Supplicants and Guardians: the petitions of Royalist widows during the Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642–1660

Worthen, Hannah

doi:10.1080/09612025.2016.1148503

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

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“…74 which thousands of women had participated and claimed an equal space in public politics, but continuing the tradition of female petitioning on issues of poor relief and property, women's signatures were concentrated on petitions where their role in the 'private' household or local parish could be extended into the public sphere. 75 The preservation and management of property and the politics of subsistence allowed the contribution of women to be acknowledged, echoing the practice in civil courts. 76 On other issues, because the emphasis was on citing the artisanal skills of petitioners to convince parliamentarians of their knowledge and the necessity of demonstrating that different interests were standing together, the work of women in aspects of textile manufacture and retail also made their participation recordable on petitions.…”

Section: Middle Sortsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Petitioning and Petitioners to the Westminster Parliament, 1660–1788

Loft

2019

Parliamentary History

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Narratives of the mid‐18th‐century state as drifting towards oligarchy and closure have long been superseded by accounts stressing its responsiveness to outside interests and opinion. Participatory election rituals, crowd activity and the expansion of print media demonstrate that political activism was not limited to a narrow circle of elites, even after the passage of the 1716 Septennial Act. Additionally, as an institution after 1688 the Westminster parliament rendered itself useful to propertied society through its passage of greater amounts of legislation. However, while the strength of party and trajectory of electoral participation is well mapped, as are addresses to the crown, the petitioning of interest groups has had few systematic quantitative surveys. This article first sets out the chronology of petitioning to both houses of parliament from 1660 to 1788, demonstrating that petitioning was at its height before 1722, rather than rising to its greatest levels with the reform movements in the 1780s. Second, the article demonstrates the role of petitioning in expanding the political nation beyond the boundaries of parliamentary boroughs, and why, on occasion, petitioning involved women and illiterate men. Third, in order to emphasize the continuity in petitioning and its contribution to the formation of public opinion, the article compares the different roles that concurrent subscription practices envisaged for the public. Finally, the article argues that despite the rising tendency to cite numerical strength to arbitrate political divisions, petitioners continued to legitimise their voices on the basis of representing collections of reasons and interests rather than opinion.

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Section: Middle Sortsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Petitioning and Petitioners to the Westminster Parliament, 1660–1788

Loft

2019

Parliamentary History

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Understandings of Adversity and Resilience Amongst Women and Children During the Seventeenth-Century British Civil Wars

Pells

2022

Mental Health in Historical Perspective

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The Popular Politics of Local Petitioning in Early Modern England

Waddell

2024

J. Br. Stud.

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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.

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Supplicants and Guardians: the petitions of Royalist widows during the Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642–1660

Cited by 4 publications

References 6 publications

Petitioning and Petitioners to the Westminster Parliament, 1660–1788

Petitioning and Petitioners to the Westminster Parliament, 1660–1788

Understandings of Adversity and Resilience Amongst Women and Children During the Seventeenth-Century British Civil Wars

The Popular Politics of Local Petitioning in Early Modern England

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