Empty spaces: the missing estate petitions of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Wales

Abstract

No pre-Victorian Welsh estate has a consolidated body of petitions, and in most collections written supplications from tenants to estate managers are unusual. Lords like the Campbells of Cawdor or the Marquises of Anglesey had lands in Wales and elsewhere in the British Isles; petitions are noticeably more common among their non-Welsh estate papers, suggesting their use related to regions rather than owners. Welsh peasants seemingly wrote few formal petitions and those they did were usually group complaints rather than individual supplications. For their part, owners had to deal somehow with requests, because no estate could be run purely by diktat, but they did not expect to receive written requests. At first sight it might appear that harmonious relations or a lack of change lay behind the missing petitions, but the real reason was a combination of the social gulf between landlord and tenant and a set of communal priorities within peasant communities that reflected and reinforced that distance. Understanding the context of socio-economic relations allows us to build up a plausible set of reasons for the absence of petitions in Wales. Much of the evidence remains either circumstantial or impressionistic. Dealing with absence nevertheless helps us to bring out the importance of petitioning on estates that encouraged it.