Public petitions to the Commons encompassed a diverse range of political, religious, social, and economic topics. This chapter examines the 33,000 or so different issues that were raised by petitioners to the House of Commons. The initial expansion of petitioning in the late eighteenth century was associated with subjects relating to economic regulation and taxation. From the early nineteenth century, the volume of petitions (and signatures) on economic topics was outstripped by the surge of petitioning on religious and social issues. The analysis reveals that petitions were a crucial means for addressing religious issues across the four nations, as well as for debating the UK’s constitutional arrangements. The chapter then considers the different types of issue, from those linked to mass campaigns, to the ‘long’ tail of petitions concerning medium and small-scale topics. Petitions remained an important mechanism for raising individual grievances, particularly from women, in Parliament. Finally, one of the limitations of the petitions data is the relative absence of petitions concerning the empire or foreign policy, which is attributable to the clerks’ system of categorisation and the appeal of petitioning other authorities.

This chapter examines petitioners and petitioning communities within a range of localities to explore the politics of place. First, the analysis demonstrates the ways in which particular topics, such as those associated with mass subscription campaigns, could bring together petitioners from across the four nations. Second, the chapter zooms in to survey a range of localities to offer a comparative study of petitioning communities, emphasising similarities and patterns as well as local variations and differences. Religious congregations were a particularly important, and enduring, form of petitioning community across the period. On other issues, petitioning communities were defined by occupation, profession, trade, or perceived economic interest, such as shipowners or merchants in port cities. Petitioning communities could also be defined by official roles, as when local boards of poor law guardians petitioned regarding social policy, or associational memberships. More generally, it is possible to discern particular continuities and traditions within particular places that reflected the interplay between local political culture and petitioning communities. A study of petitioning communities reveals the diversity of local political cultures, but also shows how they were connected horizontally to petitioners in other localities, and vertically, to national institutions such as Parliament.