Brodie Waddell's recent History Today essay provides a valuable catalogue of petitioning in early modern England, showcasing thorough archival research—tracking signatures, reconstructing subscription networks, and analysing how Elizabethan Puritan tactics were later adopted by apprentices, washerwomen, and Leveller activists. This kind of empirical social history work is essential. However, framing petitioning as a “technology of collective voice' introduces a formalism that strips political meaning from revolutionary history, resulting in a focus on structural forms rather than the underlying forces.
Petitioning did not simply evolve from elite subscription
campaigns into mass mobilisation. Instead, antagonistic social groups captured,
repurposed, and fought over it, driven by interests that were not only
different but fundamentally opposed. The gap between the Elizabethan gentry’s
push for more Church reform and the Levellers’ call for near-universal male
suffrage marks not a smooth progression of civic practice but a rupture: the
rise of a plebeian political movement challenging the limits of a gentry-led
revolution. Framing this as a steady development of “petitioning habits”
overlooks the class conflict within the parliamentary camp—an aspect thoroughly
examined by historians like Christopher Hill, Brian Manning, and Ann Hughes.
Waddell’s evidence repeatedly hints at this conflict without
naming it directly. The 1629 Chester “poor householders" invoking “the
general good” against “private profit" were not just early users of civic
technology; they were expressing an emerging class language that would become
more explicit in the 1640s. The washerwomen protesting Charles I’s soap
monopoly weren’t expanding “public voice" but resisting a royal economic
attack on their livelihoods. The bold claim—quoted but not examined—that
Leveller organisers could have mobilised “a hundred thousand hands” for their
1648 petition if Cromwell’s agents hadn’t obstructed them isn’t just a minor
detail.
This clearly shows that the independent elites strengthening
their power following the regicide were deliberately suppressing mass petitions
from the plebeian left. This illustrates the class-based character of the
post-1649 settlement, not just a statistical aspect of petitioning history. To
grasp petitioning during the English Revolution, we should go beyond the
liberal-pluralist idea of rising “voice” and view petitioning as a disputed
social dynamic. In this arena, different class forces vied to steer the
revolution’s direction.
Gentry Petitioning: Pressure Without Transformation
The Root and Branch petition of 1640, which gathered 15,000
signatures, is often seen as a sign of emerging mass politics. However, its
class background is clear. Property reformers—merchants, clergy, and the
parliamentary gentry—organised it to influence the Crown toward ecclesiastical
and constitutional changes. Petitioning here was primarily a way to mobilise
respectable public opinion, not to challenge existing property structures. It
served as a tool for a political effort to reshape the state while maintaining
the social hierarchy. This context is what Waddell considers the baseline:
orderly lists of signatures, processed through parish systems, expressing
grievances that did not threaten the core of propertied society.
By the early 1640s, different social groups had taken over
petitioning. Artisans, apprentices, watermen, porters, and small producers used
petitions to voice local grievances about monopolies, prices, military
impressment, and corruption. Their language—"general good” versus “private
profit"—reflected emerging class tensions, not civic virtue. This shift
didn’t represent a broader "voice" but rather the political emergence
of groups previously shut out of formal politics. The revolutionary crisis
broke down the usual barriers that kept the poor, women, and the unpropertied
outside public affairs. Petitioning then became a tool for those whose
interests conflicted with the parliamentary gentry.
The Levellers turned petitioning into a powerful tool for
mass democracy. Their campaigns from 1647 to 49 — calling for legal reform,
religious freedom, freeing political prisoners, and almost universal male
suffrage — marked a significant advancement. Petitioning shifted from a
pressure tactic within the parliamentary coalition to a direct challenge to the
parliamentary leadership.
The scale of Leveller petitioning was unparalleled, with
tens of thousands of signatures collected from London wards, army regiments,
and provincial towns. The claim that “a hundred thousand hands” might have been
gathered in 1648, had Cromwell’s agents not intervened, shows the extent of
popular mobilisation and the fear it instilled among the ruling class. Waddell
reduces this to simply “mass petitioning,” but in reality, it signifies the
rise of a revolutionary democratic movement that challenged property limits.
Once the Independent grandees consolidated power after the
regicide, petitioning became a battleground of counter-revolution. The same
authorities that had promoted petitions against the Crown swiftly turned to
suppress those threatening their authority. Leveller organisers were detained;
petitioners were scattered; women petitioners faced violence, imprisonment, and
in some cases, death. The harsh crackdown on the August 1643 women’s
petitioners—initially depicted by Waddell as unfortunate crowd violence—actually
reveals how rapidly the parliamentary state was willing to deploy force against
popular mobilisation that went beyond its limits. Petitioning was tolerated
only when it aligned with property interests.
The essay’s conclusion—linking 17th-century petitions,
abolitionism, Chartism, suffragism, and the 2019 Brexit e-petition—highlights
the depoliticising trend of this genre. It shifts from a history of revolution,
counter-revolution, and class struggle to a narrative focused on civic
technology. The five million signatures of the Chartists are presented in the
same continuum as a modern online petition against trade policies, stripping
away the political stakes that separated a movement advocating for
working-class voting rights from a 21st-century clicktivist act.
This illustrates Whig history dressed as social history:
authentic archival efforts to recover popular agency are overshadowed by a
story of an expanding “voice,” which perceives the state as a neutral stage
gradually inviting more participants, rather than an instrument of class
domination that needed to be challenged through revolution.
A serious examination of Civil War-era petitioning must
confront the question raised by Waddell’s own evidence: whose interests did
this “collective voice” serve, and against whom was it directed? Moreover, who
moved to suppress it when it threatened to transcend the boundaries set by the
parliamentary gentry? Petitioning during the English Revolution was not a
developing civic practice leading toward modern democracy. Instead, it
functioned as a battleground where the lower classes temporarily gained control
of political communication, only to face repression when their demands
challenged the interests of property-holders.
Brodie Waddell stands at the centre of today’s post‑revisionist
social history: archivally rich, methodologically sophisticated, and
politically cautious. As a leading figure at Birkbeck and an ex officio
representative for Cultural & Social History, he helps set the tone
for a generation of scholarship that foregrounds “ordinary people” while
avoiding the class‑analytic frameworks that once defined radical Civil War
historiography.
His work on petitioning, parish politics, and popular
protest exemplifies the dominant trend: history from below without class.
Waddell recovers voices, practices, and local interactions, but frames them
through communication, identity, and “political participation,” rather than
through the structural antagonisms that shaped those practices. Where Hill or
Manning would ask what class forces produced these forms, Waddell asks how
people “made their voices heard.”
The result is a liberal‑pluralist narrative of expanding
civic inclusion — a story of participation rather than transformation.
Petitioning becomes a technology of communication, not a weapon in a struggle
between plebeian democrats and parliamentary grandees. Conflict is catalogued
but depoliticised; revolution is rendered as a sequence of practices rather
than a clash of forces.
In short: Waddell is the exemplary historian of a
depoliticised social‑history moment — invaluable for evidence, limited in
explanation, and firmly within the consensus that has displaced class analysis
from the study of the English Revolution.
Sources and Bibliography: Brodie Waddell
Books
- God,
Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720, Boydell Press,
2012.
- The
Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain (co‑authored with Jason
Peacey), UCL Press, 2024.
- Petitions
and Petitioning in Europe and North America: From the Late Medieval Period
to the Present, Oxford University Press, 2024. (Co‑authored with
Huzzey, Janse, Miller, Oddens, Waddell)
Major Journal Articles
- “The
Popular Politics of Local Petitioning in Early Modern England” Journal
of British Studies (2024).
- “Work
and Identity in Early Modern England” (with Mark Hailwood) Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society (2023).
- “The
Economic Crisis of the 1690s in England” The Historical Journal
66:2 (2023).
- “The
Rise of the Parish Welfare State in England, c.1600–1800” Past
& Present (2021).
- “The
Evil May Day Riot of 1517 and the Popular Politics of Anti‑Immigrant
Hostility in Early Modern London” Historical Research (2021).
- “Verses
of My Owne Making”: Literacy, Work, and Social Identity in Early Modern
England, Journal of Social History (2020).
- “Writing
History from Below: Chronicling and Record‑Keeping in Early Modern
England” History Workshop Journal (2018).
- “The
Politics of Economic Distress in the Aftermath of the Glorious Revolution,
1689–1702” English Historical Review (2015).
- “Governing
England Through the Manor Courts, 1550–1850” The Historical Journal
(2012).
- “Economic
Immorality and Social Reformation in English Popular Preaching, 1585–1625”
Cultural and Social History (2008).
Book Chapters
- “Economic
Life” In Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources (2016).
Edited Collections & Collaborative Works
- The
Future of History from Below: An Online Symposium (with Mark Hailwood)
The Many‑Headed Monster (2013).
- Plebeian
Cultures in Early Modern England: Thirty‑Five Years After E.P. Thompson
(with Mark Hailwood), Social History 34:4 (2009).
- Introduction:
Petitions and Petitioning in Historical Perspective (Huzzey, Janse,
Miller, Oddens, Waddell…) in Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and
North America (2024).
Archival & Digital Scholarship
- The
Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth‑Century England (AHRC project,
2019–21). Project outputs include datasets of 3,800+ manuscript petitions.
