Methodologies: the practice and theory of petitions, and the choice of estates

Abstract

Petitions offer a way of advancing understanding of rural social relationships, beyond the valuable range of scholarship discussed in the previous chapter. They are an expression of an established or desired relationship, drawn up when an individual or group lacked something which the recipient of their request had it in his or her power to grant. Petitions usually addressed a social and economic superior in terms of entreaty, providing information about the applicant’s circumstances and others relevant to the wish. They came out of a difference in status and assets, but sought to establish a moral and/or material bond between solicitor and solicited. In the context of a landed estate, written requests give the mediated voice of the tenant and sometimes sub-tenant or even labourer in a more-or-less public forum. They allow examination of the texture of relationships between an estate’s management and its inhabitants and, indirectly, between different types of inhabitant. The encounter between a supplicant and superior in petitions imparted dynamism to early modern social relations, which many other types of document leave inert. As historian Donna Andrew puts it: ‘The begging letter … operated as a conduit of exchange; the exchange of dependence for obligation, of service for care, of need for succor.’¹ Power could be used to coerce and to exclude, but it could also accommodate reciprocity and exchange. Petitions allowed such interaction.