Richard W. Hoyle

Petitioning as popular politics in early sixteenth–century England

This article offers the thesis that petitioning by collective groups, whether occupational, regionally constituted, or simply the body of people called the commons, was an important form of political communication in the early sixteenth century which, although poorly documented and consequently overlooked by historians, allows us an entry into the world of popular politics. The article offers illustrations of the way in which petitions were employed within the city of York, by groups such as weavers or by the commons of East Anglia in 1549 and 1553. The right to petition could not be denied, but mass petitioning was viewed with apprehension by government. Nonetheless, petitioning may be seen as a conservative form of behaviour when compared to calls for insurrection.

The character of English rural society : Earls Colne, 1550-1750

Maps Tables Abbreviations A note on references to the Earls Colne sources A note on measurements Glossary Preface 1. The character of rural change 2. Earls Colne 3. The lords of Earls Colne 4. The Harlakenden estate 5. The lord and his copyholders 6. The land market quantified 7. The land market anatomised 8. Subtenancy: the character of Earls Colne, 1722-50 9. Conclusion

The Slaidburn poor pasture: changing configurations of popular politics in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century village

As our knowledge of the rural Old Poor Law deepens, we appreciate ever more clearly that the poor were not only supported by the receipts from the poor rate, but also by the income from property accumulated by parishes and parochial charities. Historians from W. K. Jordan onwards have made us aware of the considerable capital tied up in investments for charitable, educational and, less often, spiritual purposes. Broad has shown how, in the south Midlands at least, villages owned considerable stocks of housing, property which was sold off by the New Poor Law authorities in a process of first nationalization and then asset stripping. Recent writing on the Old Poor Law has also stressed the politics inherent in the discretion given to the overseers and vestries who administered relief at the local level and the negotiations which went on between them and those who believed that they were entitled to parish assistance. The poor were also well aware that they had rights of appeal beyond the village to the JPs. Individual parish officers were therefore liable to have their actions scrutinized by both their

THE ENCLOSURE OF PRESTON MOOR AND THE CREATION OF MOOR PARK IN PRESTON

IT IS WIDELY HELD — and not least within Preston — that Moor Park in Preston is the oldest municipal park in the world.1 As its name suggests, it is the last open remnant of Preston Moor, enclosed between 1833 and 1835. On the basis of these limited facts, we can identify a number of problems. How was Preston Moor transformed into a municipal park? There is no enclosure award, nor was parliamentary sanction sought for the enclosure, so what legal processes underlay the conversion? What prompted the unreformed corporation of Preston to undertake such a striking and apparently unparalleled step? Indeed, was Preston really so advanced in its attitudes in the early 1830s that it created a public park a decade before Manchester?2 The study of urban commons, of which Preston Moor is an example, has come on in leaps and bounds in the past decade. Work by English Heritage from a landscape and archaeological point of view, and by Professor Henry French from the historical, has pointed both to the large number of commons attached to towns and to their potential significance for the urban economy.3 But urban commons were also a declining asset. At all periods they were under pressure from councils who saw them as resources which could be exploited in more profitable ways. Their conversion to

Farmer, Nonconformist Minister and Diarist: The World of Peter Walkden of Thornley in Lancashire, 1733–34

Abstract Peter Walken (1684–1769) was a small farmer resident near Chipping in Lancashire. Somewhat unusually, he was also minister of a small Nonconformist congregation, and even more unusually, he was a compulsive diarist. Most of his diaries have been lost, but one of two surviving volumes, for fourteen months in 1733–34, was published in 2000. The extant volume offers a detailed account of Walkdens farming activities, his income and expenditure, role as an employer and describes his struggle to secure credit. It also sheds light on the economic activity of his wife and the female sphere within his household. All of these aspects of his life are explored in this paper which offers a fine-grained account of farming life in Lancashire in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.