The Popular Politics of Local Petitioning in Early Modern England

Abstract

This article examines the rise of a culture of local petitioning, through which growing numbers of ordinary people sought to win the support of state authorities through collective claims to represent the “voice of the people” at the local level. These participatory, subscriptional practices were an essential component in the intensification of popular politics in the seventeenth century. The analysis focuses on over 3,800 manuscript petitions submitted to the magistrates across fifteen jurisdictions with “sessions of the peace” in England, with nearly 1,000 dating from before 1640. Over the course of the early seventeenth century many, if not most, English parishes witnessed attempts to persuade the authorities through collective petitioning. Groups of neighbors across the kingdom formulated their grievances, organized subscription lists, and articulated their own role in the polity as “the inhabitants” or “the parishioners” of a particular community. In so doing, they not only directly shaped their own “little commonwealths” but also unintentionally helped to develop habits of political mobilization in a crucial period of English history.