Petitions in Early Modern Britain: Asking for justice, questioning the law

In the study of English legal history a number of themes receive much attention. Learned literature, rolls in many genres, the role of courts and of particular legal officials, the history of prisons, and not in the least the representation of law and justice in English literature are among these subjects. While searching for collections with digitized printed pamphlets and broadsides a slightly different form, too, attracted my attention, manuscript pamphlets. They led me to projects concerning petitions in Early Modern Britain. By chance I noticed a new volume with essays in open access, edited by Brodie Waddell and Jason Pearcey, The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century Britain (London: UCL Press, 2024; online (PDF, 79 MB)). Waddell leads the research project The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England. Combining the volume and this project in a new post together with some related projects seems a good idea.

Studying petitions

At the portal British History Online you can quickly find the editions of petitions in the seven printed volumes of the series English Petitions. This series show clearly the study of Early Modern petitions is not an entirely new subject. The presence of several current research and editions projects is the reason I would like to look at these petitions.

The volume with scholarly articles edited by Brodie Waddell (Birkbeck, University of London) and Jason Pearcey (University College London) is most helpful in gaining some basic perspectives on the role of petitions in various locations. Waddell and Pearcey provide you with just that in their introduction (pp. 1-32). They stress the variety of persons petitioning and the variety of institutions they addressed. All kind of grievances were expressed, both by individuals and by persons petitioning together. The editors see no linear development or a neat distinction between petitions which typically would be the field of social history on one side, and political history on the other. The title of petitions varied widely, as do the material forms, making it important to study the original documents, not just the texts. Printed petitions only slowly gained acceptance after 1620. The paragraphs on expectations and effects are equally important and interesting. Attention is also given to the way petitions were presented, and medieval petitions, too, are not forgotten.

Although it would be great to here look at all nine articles of The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century Britain, wisdom and good sense lead me to focus on a few articles. The volume does indeed deal with the entire United Kingdom, not just with England. In some articles the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, too, come into view. Hannah Worthen contributed a fundamental chapter, ‘The process and practiceof petitioning in early modern England’ (pp. 61-81), discussing the actual roads a petition could go, the importance of geographical location, and the position of petitions in comparison to other means of (legal) redress. The chapter by editor Jason Pearcey, ‘‘The universal cry of the kingdom’: petitions, privileges and the place of Parliament in early modern England’ (pp. 81-113) looks at the ways protections were granted or revoked by Parliament. Brodie Waddell focuses in his contribution ‘Shaping the state from below: the rise of local petitioning in early modern England’ (pp. 201-227) on 3,800 petitions between roughly 1560 and 1790 directed to sessions of the peace, and the development of local initiatives to influence the state and state formation.

My brief summaries can scarcely do justice to the wealth of detailed information, the various questions and the questioning of earlier research presented in these and the other contributions. They definitely show the importance of including petitions and their role as a vital element of British legal life in the Early Modern period.

At the project website of The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England Waddell wrote in 2019 a concise introduction to the nature of petitions, their survival in archives and their role in society. In this period petitioners seldom wrote a petition themselves. The main addressees of petitions were local magistrates, the Crown and the parliament. Petitions to civic and country magistrates from before 1700 exist for some twenty of the fourty counties; they are mainly preserved among the quarters sessions papers and rolls. According to Waddell some 30,000 petitions to local magistrates exist for the period 1570 to 1690. Some 10,000 petitions survive for Westminster in the eighteenth century. Among petitions to Parliament only those for the House of Lords have survived. Waddell mentions also other genres of petitions.

A Derbyshire petition asking for the removal of Robert Boocley from the Swarkeston schoolhouse – Matlock, Derbyshire Record Office, Q/SB/2/63 – image source: British History Online

The online edition of petitions in the series English Petitions is the fruit of this research project. The series contains now seven volumes, dealing with Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Cheshire, Worcestershire and Westminster, and with petitions among the State Papers and those addressed to the House of Lords between 1590 and 1700. Apart from these petitions there is also a larger dataset at Zenodo for some 2,800 petitions and 10,000 petitioners between 1573 and 1799, created by Brodie Waddell and research associate Sharon Howard (University of Sheffield) who edited the volume on Cheshire with 290 items from around 5,000 surviving petitions for this county. At British History Online I somehow could not readily find the names of the editors and the date of publication of each volume. Some care and attention for the metadata of this important born digital online editions in open access would be welcome.

The project website restricts itself to essential information about the project team, the resources, the project partners – including the assistance of country record offices – and funders, but there is a blog section with an annotated bibliography on the study of British petitions. The list of project publications mentions also a number of public and academic events around the project. The overview of resources lists the editions of petitions, and contains also external resources which could have been marked as related projects. They figure in the second part of my contribution.

The impact of wars and other aspects of petitions

A key period in the seventeenth century rightly gets much attention, the Civil War – or perhaps even better Civil Wars – between 1642 and 1651. Thus it is no surprise a separate research project exists for Civil War petitions which even extends the period of civil wars to 1710. Several universities worked together in this project led by Andrew Hopper (Oxford). The project website scores with a clear division into themes of petitions, with images of recently added petitions and transcriptions of them, and apart from a blog also with an educational leaflet (13 pp.; PDF) as part of its educational activities. A section Discoveries is also one of the attractions here. A glossary of terms and a bibliography, too, enhance the website. In these Civil War petitions people ask for pensions, in particular widows and orphans, and veterans apply for support to pay for medical care. This project clearly aimed at and succeeded in creating (digital) public history, making the lives and voices of ordinary people alive, an aspect stressed by scholars and teachers speaking in the video made at the project conclusion at the National Army Museum.

It should not be entirely surprising to see the involvement of Sharon Howard here again. She has a great role in the project for the Digital Panopticon discussed here in 2014, and apart from supporting several digital projects for English (legal) history she is a most active creator of websites. As an offspring of the project London Lives 1690 to 1800 project she created the London Lives Petitions Project which is equally a sister project to The Power of Petitioning. Here you can find information concerning some 10,000 petitions written in the eighteenth century from London and Middlesex. Howard created a number of graphic visualisations of key information about petitions for aspects such as gender, the courts involved, the role of parishes and churchwardens in petitions, and such obvious but quickly forgotten matters as showing the shortest and longest petitions. Howard’s page on petitioners gives a good impressions of the kind of information she extracted. Petitions were delivered to sessions of the peace in London, Westminster, Middlesex and a few also to the Old Bailey. For London Lives’ Voices Howard also created data on paupers, coroner’s inquests and trials at the Old Bailey. She explicitly warns for hasty use of these data. Of course Howard contributed also a chapter to the new volume on British petitions, ‘The local power of petitioning: petitions to Cheshire quarter sessions in context, c.1570−1800’ (pp. 229-261), with again revealing visualisations.

A bit different is the approach to petitions for one particular subject in the research project Intoxicants & Early Modernity – England 1580-1740 (University of Sheffield and Victoria & Albert Museum, London). For this project 135 petitions to quarter sessions, mainly from Norfolk and Lancashire, have been transcribed. In a number of them village people wanted an alehouse (pub) to be closed, others elsewhere asked a licence to open an alehouse. Interestingly, the database for this project contains also socalled presentments, official complaints about behavior deemed bad. In the volume edited by Waddell and Pearcey only Sharon Howard mentions presentments, without a clear indication of their official nature. The combination of sources used and presented for the history of intoxicants is tempting indeed. The presence of a source which I did not know at all, presentments, confirms for me the value of looking here at a wider array of resources.

Libels and manuscript pamphlets

In the final section of this post I would like to look at two research projects for sources which seem to me related to petitions. The project Early Stuart Libels presents some 350 libels, defamations in poetic form in writing or print, taken from various manuscript sources held at British and American libraries and record offices. You can search these libels in various ways, not in the least by choosing one of the twenty main themes of these libels written between 1590 and 1640. Defamation clearly could have legal consequences, both in civil (private) and criminal law. The project website created by Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae comes with a bibliography. These libels can serve here to make the point that a certain literary quality, be it conciseness, telling words or prolixity, can all serve purposes in a petition, too.

The second project to be mentioned here is Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England created by the universities of Birmingham and Bristol. It brings you an inventory of currently 532 handwritten pamphlets from the holdings fifty British and American institutions, with for some 200 of them transcriptions. Those with images and transcriptions have been marked with icons, but you cannot currently select only pamphlets with transcriptions and/or images. Noah Millstone and Sebastiaan Verweij score points with their candid explanation about what is missing in the database. For example, they excluded on purpose the libels covered by Early Stuart Libels. They adduce several reasons why manuscript pamphlets came into use.

In my view both projects fill a clear gap when you would look only at cases dealt with by courts or parliament, or exclusively at petitions. These libels and handwritten pamphlets set at least a part of the general scene within public opinion for the reception of petitions and presentments.

Some closing remarks

After presenting here a number of related projects for Early Modern petitions in the United Kingdom, followed by a paragraph on two projects dealing with different resource genres, you might think I am a bit intoxicated by them! The array of subjects is indeed alluring for me, but there is more to them in my opinion. These petitions and the other genres serve here first of all as forceful reminders Early Modern England was not an untroubled nation. Revolts, rebellions and outright revolutions happened between 1500 and 1800, and it dispels the myth of unbroken continuity in English history. Rebellions and revolts happened in the medieval period, too. How do these petitions relate to legal developments in particular shorter periods? It would be fascinating to relate these petitions to cases heard at courts, surely partially by providing another way of obtaining justice from authorities. Looking at petitions can reveal the weaknesses and lacunae of a legal system, and indeed show how law and justice are sometimes anything but truly law and justice. I found it illuminating, too, to see the different qualities in the projects presented here, and I am afraid I could not mention enough of them here.

I saw an announcement of the volume Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America From the Late Medieval Period to the Present (Oxford, etc., 2024) to be published shortly, with Brodie Waddell and two Dutch historians among its editors. No doubt the contributors will provide insights to understand better the peculiarities of English petitions in the Early Modern period. I could not resist the opportunity to look now briefly at a subject deserving attention from legal historians.