Abstract
This part of the book begins with Ireland because the Drapers’ Company papers contain a unique digest of petitions received in 1832 that assigns requests to categories transferable elsewhere. Most classifications are ‘artificial’, on the one hand made by archivists when arranging papers chronologically or by subject or location, on the other imposed by historians seeking to bring order to the bewildering array of requests. Yet the route by which the collections reached the modern researcher is often unclear, and the process of collation and dispatch remains similarly opaque. There is evidence of bunching of Breadalbane petitions from specific areas (a run of consecutive items from the south side of Loch Tay followed by a run from the north) which suggests that the petitions were collected and dealt with by officiary. The Leconfield ‘petitions to the lord’ are grouped by subject such as ‘wood’, but by an archivist. The three boxes of mid-nineteenth-century petitions among the Shirley papers are not numbered and some described as ‘original bundles’ are now loose in the first box. In contrast, the Drapers’ papers contain bundles of petitions for the century 1808–1902, which are often sub-divided by subject such as rent reduction or assistance to emigrate; these collations seem original as they reflect how the estate handled incoming requests, based on what we know from published reports and other manuscripts.
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Notes
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Ibid., 131. This is worth bearing in mind when one reads Liam Kennedy’s account of the benefits of the system to ‘the tenant-farmer stratum’. L. Kennedy, ‘The rural economy, 1820–1914’, in L. Kennedy and P. Ollerenshaw (eds), An economic history of Ulster, 1820–1940 (Manchester, 1985), 40.
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© 2014 Robert Allan Houston
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Houston, R.A. (2014). The north of Ireland, c. 1750–1850. In: Peasant Petitions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137394095_13
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