Slide 4 plots the length of every petition in the dataset (after stripping out marginal annotations etc). The density of dots highlights more and less intense activity. Two things stand out: 1. they are short documents, mainly clustering between 150-250 words (average over whole period is just under 225 words, of which a fair chunk is the petition formalities); but 2. they're getting longer. There are 81 petitions of more than 750 words: 66 of them are after 1750. (This chart takes a little while to load, please be patient.) ⇛ next slide