The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England

没有官方政治权力的人怎么能推动当局采取行动呢？从历史上看，最常见的策略之一是创建请愿书或恳求书。即使在今天，每年仍有成千上万的普通公民签署电子请愿书，提交给议会，这些请愿书可以直接引发下议院的高调辩论。在17世纪的英国，请愿无处不在。这是在寻求补偿、怜悯或晋升时向当局求助的唯一可接受的方式之一。因此，它是“统治者”和“被统治者”之间沟通的重要方式。社会各阶层的人——从贵族到贫民——都通过请愿来表达自己的意见。有些只是潦草地写在纸片上的乞求信；另一些则是精心制作的激进要求，由数千人签署，并送到这片土地上的最高权力机构。无论它们以何种形式出现，它们都为揭示那些被认为“无能为力”的人们所关心的问题提供了一个重要的来源，也为描绘构成早期现代社会的权威结构提供了一种独特的手段。这项研究将首次系统地考察整个世纪以来英国各级政府的上访情况。该项目将通过数字化和转录从国家和地方档案馆保存的9个主要请愿文集中提取的语料库，创造一个宝贵的新资源，总计约2500份文件。这个语料库，当与仔细的语境化相结合时，将允许调查人员对在这一形成时期展开的主要社会和政治变革的关键问题提供新的答案。我们将考察请愿在一些特定时期的作用，如1642年内战爆发、1660年君主复辟、1679-81年排他危机和1688年光荣革命。通过评估上访者的注意力从地方当局转移到国家当局、从个人转移到大众订阅的程度，我们还将能够追踪上访者的做法是如何塑造长期发展的，以及被长期发展所塑造的，比如政治化的“公共领域”的出现和英国国家的巨大扩张。这些问题是理解这一时期政府和政治的核心，但它们只能通过对大量请愿书的系统分析来解决。这一资源将使人们有可能超越请愿的具体问题，对国家权力本身的性质提供一个新的视角。目前对17世纪英国正式权力结构的理解主要来自理论家或官员的著作。相比之下，请愿书提供了一种“来自下面”的权威观点。它们将使我们能够重建那些没有任何官方权威的人的观点。他们认为上级应该解决哪些问题？他们向谁投诉或请求？他们如何调整自己的言论，以适应国家不断变化的政治和意识形态？经过转录的请愿书将通过一个定制的历史研究所网站免费提供，并增加相关文章，可按年份、地点、发件人、收件人、主题和回应进行搜索。因此，虽然研究者的出版物将解决上述研究问题，但其他学者将利用这一资源进行进一步的研究。此外，该资源还将满足专业研究人员以外的利益相关者的需求。我们将与两个档案馆（柴郡档案馆和伦敦大都会档案馆）和一个大型志愿者组织（第三时代大学）合作，支持非专业研究人员——比如当地和家族历史学家——研究这些按地点和名称标注的新材料。因此，这个项目将为学者和广大公众开辟一个研究17世纪的新视角。

How can people without official political power push the authorities to act? Historically, one of the most common tactics was to create a petition or supplication. Even today, every year hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens sign e-petitions addressed to parliament which can lead directly to high-profile debates in the House of Commons.In seventeenth-century England, petitioning was ubiquitous. It was one of the only acceptable ways to address the authorities when seeking redress, mercy or advancement. As a result, it was a crucial mode of communication between the 'rulers' and the 'ruled'. People at all levels of society - from noblemen to paupers - used petitions to make their voices heard. Some were mere begging letters scrawled on scraps of paper; others were carefully crafted radical demands signed by thousands and sent to the highest powers in the land. Whatever form they took, they provide a vital source for illuminating the concerns of supposedly 'powerless' people and also offer a unique means to map the structures of authority that framed early modern society. This study will be the first to examine petitioning systematically at all levels of English government over the whole century.The project will create a valuable new resource by digitising and transcribing a corpus drawn from nine key collections of petitions held at national and local archives, totalling about 2,500 documents. This corpus, when combined with careful contextualisation, will allow the investigators to offer new answers to crucial questions about the major social and political changes that unfolded in this formative period. We will be able to examine the role of petitioning in specific moments such as the outbreak of civil war in 1642, the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Exclusion Crisis in 1679-81 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. We will also be able to track how petitionary practices shaped - and were shaped by - long-term developments, such as the emergence of a politicised 'public sphere' and the vast expansion in the English state, by assessing how much petitioners' attention shifted from local to national authorities, and from individual to mass subscriptions. Such questions are central to understanding government and politics in this period, but they can only be addressed through methodical analysis of a substantial corpus of petitions.This resource will make it possible to go beyond questions specific to petitioning by offering a new perspective on the nature of state authority itself. Current understandings of formal power structures in seventeenth-century England have been drawn primarily from the writings of theorists or officeholders. In contrast, petitions provide a view of authority 'from below'. They will allow us to reconstruct the outlook of people who lacked any official authority of their own. What concerns did they believe should be addressed by their superiors? To whom did they direct their complaints or requests? How did they adapt their rhetoric to fit with the changing political and ideological complexion of the state?The transcribed petitions will be made freely available through a bespoke Institute of Historical Research website, augmented with contextual essays, and searchable by year, locality, sender, recipient, topic and response. So, while publications by the investigators will address the research questions above, other scholars will use this resource to pursuing further lines of inquiry. Moreover, this resource will also serve the needs of stakeholders beyond professional researchers. We will partner with two archives (Cheshire and London Metropolitan) and a large volunteer organisation (The University of the Third Age) to support lay researchers - such as local and family historians - working on this wealth of newly accessible material tagged by place and name. This project will therefore open up a new perspective on the seventeenth century for both scholars and the wider public.