sense of the wider landscape that is explored, in terms of the grievances that drove people to petition Parliament, their hopes and expectations, and the ways in which they were treated. Ultimately, he makes it possible to understand the willingness of MPs and peers to help humble supplicants, even if this meant acting in ways that proved to be controversial.

What do you hope readers will take away from reading your chapter?

My hope is that readers will gain a new perspective on the significance of Parliament within the early modern political landscape, and indeed the political imaginary. Too often, it seems to me, the place and power of Parliament, as well as its fluctuating fortunes, have been analysed in relation to constitutional conflict, and in terms of contestation with the crown. Historians thus debate the ‘rise’ of Parliament in ways which assess the severity of tensions between different ‘estates’, from the accession of James I (and earlier) to the Glorious Revolution, by way of the civil war and revolution. Central to this story and these debates are issues relating to the powers claimed and exercised by Parliament, including those liberties and privileges that lie at the heart of my chapter.

My aim is to recontextualise one such privilege – the ability of peers and MPs to ‘protect’ their servants from arrest – and my hope is that readers will be persuaded about the need to think not just about members’ willingness to flex their institutional muscles in order to challenge successive monarchs, but also about their responsiveness to petitioners, and indeed about the extent to which petitioning inspired policy changes and institutional reform. Ultimately, my hope is that the chapter will provoke further research on how petitioners were treated, on how politicians thought about their responsibilities towards supplicants, and on the extent to which the development of Parliament as an institution reflected its growing importance as a focal point for the public, and for anyone with a grievance that needed to be addressed.

How does your work on this chapter fit into your current and future research?

One of the most fascinating things to emerge from the research for this chapter has been the potential for studying the responses that petitions elicited. This is a neglected area of research, but scrappy annotations as well as some surviving registers provide vital evidence about whether individual petitions were accepted or rejected, about the speed with which they were handled, and about the care with which they were sometimes considered. In future, I plan to do more work on such evidence, not least in order to complement a chapter which focuses on the responsiveness of Parliament with another essay which assesses when and why petitioners were turned away. Both topics are arguably vital for understanding how Parliament was viewed, from within and from without, and how perceptions changed over time. Indeed, setting such evidence about reactions to parliamentary petitions alongside similar registers that record royal responses to supplications will make it possible to assess the relative value to contemporaries of Crown and Parliament.

Ultimately, my aim is to feed further research on petitions and petitioners into a much broader study of early modern citizenship, defined as activities that brought ordinary people into direct contact with national institutions, and involved some kind of political participation. As a topic, citizenship is most often studied in relation to ‘rights’, which might lead to the conclusion that it is an inappropriate concept for the early modern period, but my aim is to assert its value by shifting attention to ‘responsibilities’ as well as everyday opportunities for exerting some kind of political agency.

We recently published The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain, an open access collection of essays available to read for free from UCL Press. One of the contributors is Hannah Worthen, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Hull. We asked her about her chapter on ‘The Process and Practice of Petitioning in Early Modern England’ and its place in her wider research.

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How did you get interested in early modern petitioning?

My PhD project, a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with the University of Leicester and The National Archives (2013-2017), had petitions at its heart. The thesis was titled ‘The experience of war widows in mid seventeenth-century England’ and it used the petitions of Royalist and Parliamentarian war widows to local and national jurisdictions in order to reconstruct both their economic experiences of the wars (through, the pensions they were awarded and also in some cases, the lands they had confiscated) and the ways in which they narrated poverty and loyalty in their petitions.

In doing this research I fell in love with petitions. In particular, because the narratives contained within them have the power to connect us with the lives of ‘ordinary’ people in the past, in particular women, in ways that can often feel difficult with the administrative and governance records of the early modern period. They are also usually relatively short, in English, and relatively easy to find via catalogue searches as an added bonus! And so after finishing my PhD I continued to be fascinated by them as a source and particularly, as my chapter explores, the process behind their creation and the practice of actually petitioning in early modern England.

What is the most interesting petition or petitioner that you came across while researching this chapter?

The petition I have chosen doesn’t directly feature in my chapter, but it was one of the ones which inspired this research on the process and practice of petitioning.

The petition was submitted by the Yorkshire widow, Ann Saville, who had her lands confiscated by the Yorkshire Sequestration Committee during the Civil Wars ‘supposeinge her to be a papist w[hi]ch she utterly denyes’.[1] She submitted several petitions to the Committee in London and all of them contain useful insights into the experience of an early modern woman trying to manage lands at a time of great unrest. As, for example, her petitions narrate issues with her tenants exacerbated by ‘many great losses by the severall Armyes & distrac[i]ons in those p[ar]tes’.[2]

What really drew me to this particular petition, however, cannot be gleaned just from a transcription of the words within it. Ann signed all of her petitions, and this is clear from the distinctive form of the letter ‘A’ she uses at the start of her name. Intriguingly, one of her petitions shows that she started writing this letter mid-way through the petition, before the final section, which is not where a petition would usually be signed. Then (perhaps realising her mistake or being corrected by the scribe) the letter stops and is re-started in the proper position at the end of the petition following the familiar sign off ‘And as in duetie bound shall pray &c’. This simple mistake, which endures on the page of the petition held at The National Archives, is a stark reminder of the petitioner behind the petition. Imagining the actual person who collaborated in the creation of this physical document, in the sincere hopes that it would help her to protect her lands and her children, was for me a small, but profound, glimpse into the past.

[1] The National Archives (TNA), SP 23/155 p. 587.

[2] TNA, SP 23/115 p. 581.

What do you hope readers will take away from reading your chapter?

My chapter was written in response to what I saw as a gap in current petitions-based research: to look in more detail at the context of the creation of these sources in order to ensure that the stories and lives contained within them form a robust part of contemporary historical research. This research is now emerging both within this book and in other places and a lively field of research is emerging. So, I hope readers will take from my chapter some of the answers to the question ‘who wrote the petitions anyway?!’ and subsequently to challenge the assumption that if it were not the petitioner, how do we know their role in its creation? Also, to take my chapter as an imperative to not just read the narratives contained within petitions (even though this is certainly valuable research) but also to consider the embodied and spatial experience of petitioning. In doing so, as I argue, we can find the petitioner at the heart of the petition.

How does your work on this chapter fit into your current and future research?

I plan to continue my work into the process of petitioning, particularly its spatial and environmental elements. As a result of my historical research on Hull’s flood histories for the Risky Cities project at the University of Hull I have become particularly interested in the role of collective petitioning in response to historical flood events and other environmental hazards.

I also continue to be drawn to the powerful narratives contained within early modern petitions and their enormous ability to connect us with the past. This is something which I drew on in some community engagement work on behalf of the Risky Cities project, and I am interested in exploring more the potential power of historic petitions in knowledge exchange work with communities today.

 

We recently published The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain, an open access collection of essays available to read for free from UCL Press. One of the contributors is Lloyd Bowen, Reader in Early Modern and Welsh History at Cardiff University. We asked him about his chapter on ‘Genre, authorship and authenticity in the petitions of Civil War veterans and widows from north Wales and the Marches’ and its place in his wider research.

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How did you get interested in early modern petitioning?

I became interested in early modern petitioning after sifting through the records of local quarter sessions and assize courts from the seventeenth century looking for forms of political engagement – such as prosecutions for seditious speech. I became used to wading through large number of petitions and wondered about what they could tell us about the lives and contexts of those in whose names they were presented. I later became involved with a project that was considering petitions from the veterans and widows of the British Civil Wars to reveal something of contemporaries’ experiences and understandings of those conflicts.

What is the most interesting petition or petitioner that you came across while researching this chapter?

Perhaps the most interesting petition I discuss is that of the parliamentarian trooper John Edwards of Ruthin in north Wales. His petition from 1650 asks for assistance due to his being disabled at the siege of Denbigh, but he requests that the justices adjudicating on his case do not consider his ‘weak & ymbecyle parts’ as they currently appeared before them, but that they rather think of him as the vigorous parliamentarian he once was ‘according to which his desires have exprest & his hands acted’. I found his awareness of the gap between his present maimed body and his previously active soldierly one to be both moving and informative.

What do you hope readers will take away from reading your chapter?

I hope that readers of my chapter will see that ‘authoring’ a petition was often quite a complicated business but that, nevertheless, when used carefully, we can still recover important elements from our subjects’ histories by using these petitions.

How does your work on this chapter fit into your current and future research?

This chapter fits into current research I am undertaking on petitions from the civil wars – I am involved in editing those from Wales and the Marches which will appear in a physical volume in the next few years. I have also become interested in a husband and wife team of inveterate petitioners from the Elizabethan and Jacobean period and am pursuing their fascinating life stories partly thought their voluminous archive of petitions.

 

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 Quarter Session (QS) collections (Cheshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Westminster and Worcestershire), as well as additional data I’ve collected for a larger sample of untranscribed Cheshire files, and slightly less detailed data for Hertfordshire, for a total of 2141 petitions.

What is a petitioner? These petitions have two types of participant. Most QS petitions have one or more named petitioners at the head of the petition (often, “The humble petition of X”), including in some cases people on whose behalf the petition was made. Meanwhile, subscribers are those who signed their names in support of the petition, either in the space below the main text or on an attached document. In some petition archives, collective petitions, which have only subscribers (and might have thousands of them) are the most familiar type of petition; this is rather less common in QS records, and it’s quite common for QS collective petitions not to have any named subscribers either. [Other names which may appear on petitions are not considered here: signatures of clerks, lawyers, judges or other officials; and mentions of individuals, especially the subjects of petitioners’ complaints, in the body of a petition.]

Using these definitions, I have some information about individuals for 2229 named petitioners and 3531 subscribers (for Herts, I only have subscriber counts). Potentially meaningful information which is available for at least some petitioners and subscribers:

• nearly all have gender information, on the basis of first names (>99% of petitioners and ~95% of subscribers)
• for transcribed petitions, signature types (name, initials, marks) of signed names
• occupation/social status and locations for some names (but both of these would need more work to make them usable than is possible here)

It should be noted that the Derbyshire collection is only a partial set of surviving petitions in the Derbyshire QS records which are, moreover, a bit different from the other counties’ archives (in that they did not survive in the usual sessional organisation). Many petitions were excluded because they couldn’t be dated and there were very uneven clusters among those that could). I’ve kept them in the analysis for now, but they’re often very anomalous and I’m increasingly doubtful that anything can be read into the differences.

Making petitioners count

By far most petitions were initiated by a single person (1430 petitions, about 67%). For the other 33%, the most noticeable feature is that petitions by groups of named petitioners are less common than those from collectives (with or without named subscribers): there were 473 collective petitions (including 88 on behalf of a named person(s)), compared to 238 petitions with multiple named petitioners (including 32 on behalf of someone).

Moreover, the vast majority of named group petitions are by very small groups. 168 have just two petitioners, only 23 have more than five and just three petitions have more than ten. It seems likely to me that group petitions are often the work of close relatives or working colleagues. At least 70 group petitions include people who are married couples, stated to be relatives (especially siblings) or share surnames. There are further group petitions from constables, other local officials or business partners, directly concerned with shared responsibilities or work.

This shows subscribers only, for petitions that have them, and excluding a tiny handful of petitioners with more than 50 subscribers. Once again, 1 is the most frequent number of subscribers, but there is a much longer tail. Subscribers average 9.75 per petition, cf. 1.27 petitioners. However, more than a third of collective petitions had no signatures at all (168); obtaining signatures was clearly not essential to support collective petitioning

counties

The proportions of solo / collective / group petitions can vary geographically.

The percentage of group petitions appears to be relatively consistent across the counties (except for Derbyshire); the main variation here is between single and collective, hinting at regional variations in petitioning cultures.

topics

Because of the larger number of topics, it’s more effective to focus on the proportion of petitions by solo petitioners rather than the full breakdown. (This time, the size of squares is used to indicate the number of petitions in the group.)

Petitions complaining about local rates and taxes clearly tend to be group/collective affairs, or at least presented as such (communities organising together to complain about unfair rate assessments compared to other towns or villages more often than individual complaints of unfairness compared to neighbours). Dissenters’ petitions, though a small category, are specifically applications to license places of worship and brought by local communities rather than single individuals. On the other hand, more predominantly solo efforts include petitions about military relief, poor relief and child support.

change over time

There may be a long-term shift towards solo petitioning, though it’s far from conclusive. For much of the 17th century the percentage of solo petitioners is relatively consistent; fluctuations become more noticeable after petition numbers fall from the late 17th century onwards. However, the overall 18th-century solo average (73%) is higher than that for the 17th century (66%), and the late-16th-century solo average is even lower at 52%.

Gender

The majority of petitioners are men; only about 23% of named petitioners are female.

But the gender disparity is much greater for subscribers, of whom only about 2% are women.

Women are also more likely than men to be solo petitioners.

Moreover, there are no all-female petitioner groups larger than two people (women also tend to be very much in the minority in larger mixed groups). So it’s clear that men were far more involved with petitioning as an organised collective or group activity. The absence of women as subscribers may imply that supporters were most often recruited on a household basis, with men signing as heads of households.

Comparing gender across counties: Herts and Staffs are noticeably lower female % (about 15%) than the other four counties (25-30%).

It’s not very surprising that female participation also varies with petition topic (and this at least to some extent correlates with topics that were more or less likely to be solo vs group/collective); in particular very few women are involved in petitions about rates, while approaching half of petitioners for poor relief.

Signing petitions

There was no requirement to sign a petition and the majority of petitioners did not sign their petitions at all. Therefore, this is not an attempt to analyse signatures for evidence of literacy. But why did some petitioners sign their names if the majority didn’t bother? What, if anything, is the social/cultural/legal significance of a signature in a petition? It might not be the same as in witness examinations or other legal documents (for which signatures usually were required). So I’m curious as to whether there are any patterns of interest.

I don’t have any signatures data for Herts and I only have partial data for the untranscribed Cheshire petitions, so they’re excluded from this section. Overall, there’s some kind of signature data for 24% of petitioners in the transcribed collections.

In transcriptions, signatures were also marked up for “type” of signature:

• mark
• initial(s)
• autograph signature
• name written in the same hand as the main petition text

The last of these can be difficult to interpret. In most cases, it’s not because the petition was written by the petitioner; inspection of the Cheshire petition images indicates that the only instances of this were less typical petitionary letters. In some cases – certainly for subscribers – it looks possible that the petition is a copy rather than the original document. For petitioners it’s hard to be sure whether it’s a copy of an original autograph or a scribal decision to write out the name as a kind of pseudo-signature and so I’ll only include them in breakdowns by signature type.

Initials are very rare (<10, only 1 of which is for a petitioner) and so are counted with marks for this analysis. However, this in itself seems quite noteworthy, as I might expect them to be more common based on my recollection of other types of document in early modern court archives such as witness examinations. (Though I wouldn’t guarantee that my memory is reliable, and I’d need some data to verify this.)

Moreover, as can be seen, even when combined marks and initials are not very common (only 2% of all petitioners signed this way, or 12% of signatures excluding scribal) – considerably less common, I suspect, than in witness examinations even though I might expect petitioners to be of fairly similar social status to witnesses.

The same for subscribers, and here (since there are no “[none]” to worry about) the low percentage of supporters signing by mark/initials is really striking, at about 4% (excluding scribal). This carries some clear implications about the social status of subscribers, and potentially these rates could be compared to data from studies of literacy.

counties

Not for the first time, Derbyshire is anomalous and difficult to interpret because of its small numbers and gaps (and the high % of scribal “signatures” may say more about the county’s clerks and record-keeping practices than about its petitioners). Cheshire doesn’t offer the same excuse and the low % of petitioners signing is very striking. Worcestershire meanwhile has a considerably higher % of marks than the other counties.

Westminster has by some distance the highest % of petitioner signing their names, and (notwithstanding my caveats) that probably really does reflect higher levels of literacy in London. But it’s highly unlikely that literacy was significantly lower in Cheshire than in neighbouring Staffordshire and Worcestershire, so why are the % so much lower?

gender

The lower % of women signing their petitions with autograph signatures might come as no surprise. But this also highlights that petitioners who could not write their names didn’t normally choose to sign with a mark instead.

petition topics

Association between the presence of signatures and specific petition topics is very clear: again, even if this isn’t directly about literacy, there are obvious correlations between higher signing % and topics where you might expect petitioners to be of higher/middling status, and the lowest % of signing are mostly related to poor relief. (There’s no obvious relationship between signing and the size of a topic.)

change over time

Here, however, there is a strong relationship between the popularity of petitioning and the % of petitioners signing their petitions, as well as the obvious change over time. (51 Westminster petitions couldn’t be dated to within a decade. However, all were from c.1620-1640 and none were signed by the petitioners, so they’d make very little difference to this picture.)

Between the 1610s and 1670s and in the 1690s (the rise in the 1680s is intriguing), signing rates never rose above 10% of petitioners. Also, even though numbers are relatively small, the rate seems consistently much higher in the late 16th century, around 25-30%. From 1700 signing rates rise dramatically again; from the 1710s they never fall below 50% and peak in the 90s in mid century.

(It’s also worth remembering that petitioning declined much more sharply in Cheshire after the 1680s than in the other counties.)

Tracking the % of petitions that have subscribers diverges from the chart for petitioners in some interesting ways. The % is consistently low in the first half of the 17th century, suddenly rises in the 1650s, falls again in the early 18th century before gradually increasing over the rest of that century. Could the sudden jump around 1650 suggest the influence of political revolution on collective activity in much more mundane areas of life?