This post in our Addressing Authority Online Symposium comes from Fabio Antonini, who recently completed his PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, as part of the ERC funded project ‘ARCHIves – a History of Archives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy‘. He examines a single illuminating document from seventeenth-century Italy to show how a skilled writer could craft a powerful petition, and what this can tell us about the secretive men who controlled the flow of information in the Venetian Republic.

There were few figures more important to the legislative and diplomatic activity of the early modern Republic of Venice than the secretaries of the city’s chancery. Operating within a vast and complex bureaucratic hierarchy, these were the scribes, archival assistants and international correspondents who drove the Republic’s substantial information networks, both within the city and across the continent. From an individual perspective, however, written traces of their careers and professional activity are often hard to come by amongst the Venetian state papers; the deliberately faceless and anonymous representation of the Republic’s various councils meant that the voice of the individual secretary is far more muted than in other prominent examples across early modern Europe.[1]

One of the rare occasions in which the secretaries of the Republic were allowed a personal voice, however, was in the petitions and supplications addressed to their paymasters – the highly secretive executive body known as the Council of Ten – which now reside in the Venetian State Archives. Many of these petitions, in which the secretaries give a detailed narrative of their careers and activities in order to demonstrate their years of service to the state, were often submitted in the hope of salary increases, promotions within the ranks of the chancery, or even favourable treatment for their children as they too embarked upon the secretarial career path.

Vendramin’s petition in the Venetian State Archives, 1614

In some cases, however, the stakes were significantly higher. Whilst looking through these semi-autobiographical records as part of my research into the history of the Venetian chancery,[2] I came across a particularly poignant and revealing example of the importance of petition writing for the livelihoods of Venice’s early modern secretaries. This particular petition was submitted by a former secretary of the Senate – the third highest ranking within the hierarchy of the chancery – Giacomo Vendramin, who in 1612 had been accused of revealing state secrets whilst serving the Venetian ambassador in Florence. Vendramin was ordered back to Venice to face trial, and was subsequently sentenced to two years imprisonment.[3]

In some respects, Vendramin had got off lightly. The revelation of state secrets – whether through design or negligence – had long been an extremely serious offence for those entrusted with compiling and registering government records. In one famous case in 1542, for example, an unfortunate secretary was publically strung up between the columns of Saint Mark’s Square after having been caught in the act of selling secret papers to an Ottoman spy.[4]

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The next post in our Addressing Authority Online Symposium comes from Rebecca Tomlin, postdoctoral researcher at CRASSH, University of Cambridge. Here she examines responses to fires which burnt down much of the town of Tiverton in 1598 and 1612, showing how pamphlet descriptions contrasted with the petitions for aid that were recorded in official documents.

In 1598, when he reported on the recent disastrous fire in Devon, the writer of the pamphlet The True lamentable discourse of the burning of Teuerton told a story of terrible panic and distress that the fire had caused among the town’s inhabitants.[1] The fire, which started when two elderly women tried to use straw to cook themselves pancakes because they had no wood, spread rapidly through the prosperous market town, killing some one hundred people, destroying four hundred houses and property valued at £300,000 and £400,000. [2] The town was left without resources to shelter and feed its displaced inhabitants, who were also suffering what we would now describe as shock, and were left wandering on the outskirts of the town ‘more like Spirits and Ghostes then liuing creatures'(B2^r). The writer emphasises the sensory qualities of the fire, particularly the noises and sights of the burning town and its aftermath to evoke horror in the reader, or listener; this is surely a pamphlet intended to be read aloud in terrible tones to a pitying audience. The disaster is blamed on Tiverton’s own ‘unmercifulnesse, & small regard of the poore, which were dayly seene to dye and perish in their streetes for lacke of reliefe’ (B2^r) while the escape from the fire of twenty poor men’s cottages and the town’s alms houses is taken as proof of God’s providential intervention and intent.

Unfortunately for Tiverton, it was revisited by fire in 1612. Another pamphlet was printed, which also incorporated a dramatic woodcut illustration of the attempts to fight the fire and a retelling of the story of the 1598 burning. The day of the 1612 fire, August 5th, was a holiday ordered by King James to celebrate his preservation from the Gowrie conspiracy. In Tiverton, an un-named dyer did not observe the holiday and put his boy in charge of the furnace so that they could continue to work. But the boy, eager to finish early so that he could join in with the holiday, stoked the fire too high and quickly lost control. This time the fire burned 300 houses, and some £50,000 worth of goods and animals were destroyed. Only the free school, the alms houses and some poor cottages were spared.

Wofull newes from the west parts England, Being the lamentable burning of the towne of Teuerton (1612) borrows much of its descriptive text from the 1598 account.[3] Further sensational descriptions are added, including some in terms which link the fire to the Gowrie conspirators; it is ‘a flame of confusion, a flame of subuersion, a spoyling flame (A4^r). The fire is personified with intent: ‘a commanding Tyrant’ (A4^v) which has ‘commanding power’ and ‘made conquest’ (B3^v). As in 1598, the fire was interpreted as sign of God’s displeasure, in this case at the breaking of the Sabbath, and as a warning to other communities. In 1617 Thomas Beard included the story of the town in Devon that had twice suffered God’s displeasure in his The thunderbolt of Gods Wrath, adding that it was punished for rejecting a godly preacher and profaning the Sabbath.[4] The story of Tiverton and its two fires became an exemplary moral tale throughout the seventeenth century, used for example by a preacher taking his examples from Beard, and for a broadsheet compilation of the the ‘theatre of God’s judgement’ stories.[5]

What does all of this have to do with petitioning? Well, taking the two fires together we have a rare case where we can directly compare pamphlets and petitions which represent different ways of writing about the same disaster. The differences between the modes of writing in these different forms draw attention to the social and economic concerns of the petitions for large charitable collections made in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Continue reading →

The next piece in our Addressing Authority Online Symposium has been authored by Hannah Worthen, completing her doctorate at University of Leicester and The National Archives. She argues here that war widows’ petitions cleverly used established stereotypes about humility and poverty to press their cases, while also sometimes boldly asserting their political autonomy from their late ‘delinquent’ husbands.

In July 1645, a few months before Charles I surrendered to the Scots at Newark and brought the first Civil War to a close, Elizabeth Warner sent a petition to the Parliamentary Committee for Compounding with Delinquents. This committee had been set up to manage the confiscated estates of Royalists and to allow them to regain their estates for a fine. Elizabeth’s offence was that she had been discovered to have been sending letters to the wife of Colonel Thomas Blagge who was then governor at Wallingford House: a garrison being held for the King.

Elizabeth asserted in her petitions that the letters were sent to ‘her antient & intimate friend’ and that ‘there past no thing but Civill Complem[en]ts’ in them. Despite this, she was suspected for a Royalist and her estate was seized by the sequestrators. In the final part of her petition she wrote she ‘submissively begs’ that ‘she may be freed of this Brand’.[1] Elizabeth was just one of many widows who were ‘branded’ with delinquency because of their own actions or the actions of their husbands. They used the petition in order to lobby Parliament for the return of their lands. Continue reading →

Our next post in the Addressing Authority Online Symposium has been written by Judith Hudson, an Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. She looks here at how women used collective petitioning to push the English government into action in the early seventeenth-century.

In March 1626, the Duke of Buckingham, Admiral of the Fleet, was presented with the ‘humble petition of the distressed wives of almost 2,000 poor Mariners now remaining most miserable captives in Sally in Barbary’.^[1]  The wives, with their ‘multitude of poor Infants’, requested that Buckingham intercede with the King for their husbands.  Throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English sailors in the Mediterranean, together with residents of coastal villages, were captured by North African and Ottoman Turk corsairs and sold as slaves in the markets of Algiers, Sallee, and other so-called ‘Barbary’ ports.  The experience of captivity became a collective one at this time, shared with the nation via testimony, sermons, and drama.  Numerous petitions seeking justice for the captives were laid before the Crown and Parliament by their local officials, their employers and priests.   The 1626 petition, however, was the first time that the wives of the captives would speak out.  For the next twelve years ‘distressed wives’ were to petition on a regular and organised basis.

Redemptionist Friars arriving to ransom captives: Pierre Dan, Histoire de Barbarie et de ses Corsaires (1637)

Women had petitioned before as individuals, however a large group engaged in organised intervention seems to be something new.   In this post, which builds on an initial investigation by Nabil Matar, I’d like to suggest that the 1626 petition represents the start of a progression of collective female petitioning – women as a self-defined political lobby – that has usually been considered to begin in the years immediately preceding the Civil War.^[2]  The ‘Civil War’ petitions, which include a diverse range of texts, from pro-Royalist petitions in 1642 to the Leveller petitions for the release of Lilburne and others, are frequently constructed as the corollary of a specific interlude of ‘female potentiality’, occasioned by the Civil War and by the rise of sectarian groups.  This is coded specifically as a new and radical engagement. ^[3]  However, well over a decade earlier, wives of ‘Turkish’ captives had organised themselves into petitioning groups to considerable effect. Was the Civil War really a unique catalyst, or can we see a similar dynamic in the Barbary texts of the 1620s? Continue reading →

Our next post in the Addressing Authority Online Symposium has been written by Sharon Howard, an early modern historian and a project manager at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield. Here she shows how use of a digital ‘macroscope’ can both reveal the changing nature of local petitioning in eighteenth-century London and make these documents more easily available to anyone with an interest in this important set of sources.

Last year at the Voices of the People symposium, Brodie Waddell argued the importance of amplifying the voices of the people through digitisation and online access. This, along with another symposium post by Jonathan Healey on petitions, got me thinking about the petitions addressed to magistrates in the voluminous records of eighteenth-century London and Middlesex Sessions of the Peace, which were digitised several years ago by the London Lives project.

Although already digital, these petitions have been difficult to access within the London Lives website because of the sheer size and variety of the Sessions Papers. I didn’t even know how many petitions there might be (other than “a lot”). The result of this musing was a plan to discover and extract every identifiable petition in the Sessions Papers, and make the resulting metadata and text corpus available as open data (more information can be found via the London Lives Petitions project website).

So: what can you do with 10,000 petitions? Here’s just one, a personal favourite, from Ester Cutler to the Middlesex Sessions in 1715:

Most

Worthy gentellmen of the Court your humble petishnor Ester Cutler begs Consederacion being a Weddow Woman & nothing to live apon but what she can gitt out of Selling a few herbs so that she humbly desiers to be taken of that tax of paying to the poor your

humble petishenor

Ester Cutler

Ester and her petition offer much of compelling interest to me: she presents herself as a lone, poor, working woman, but a ratepayer, not (yet) a pauper. She could write, but far from fluently, and her spelling is idiosyncratic to say the least. I know that this petition is unusual: it’s rare for petitioners to write their own petitions and it’s missing much of the usual conventions and formalities. But just how unusual is it? Continue reading →

Our second post in the Addressing Authority Online Symposium is authored by Brodie Waddell, a lecturer at Birkbeck. Here he attempts to assess the pervasiveness of petitioning in early modern England, and how it competed with other methods of lobbying and redress.

Petitions were everywhere in early modern England. The sheer number of petitions and supplications produced is impressive: about 800 a year sent to James I and 1,000 annually to Charles II; 850 to the House of Commons in the first nine months of 1660; scores every year to the magistrates of large counties such as Lancashire and the West Riding in the seventeenth century; and over 10,000 to London magistrates in the eighteenth century.[i] In addition, innumerable ‘unofficial’ petitions were sent from the distressed to charitable institutions, from tenants to landlords, and from private suitors to potential patrons.[ii]

The Apprentices of Londons Petition … with the Names of about 30000 Apprentices (1641)

Most were sent by individuals but many represented the views of organised groups and some were signed by tens of thousands such as those related to the intense political and religious struggles of the 1640s and 1679-80.[iii] Some reached a still broader audience through printing, with perhaps 500 published for a public readership in the 1640s and 50s, and more than 10,000 titles involving ‘petition’ published before 1800.[iv] So, even if someone didn’t join a petitioning campaign directly, they may well have supported it indirectly through buying a copy and spreading the word.

Moreover, beyond the numbers, the range of issues addressed in petitions was extraordinarily broad. Most supplicants sought ‘practical’ things such as employment, licences, titles, poor relief, judicial mercy and relief from taxes, yet others aimed at grander goals such as ecclesiastical reforms, political redress or constitutional changes.

This might lead us to conclude that early modern England – and perhaps Europe more generally – was a ‘petitionary society’ in which essentially everyone used petitions as their primary means of addressing those more powerful than themselves.[v] This would be a very convenient conclusion to reach for an event like this, and I believe there is some truth in it. Yet I would also like to raise a few reservations. Continue reading →

Our first piece in the Addressing Authority Online Symposium comes from Andreas Würgler professor of Swiss history at the University of Geneva and author of several publications on early modern petitioning. He offers an overview of the role of petitioning across Europe at this time, focusing in particular on how they can reveal both the microhistories of individual lives and the broader history of the emergence of early modern states.

The petition of Margrete Liechtenstein (Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland, Sig. A 92.1, No. 69)

On 27 April 1583, Margrete Liechtenstein wrote a supplication to the Zurich city council. In her letter, she petitioned the authorities for a job as a teacher in the city’s school. She claimed that she sought this favour because she was a widow and mother having no income. Since her husband’s death three years earlier, her friends and ‘other good people’ had been supporting her and her three-year-old son. Margrete apologized for her shaky handwriting – which was not very likely to qualify her as a teacher – and explained that ‘fear and anxiety made my hand tremble, so I was not able to produce any single nice character while I was shaking all over as if I had a cold fever’.[1] But as she had ‘trained herself in reading and writing since her youth’, she would like to teach the children and earn her livelihood instead of depending on charity. The council decided to give her some grain, but did not consider her able to be employed as a school teacher.

This supplication is one among thousands shedding light on an individual’s fate and on the social strategies used to cope with hardship: only after relatives, friends and neighbours were not able to help any more did Margrete turn to the city’s authorities – and she got temporary assistance, but no lasting improvement of her situation. Millions of other ordinary people like Margrete addressed petitions to local or central, secular or ecclesiastical authorities. In an attempt to persuade the recipients, they both revealed personal information about their conditions of life and undertook an exercise in deliberate self-fashioning. As petitions and supplications were made in the most varied situations they record their authors’ needs and hopes, interests and experiences, attitudes and activities. Although these sources were written by ordinary people – mostly with a little help from a friend or a professional writer on a modest fee – state, church or other institutions dealt with them carefully – and preserved them in their archives. Some of these institutions even copied out orally presented requests and grievances into their registers.[2]

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