How can people without official political power push the authorities to act? Historically, one of the most common tactics was to create a petition or supplication. Even today, every year hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens sign e-petitions addressed to parliament which can lead directly to high-profile debates in the House of Commons. In seventeenth-century England, petitioning was ubiquitous. It was one of the only acceptable ways to address the authorities when seeking redress, mercy or advancement. As a result, it was a crucial mode of communication between the 'rulers' and the 'ruled'. People at all levels of society - from noblemen to paupers - used petitions to make their voices heard. Some were mere begging letters scrawled on scraps of paper; others were carefully crafted radical demands signed by thousands and sent to the highest powers in the land. Whatever form they took, they provide a vital source for illuminating the concerns of supposedly 'powerless' people and also offer a unique means to map the structures of authority that framed early modern society. This study will be the first to examine petitioning systematically at all levels of English government over the whole century. The project will create a valuable new resource by digitising and transcribing a corpus drawn from nine key collections of petitions held at national and local archives, totalling about 2,500 documents. This corpus, when combined with careful contextualisation, will allow the investigators to offer new answers to crucial questions about the major social and political changes that unfolded in this formative period. We will be able to examine the role of petitioning in specific moments such as the outbreak of civil war in 1642, the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Exclusion Crisis in 1679-81 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. We will also be able to track how petitionary practices shaped - and were shaped by - long-term developments, such as the emergence of a politicised 'public sphere' and the vast expansion in the English state, by assessing how much petitioners' attention shifted from local to national authorities, and from individual to mass subscriptions. Such questions are central to understanding government and politics in this period, but they can only be addressed through methodical analysis of a substantial corpus of petitions. This resource will make it possible to go beyond questions specific to petitioning by offering a new perspective on the nature of state authority itself. Current understandings of formal power structures in seventeenth-century England have been drawn primarily from the writings of theorists or officeholders. In contrast, petitions provide a view of authority 'from below'. They will allow us to reconstruct the outlook of people who lacked any official authority of their own. What concerns did they believe should be addressed by their superiors? To whom did they direct their complaints or requests? How did they adapt their rhetoric to fit with the changing political and ideological complexion of the state? The transcribed petitions will be made freely available through a bespoke Institute of Historical Research website, augmented with contextual essays, and searchable by year, locality, sender, recipient, topic and response. So, while publications by the investigators will address the research questions above, other scholars will use this resource to pursuing further lines of inquiry. Moreover, this resource will also serve the needs of stakeholders beyond professional researchers. We will partner with two archives (Cheshire and London Metropolitan) and a large volunteer organisation (The University of the Third Age) to support lay researchers - such as local and family historians - working on this wealth of newly accessible material tagged by place and name. This project will therefore open up a new perspective on the seventeenth century for both scholars and the wider public.

The vocabulary of Standard English includes approximately 600 words from Old Norse, the language of the Scandinavian newcomers who settled in Britain from the 9th to the 11th centuries (popularly known as 'the Vikings'). They tend to be everyday words (e.g. husband, skin, window; happy, ill, ugly; cast, die, scare), even personal pronouns (e.g. they), prepositions (e.g. until) and conjunctions (though). Many more terms are still used in the modern dialects of the areas where the Vikings originally settled (i.e. the so-called Danelaw; e.g. dale, fell, gowk; bain, gormless, mickle; attle, flit, laik). The Gersum Project has revolutionised the way in which we identify Norse loans in English by developing an innovative classification based on the reliability of the evidence for Norse derivation. A freely accessible online database classifying over 900 terms, a collection of essays and a series of journal articles will make our findings available to the academic community and other interested readers. We have also built a significant public engagement agenda, delivering 17 public talks, taking part in 4 radio interviews, etc. These activities have evidenced non-academic audiences' interest in the effects that the country's multicultural past has had on the English language, both at the local and national level. With this follow-on project we aim to widen the public impact of our work by developing activities and resources that focus primarily on two sectors: education (primary and secondary school children and their teachers) and cultural heritage. We will: 1. Develop a series of online age-appropriate educational resources that will shape the way in which the lasting cultural impact of the Viking presence in England is taught in thousands of primary and secondary schools across the country. The resources will focus on present and past manifestations of Norse-derived words in English in general and the northern dialects in particular, with special emphasis on the North-West Midlands (the area where the texts included in the Gersum corpus originate). The resources will include written content, audio recordings by speakers from different dialectal areas, video recordings of lectures by the Gersum Team and other experts, interactive activities and downloadable resources that can be used in the classroom. Recent changes in the History A-level curriculum of the OCR examining board, where the prominence of this topic has significantly increased, underpin the timeliness of these resources. 2. Establish focus groups with teachers and examination board members, a teacher panel and training sessions in the use of the resources. Collaborating with the relevant stakeholders throughout the project and having the support of various educational organisations will enable us to create relevant and engaging resources that can be widely publicised and used. 3. Train York Archaeological Trust's (YAT; our project partner) front-of-house staff (particularly those working at the JORVIK Viking Centre) in topics concerning the Vikings and their presence in England, with particular focus on their linguistic impact. Need for training has arisen as a result of JORVIK's closure from 2015 to 2017 because of flood damage and subsequent staff changes. We will also provide YAT with a staff training manual for future use and linguistic information for their virtual learning environment. 4. Hold two family days at St Mary's Creative Space (Chester), in conjunction with Cheshire Record Office, and YAT's Barley Hall (York), respectively, as part of the nationwide Being Human festival, where visitors of all ages will be invited to explore the rich linguistic heritage of these dialectal areas through a series of activities aimed at different ages, including arts and crafts, storytelling and public lectures. The data and feedback that we gather during these days will further help the development of our educational resources.