Month: June 2024

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.