What is petition? This word is obsolete, since today it is no longer customary to “beat the brow,” that is, bow to someone until the floor, touching his forehead (brow). But it is precisely from this phrase that the word “petition” comes from. It is a petition submitted to the king in writing. More about what petition is described in our review.
Written petition
So what is petition? In Russia, almost until the end of the 18th century, a written request was made petition, made collectively or individually, upon submission of which they “beat the brow”. Apparently, it is a prototype of modern complaints and claims. Everyone who brought petitions written in the royal name gathered near the Faceted Chamber, at the Red Porch. They were transmitted through the Duma clerks.
Such a document as a petition appears in the business writing system of Moscow at the beginning of the 17th century. It replaced the term “complaint”, which was used before and had a narrower meaning - “an act containing a complaint”.
Business character
The petition place was between those acts that were official-business in nature, and those that were private-business. The official aspect of this document is due to the laws of the time, according to which any appeal to the governing bodies was addressed to the autocrat - the king. Such petitions made up in Zemstvo huts, in which the control of the posad community was concentrated.
At the same time, petitions to the tsar also bore the tinge of private acts, since most of them expressed the interests of a particular person regarding relations between individual members of society. In accordance with these two aspects, the petitions were divided into two groups.
The first includes:
- Claim.
- The guilty.
- Well known.
- Betting.
- The guilty.
- Worldwide.
- Deferred.
The second group includes:
- Also lawsuit.
- Requests for a hearing.
- About the gossip.
- On transferring the consideration of the case to another body.
- On admission to the service.
- On the provision of benefits and repayments.
- On permission to exchange estates.
Clear structure
Understanding the question of what petition, it should be noted that it was different from many other documents, as it had a clearly fixed form. Throughout the country, it was the same and for a long time did not undergo almost no changes.
It looked like this:
- As a rule, petition began with an appeal to the sovereign with the obligatory presence in it of the phrase “brow beat” (I bow).
- After that, information about the supplicant was given.
- It was followed by evidence of an incident.
- Then came a request to resolve the issue using such formulas as, for example, “accept and write down” or “make a decision”.
- In conclusion, a personal signature and the obligatory inscription "put a hand in it" were put.
On the reverse side of the petition, the clerk put the date of its filing, as well as the mark “report”. The order on this petition, which came either from the tsar himself or from the head of the order, was also briefly recorded there.
Petition
It was through the representatives of this body that the petition to the king could be submitted. Its occurrence dates back to the reign of Ivan IV. Initially, it included one deceased and two clerks. This petition was distributed by those petitions that were transmitted to the tsar during the holidays and while on campaigns. And also his servants announced decisions on them if they were taken by the king alone or with the boyars.
According to the testimony of the historian Stepan Veselovsky, in writings relating to the history of the Moscow state, as a rule, references are made exclusively to one of the parties involved in the activities of clerks and nobles attributed to the Petition Order. In them he was equated with the institution, which was the king’s own office. She was engaged in the fact that she received, studied and gave further progress to petition letters, which were given to the king at his exits from the palace.
In fact, the king did not take the paper in his hands, it was done by the clerk of the Lament of Order, who always accompanied the king during his exits. Having received a petition, the clerk on the back wrote an order from the king, which did not directly concern the essence of the matter.
This instruction was addressed to another order, the profile of which corresponded to the request stated in the document. Its content was a royal order to satisfy the aspirations of the petitioner. And in case of the impossibility of such satisfaction, it was attributed to report this to the sovereign in a special order. Thus, the main purpose of the Petition Order was to encourage all other orders involved in the field of cases to be examined, to disassemble them and to satisfy requests addressed personally to the king, if possible.