First 600 petitions now on British History Online
Nearly 600 petitions from Cheshire and Worcestershire are now freely available on British History Online.
About the project
The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth-Century England is a two-year AHRC-funded project which began in January 2019. The project will create a valuable new resource by transcribing and digitising a corpus of public petitions, drawn from seven key collections of petitions held at national and local archives, totalling over 2,000 manuscripts.
This corpus, when combined with careful contextualisation, will enable historians to offer new answers to crucial questions about the major social and political changes that unfolded in this formative period.
The Project is led by historians at Birkbeck and University College London, with the IHR in the role of technical partner. This includes publication of the 2000 petitions on the Institute's British History Online in 2019-20, and a study of Natural Language Processing to enhance the corpus' searchability.
