Customs in Common

Bishop Blaize, the patron saint of woolcombers, was supposed to have invented wool-combing and to have been torn to pieces by the sharp-toothed wool “cards”. The combers’ society on this occasion recited the lines:

The Bishop Blaize procession was still being celebrated vigorously in Bradford (Yorks) in 1825. Bishop Blaize is still at the centre of the Kidderminster ticket of 1838 (Plate III).

Such iconography emphasizes an appeal by the early trade unionists to tradition, and an attempt by the journeyman’s club or union to take over from the masters’ guild or company the representation of the interests of “the Trade”. On occasion, the journeymen actually split from the masters’ company, as did the hammermen of Glasgow in 1748, who formed their own society, levied contributions, and elected a dean and masters on the pattern of the Masters’ Company. There are also several interesting cases of workers’ organizations which emerged in close — if antagonistic — relationship to older companies. Perhaps the most consistently militant group of eighteenth-century workers — the Newcastle keelmen — were undoubtedly thoroughly cognisant with the forms of the Company of Hostmen, with whom, indeed, they wrestled for control of their own charitable institutions. The keelmen combined two features not usually found together: on the one hand, they were numerous, subject to a yearly bond, and well-placed to employ the tactics of mass action, strike and intimidation. On the other hand, since a high proportion of their numbers were Scottish, and since the bond did not entitle them to a settlement in Newcastle, it was in their interests to provide systematically for sickness, injury and old age.¹¹

The Webbs may have been right to have demolished some of the romantic myths abroad in the 1880s and 1890s — myths which were fostered by some trade unionists themselves — as to the origin of trade unions in guilds. But what they understated was the notion of “the Trade”; and also the way in which, from the late seventeenth century, the demand for the enforcement of the apprenticeship clauses of the Statute of Artificers became a demand which, increasingly, the journeymen sought to turn to their own advantage, and hence which served as a bridge between the old forms and the new. Brentano was perhaps right when he declared: “trade unions originated with the non-observance of 5 Eliz. c. 4.” From the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century there is evidence of the continuity of these craft and trade traditions in the pottery, friendly society insignia, the emblems and mottos of early unions, and in the chapbooks and verses designed for each trade. This appeal to legitimacy and to precedent (in the Statute of Artificers) can be found in some Essex verses of the late seventeenth century:

They are also found in an “Ode to the Memory of Queen Elizabeth” which prefaces a report of a trial of a cause of apprenticeship involving the London saddlers in 1811:

Indeed, we may have one record of the actual moment of transition from guild to union, in the diary of a Coggeshall weaver, which contains the rules of the Company of Clothiers, Fullers, Baymakers, and New Drapers of Coggeshall (?1659-1698), followed by those transmitted from the Company to a short-lived “Combers’ Purse”, clearly a local club, formed “that we may show that love we have to our trade, and one to another for trade sake”.²²

The sense of trade solidarities, thus, could be strong. But to suppose that such trade fraternity was necessarily at odds with larger objectives or solidarities is quite false. The trade consciousness of London craftsmen in the 1640s did not inhibit support for John Lilburne. What trade consciousness may inhibit is economic solidarities between different groups of producers as against their employers; but if we lay aside this anachronistic postulate, we will find among eighteenth-century working men and women abundant evidence of horizontal solidarities and consciousness. In the scores of occupational lists which I have examined of food rioters, turnpike rioters, riots over libertarian issues or enclosure of urban commons, it is clear that solidarities were not segregated by trade; in a region where clothing workers, tinners or colliers are predominant, these obviously predominate in the lists of offenders, but not to the exclusion of other working occupations. I hope to have shown, in another place, that all these groups, during food riots, shared a common consciousness — ideology and objectives — as petty consumers of the necessities of life. But these people were consumers also of cultural values, of libertarian rhetoric, of patriotic and xenophobic prejudice; and on these issues they could exhibit solidarities as well. When, in the quiet 1750s, Princess Amelia tried to close access to Richmond New Park, she was opposed by a vigorous horizontal consciousness which stretched from John Lewis, a wealthy local brewer, to Grub Street pamphleteers, and which embraced the whole local “populace” (pp. 111-114). When, in 1799, the magistrates attempted to put down Shrove Tuesday football in the streets of Kingston, it was “the populace” and “the mob” who assembled and triumphantly defied their orders.¹¹ The mob may not have been noted for an impeccable consciousness of class; but the rulers of England were in no doubt at all that it was a horizontal sort of beast.

Let us take stock of the argument to this point. It is suggested that, in practice, paternalism was as much theatre and gesture as effective responsibility; that so far from a warm, household, face-to-face relationship we can observe a studied technique of rule. While there was no novelty in the existence of a distinct plebeian culture, with its own rituals, festivals, and superstitions, we have suggested that in the eighteenth century this culture was remarkably robust, greatly distanced from the polite culture, and that it no longer acknowledged, except in perfunctory ways, the hegemony of the Church. As dialect and polite speech drifted apart, so the distance widened.

This plebeian culture was not, to be sure, a revolutionary nor even a proto-revolutionary culture (in the sense of fostering ulterior objectives which called in question the social order); but one should not describe it as a deferential culture either. It bred riots but not rebellions: direct actions but not democratic organizations. One notices the swiftness of the crowd’s changes in mood, from passivity to mutiny to cowed obedience. We have this in the satirical ballad of the “Brave Dudley Boys”:

It is easy to characterise this behaviour as child-like. No doubt, if we insist upon looking at the eighteenth century only through the lens of the nineteenth-century labour movement, we will see only the immature, the pre-political, the infancy of class. And from one aspect, this is not untrue: repeatedly one sees pre-figurements of nineteenth-century class attitudes and organization; fleeting expressions of solidarities, in riots, in strikes, even before the gallows; it is tempting to see eighteenth-century workers as an immanent working class, whose evolution is retarded by a sense of the futility of transcending its situation. But the “to-fro lackeying” of the crowd itself has a history of great antiquity: the “primitive rebels” of one age might be seen, from an earlier age, to be the decadent inheritors of yet more primitive ancestors. Too much historical hindsight distracts us from seeing the crowd as it was, sui generis, with its own objectives, operating within the complex and delicate polarity of forces of its own context.

I have attempted in chapter 4 to reconstruct these crowd objectives, and the logic of the crowd’s behaviour, in one particular case: the food riot. I believe that all other major types of crowd action will, after patient analysis, reveal a similar logic: it is only the short-sighted historian who finds the eruptions of the crowd to be “blind”. Here I wish to discuss briefly three characteristics of popular action, and then return once again to the context of gentry-crowd relations in which all took place.

First is the anonymous tradition. The anonymous threat, or even the individual terrorist act, is often found in a society of total clientage and dependency, on the other side of the medal of simulated deference. It is exactly in a rural society, where any open, identified resistance to the ruling power may result in instant retaliation — loss of home, employment, tenancy, if not victimization at law — that one tends to find the acts of darkness: the anonymous letter, arson of the stack or outhouse, houghing of cattle, the shot or brick through the window, the gate off its hinges, the orchard felled, the fishpond sluices opened at night. The same man who touches his forelock to the squire by day — and who goes down to history as an example of deference — may kill his sheep, snare his pheasants or poison his dogs at night.

I don’t offer eighteenth-century England as a theatre of daily terror. But historians have scarcely begun to take the measure of the volume of anonymous violence, usually accompanied by anonymous threatening letters.

What these letters show is that eighteenth-century labouring men were quite capable, in the security of anonymity, of shattering any illusion of deference and of regarding their rulers in a wholly unsentimental and unfilial way. A writer from Witney, in 1767, urged the recipient: “do not suffer such damned wheesing fat guted Rogues to Starve the Poor by such Hellish ways on purpose that they may follow hunting horse racing &c and to maintain their familys in Pride and extravagance”. An inhabitant of Henley-on-Thames, who had seen the volunteers in action against the crowd, addressed himself to “you gentlemen as you are please to call Yourselves — Altho that is your Mistakes — for you are a sett of the most Damnable Rougs that Ever Existed”. (An Odiham author, writing on a similar theme in 1800, remarked “we dont care a Dam for them fellows that Call Themselves Gentlemen Soldiers But in our opinion the[y] Look moore like Monkeys riding on Bears”.) Sometimes the lack of proper deference comes through merely as a brisk aside: “Lord Buckingham,” a handbill writer in Norwich remarked in 1793, “who died the other day had Thirty Thousand Pounds, yeerly For setting his Arse in the House of Lords and doing nothing.”¹¹

These letters show — and they are dispersed over most parts of England, as well as parts of Wales — that deference could be very brittle indeed, and made up of one part of self-interest, one part of dissimulation, and only one part of the awe of authority. They were part of the countertheatre of the poor. They were intended to chill the spine of gentry and magistrates and mayors, recall them to their duties, enforce from them charity in times of dearth.

This takes us to a second characteristic of popular action, which I have described as countertheatre. Just as the rulers asserted their hegemony by a studied theatrical style, so the plebs asserted their presence by a theatre of threat and sedition. From the time of Wilkes forward the language of crowd symbolism is comparatively “modern” and easy to read: effigy burning, the hanging of a boot from a gallows; the illumination of windows (or the breaking of those without illumination); the untiling of a house which, as Rudé notes, had an almost ritualistic significance. In London the unpopular minister, the popular politician, needed the aid of no pollsters to know their rating with the crowd; they might be pelted with obscenities or chaired in triumph through the streets. When the condemned trod the stage at Tyburn, the audience proclaimed vociferously their assent or disgust with the book.

But as we move backward from 1760 we enter a world of theatrical symbolism which is more difficult to interpret: popular political sympathies are expressed in a code quite different from that of the 1640s of of the 1790s. It is a language of ribbons, of bonfires, of oaths and of the refusal of oaths, of toasts, of seditious riddles and ancient prophecies, of oak leaves and of maypoles, of ballads with a political double-entendre, even of airs whistled in the streets.¹¹ We don’t yet know enough about popular Jacobitism to assess how much of it was sentiment, how much was substance; but we can certainly say that the plebs on many occasions employed Jacobite symbolism successfully as theatre, knowing well that it was the script most calculated to enrage and alarm their Hanoverian rulers.²² In the 1720s, when an intimidated press veils rather than illuminates public opinion, one detects underground moods in the vigour with which rival Hanoverian and Stuart anniversaries were celebrated. The Norwich Gazette reported in May 1723 that Tuesday last, being the birthday of King George, was observed in the city “with all the usual demonstrations of joy and loyalty”:

And Wednesday being the Anniversary of the Happy Restauration of King Charles II, and with him of the royal family, after a too long and successful usurpation of sanctified tyranny, it was celebrated in this city in an extraordinary manner; for besides ringing of bells, firing of guns, and bonfires, the streets were strown with seggs, oaken boughs set up at the doors, and in some streets garlands and pictures hung out, and variety of antick and comick dances. . . (with) bumpers to the Glorious Memory of Charles II.

Manifestly disloyal as this was, not only to the King but also to the Great Man in his own county, it provided no handle to the law officers of the Crown.

This was a war of nerves, now satirical, now menacing. The arrows sometimes found their mark. In 1724 the king’s ministers were poring over depositions from Harwich where the loyal Hanoverian caucus had been insulted by a most unsavoury rough music:

while the Mayor and other Members of the Corporation were assembled in the Town Hall to Commemorate His Majesty’s Most happy accession to the Throne by drinking His Majesty’s and other most Loyal Healths, he this Deponent. . . did see from a Window. . . a person dressed up with horns on his head attended by a mob.

This “said Infamous Person”, John Hart, a fisherman, was being chaired about the town by one or two hundred others of equal infamy. They were “drumming a ridiculous Tune of Roundheaded Cuckolds &c, and [Hart] came to the Mayor’s and this Deponent’s door and made signs with his hands intimating that We might kiss his Arse”.¹¹

If some of the crowd’s actions can be seen as countertheatre, this is by no means true of all. For a third characteristic of popular action was the crowd’s capacity for swift direct action. To be one of a crowd, or a mob, was another way of being anonymous, whereas to be a member of a continuing organization was bound to expose one to detection and victimization. The eighteenth-century crowd well understood its capacities for action, and its own art of the possible. Its successes must be immediate, or not at all. It must destroy these machines, intimidate these employers or dealers, damage that mill, enforce from their masters a subsidy of bread, untile that house, before troops came on the scene. The mode is so familiar that I need only recall it to mind with one or two citations from the state papers. At Coventry, 1772:

On Tuesday evening. . . a great Mob to the Number of near 1,000 of the. . . lower class of People. . . assembled by Fife and Beat of Drum on Account, as they pretended, of a Reduction of Wages by. . . one of the principal Ribbon Manufacturers. . . They declared their intention to. . . pull down his House, & to demolish him, if they could meet with him. . . Every gentle Means was made use of. . . to disperse them, but without Effect, and by throwing Stones and breaking his Windows, they began to carry their Purpose into Execution.¹¹

About two on Thursday morning a great number of Colliers and Waggoners, Smiths and other common workmen [the horizontal beast again] came along the Bridge, released the prisoners, and proceeded in great Order through the Town with Bagpipes playing, Drum beating, and Dirty Clothes fixed upon sticks by way of Colours flying. They then increased to some thousands and were in possession of the principal Streets of the Town. The Magistrates met at the Guild Hall and scarce knew what to do.

In the result they panicked, scuffled with the crowd on the Guildhall steps, and fired a volley into it, killing more than one. In retaliation:

Stones flew in among us. . . through the windows like cannon shot. . . at length the mob broke in upon us in the most terrible outrage. They spared our lives indeed but obliged us to quit the place, then fell to plundering and destroying all about ’em. The several benches of justice were immediately and entirely demolished, the Town Clerk’s Office was broke open, and all the books, deeds, and records of the town and its courts thrown out of the window.²²

They broke into the Hutch and took out fifteen hundred pounds, they. . . broke down everything that was ornamental, two very fine capital Pictures of King Charles second and James second. . . they tore, all but the faces. . . and afterwards conducted the Magistrates to their own houses in a kind of Mock Triumph.³³

Once again, one notes the sense of theatre even in the full flush of rage: the symbolic destruction of the benches of justice, the Clerk’s books, the Tory corporation’s Stuart portraits, the mock triumph to the magistrates’ homes; and yet, with this, the order of their processions and the restraint which withheld them (even after they had been fired upon) from taking life.

Of course, the crowd lost its head as often as the magistrates did. But the interesting point is that neither side did this often. So far from being “blind” the crowd was often disciplined, had clear objectives, knew how to negotiate with authority, and above all brought its strength swiftly to bear. The authorities often felt themselves to be faced, literally, with an anonymous multitude. “These men are all tinners,” a customs officer wrote from St. Austell in 1766 of local smuggling gangs, “seldom seen above ground in the daytime, and are under no apprehensions of being known by us”.¹¹ Where “ringleaders” were detected, it was often impossible to secure sworn depositions. But solidarity rarely went further than this. If taken, the leaders of the crowd might hope for an immediate rescue, within twenty-four hours; if this moment passed, they could expect to be abandoned.

Other features might be noted: but these three — the anonymous tradition; countertheatre; and swift, evanescent direct action — seem of importance. All direct attention to the unitary context of class relationship. There is a sense in which rulers and crowd needed each other, watched each other, performed theatre and countertheatre in each other’s auditorium, moderated each other’s political behaviour. Intolerant of the insubordination of free labour, nevertheless the rulers of England showed in practice a surprising degree of licence towards the turbulence of the crowd. Is there some deeply embedded, “structural” reciprocity here?

I find the notion of gentry-crowd reciprocity, of the “paternalism-deference equilibrium” in which both parties to the equation were, in some degree, the prisoners of each other, more helpful than notions of a “one-class society” or of consensus or of a plurality of classes and interests. What must concern us is the polarization of antagonistic interests and the corresponding dialectics of culture. There is very articulate resistance to the ruling ideas and institutions of society in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries: hence historians expect to analyse these societies in some terms of social conflict. In the eighteenth century resistance is less articulate, although often very specific, direct and turbulent. One must therefore supply the articulation, in part by decoding the evidence of behaviour, and in part by turning over the bland concepts of the ruling authorities and looking at their undersides. If we do not do this we are in danger of becoming prisoners of the assumptions and self-image of the rulers: free labourers are seen as the “loose and disorderly sort”, riot is seen as spontaneous and “blind”, and important kinds of social protest become lost in the category of “crime”. But there are few social phenomena which do not reveal a new significance when exposed to this dialectical examination. The ostentatious display, the powdered wigs and the dress of the great must be seen also — as they were intended to be seen — from below, in the auditorium of the theatre of class hegemony and control. Even “liberality” and “charity” may be seen as calculated acts of class appeasement in time of dearth and calculated extortions (under threat of riot) by the crowd: what is (from above) an “act of giving” is (from below) an “act of getting”. So simple a category as “theft” may turn out to be, in certain circumstances, evidence of protracted attempts by villagers to defend ancient common right usages, or by labourers to defend customary perquisites. And following each of these clues to the point where they intersect, it becomes possible to reconstruct a customary popular culture, nurtured by experiences quite distinct from those of the polite culture, conveyed by oral traditions, reproduced by example (perhaps, as the century goes on, increasingly by literate means), expressed by symbolism and in ritual, and at a very great distance from the culture of England’s rulers.

I would hesitate before I described this as a class culture, in the sense that one can speak of a working-class culture, within which children were socialized into a value-system with distinct class notations, in the nineteenth century. But one cannot understand this culture, in its experiential ground, in its resistance to religious homily, in its picaresque flouting of the provident bourgeois virtues, in its ready recourse to disorder, and in its ironic attitudes towards the law, unless one employs the concept of the dialectical antagonisms, adjustments, and (sometimes) reconciliations, of class.

When analysing gentry-plebs relations one finds not so much an uncompromising ding-dong battle between irreconcilable antagonists as a societal “field-of-force”. I am thinking of a school experiment (which no doubt I have got wrong) in which an electrical current magnetized a plate covered with iron filings. The filings, which were evenly distributed, arranged themselves at one pole or the other, while in between those filings which remained in place aligned themselves sketchily as if directed towards opposing attractive poles. This is very much how I see eighteenth-century society, with, for many purposes, the crowd at one pole, the aristocracy and gentry at the other, and until late in the century, the professional and trading groups bound down by lines of magnetic dependency to the rulers, or on occasion hiding their faces in common action with the crowd. This metaphor allows one to understand not only the very frequent riot situation (and its management) but also much of what was possible and also the limits of the possible beyond which power did not dare to go.

I am therefore employing the terminology of class conflict while resisting the attribution of identity to a class. It seems to me that the metaphor of a field-of-force can co-exist fruitfully with Marx’s comment in the Grundrisse, that:

In all forms of society it is a determinate production and its relations which assign every other production and its relations their rank and influence. It is a general illumination in which all other colours are plunged and which modifies their specific tonalities. It is a special ether which defines the specific gravity of everything found in it.¹¹

This plebeian culture is, in the end, constrained within the parameters of gentry hegemony: the plebs are ever-conscious of this constraint, aware of the reciprocity of gentry-crowd relations, watchful for points to exert their own advantage. The plebs also take over to their own use some of the gentry’s rhetoric. For, once again, this is the century of the advance of “free” labour. And the distinctive feature of the manufacturing system was that, in many kinds of work, labourers (taking petty masters, journeymen and their families together) still controlled in some degree their own immediate relations and modes of work, while having very little control over the market for their products or over the prices of raw materials or food. This explains something of the structure of industrial relations and of protest, as well as something of the culture’s artefacts and of its cohesiveness and independence of control.¹¹ It also explains much of the consciousness of the “free-born Englishman”, who took to himself some part of the constitutionalist rhetoric of his rulers, and defended stubbornly his rights at law and his rights to white bread and cheap ale. The plebs were aware that a ruling-class that rested its claim to legitimacy upon prescription and law had little authority to over-rule their own customs and rights.

The reciprocity of these relations underlies the importance of the symbolic expressions of hegemony and of protest in the eighteenth century. That is why I have directed so much attention to the notion of theatre. Of course, every society has its own kind of theatre; much in the political life of contemporary societies can be understood only as a contest for symbolic authority. But I am saying more than that the symbolic contests of the eighteenth century were particular to that century and require more study. I think that symbolism, in that century, had a peculiar importance, owing to the weakness of other organs of control: the authority of the Church is departing, and the authority of the schools and the mass media have not yet arrived. The gentry had four major resources of control — a system of influence and preferment which could scarcely contain the unpreferred poor; the majesty and terror of law; the local exercise of favours and charity; and the symbolism of their hegemony. This was, at times, a delicate social equilibrium, in which the rulers were forced to make concessions. Hence the contest for symbolic authority may be seen, not as a way of acting out ulterior “real” contests, but as a real contest in its own right. Plebeian protest, on occasion, had no further objective than to challenge the gentry’s hegemonic assurance, strip power of its symbolic mystifications, or even just to blaspheme. It was a contest for “face”, but the outcome of the contest might have material consequences — in the way the poor law was administered, in the measures felt by the gentry to be necessary in times of high prices, in whether Wilkes was imprisoned or freed.

At least we must return to the eighteenth century, giving as much attention to the symbolic contests in the streets as to the votes in the House of Commons. These contests appear in all kinds of odd ways and odd places. Sometimes it was a jocular employment of Jacobite or anti-Hanoverian symbolism, a twisting of the gentry’s tail. Dr Stratford wrote from Berkshire in 1718:

Our bumpkins in this country are very waggish and very insolent. Some honest justices met to keep the Coronation day at Wattleton, and towards the evening when their worships were mellow they would have a bonfire. Some bumpkins upon this got a huge turnip and stuck three candles just over Chetwynd’s house. . . They came and told their worships that to honour King George’s Coronation day a blazing star appeared above Mr Chetwynd’s house. Their worships were wise enough to take horse and go and see this wonder, and found, to their no little disappointment, their star to end in a turnip.¹¹

The turnip was of course the particular emblem of George I as selected by the Jacobite crowd, when they were in good humour; in ill-humour he was the cuckold king, and horns would do instead of turnips. But other symbolic confrontations in these years could become very angry indeed. In a Somerset village in 1724 an obscure confrontation (one of a number of such affairs) took place over the erection of a maypole. A local land-owner (William Churchey) seems to have taken down “the Old Maypole”, newly dressed with flowers and garlands, and then to have sent two men to the bridewell for felling an elm for another pole. In response his apple and cherry orchard was cut down, an ox was killed and dogs poisoned. When the prisoners were released the pole was re-erected and “May Day” was celebrated with “seditious” ballads and derisory libels against the magistrate. Among those dressing the maypole were two labourers, a maltster, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a linenweaver, a butcher, a miller, an inn-keeper, a groom and two gentlemen.¹¹

As we pass the mid-century the Jacobite symbolism wanes and the occasional genteel offender (perhaps pushing his own interests under the cover of the crowd) disappears with it.²² The symbolism of popular protest after 1760 sometimes challenges authority very directly. Nor was symbolism employed without calculation or careful forethought. In the great strike of seamen on the Thames in 1768, when some thousands marched upon parliament, the fortunate survival of a document enables us to see this taking place.³³ At the height of the strike (7 May 1768), when the seamen were getting no satisfaction, some of their leaders went into a dock-side pub and asked the publican to write out in a good hand and in proper form a proclamation which they intended posting on all the docks and river-stairs. The publican read their paper and found “many Treasonable & Rebellious Expressions” and at the bottom “No W-, no K-” (i.e. “No Wilkes, No King”). The publican (by his own account) remonstrated with them:

Publican: “I beg Gentlemen you would not talk of compulsion or be guilty of the least Irregularity.”

Seamen: “What do you mean Sir, if we are not speedily redressed there is Ships & Great Guns at Hand which we will use as Occasion shall require in Order to redress Ourselves besides we are determined to unmast every ship in the River & then bid you, & Old England adieu & steer for some other country. . .”

The seamen here were only playing the same game as the legislature with their repeated enactments of capital offences and legislative overkill; both sides to the relation tended to threaten more than they performed. Disappointed by the publican the seamen took their paper to a schoolmaster who undertook this kind of clerical business. Once again the sticking-point was the conclusion to the proclamation — on the right hand “Seamen”, on the left hand “No W-, no K-”. The schoolmaster had more respect for his own neck than to be the author of such a paper. The following dialogue, by his own account, then ensued, although it is a somewhat unlikely conversation-piece on Shadwell stairs:

Schoolmaster: “Gentlemen I am so much Your Friend that I would by no means be an Instrument of doing you the greatest Injury by Proclaiming you Traitors to our Dread Sovereign Lord the King & raisers of Rebellion & Sedition amongst your fellow subjects and this I humbly conceive to be the Contents of Your Paper. . .”

Seamen: “Most of us have ventured our lives in defence of His Majesty’s Person, Crown and Dignity and for our native country and on all occasions have attacked the Enemy with courage & Resolution & have been Victorious. But since the conclusion of the War We Seamen have been slighted and our Wages reduced so low & Provisions so Dear that we have been rendered uncapable of procuring the common necessaries of Life for ourselves & Familys, and to be plain with you if our Grievances is not speedily redressed there is Ships & Great Guns enough at Deptford and Woolwich we will kick up such a Dust in the Pool as the Londoners never see before, so when we have given the Merchants a coup de grease [sic] we will steer for France where we are well assured we shall meet with a hearty welcome.”

Once again the seamen were disappointed; they exeunt on the line, “do you think such a Body of British seamen is to be dictated by an old Fusty School Master?” Somewhere they found themselves a scribe, but even this scribe refused the full commission. The next morning the proclamation duly appeared on the river-stairs, signed at the bottom right “Seamen” and on the left. . . “Liberty & Wilkes for ever!”.

The point of this anecdote is that at the very height of the seamen’s strike the leaders of the movement spent several hours going from pub to schoolmaster to scribe, in search of a writer willing to set down the biggest affront to authority which they could imagine: “No King”. The seamen may not have been in any reflective sense republicans; but this was the biggest symbolic “Great Gun” that they could fire off, and if fired with the seeming support of some thousands of British tars it would have been a great gun indeed.¹¹

Contrary to cherished legends, England was of course never without a standing army in the eighteenth century.²² The maintenance of this army, in Walpole’s years, was a particular cause of the Hanoverian Whigs. But for purposes of internal control this was often a small and emergency force. It was, for example, seriously over-stretched and inadequate to the needs of the situation during the riot year 1766. The permanent quartering of troops in populous districts was always impolitic. There was always delay, and often delay for several days, between the onset of disturbance and the arrival of the military. The troops, and equally their officers (whose power to act against civilians could be challenged in the courts) found this service “odious”.³³ Jealousy of the Crown, seconded by the avarice of the aristocracy, had led to the weakness of all the effective organs for the enforcement of order. The weakness of the State was expressed in an incapacity to use force swiftly, in an ideological tenderness towards the liberties of the subject, and in a sketchy bureaucracy so riddled with sinecurism, parasitism and clientage that it scarcely offered an independent presence.¹¹

Thus the price which aristocracy and gentry paid for a limited monarchy and a weak State was, perforce, the licence of the crowd. This is the central structural context of the reciprocity of relations between rulers and ruled. The rulers were, of course, reluctant to pay this price. But it would have been possible to discipline the crowd only if there had been a unified, coherent ruling class, content to divide the spoils of power amicably among themselves, and to govern by means of their immense command over the means of life. Such cohesion did not, at any time before the 1790s, exist, as several generations of distinguished historical scholars have been at pains to show.

The tensions — between court and country, money and and land, factions and families — ran deep. Until 1750 or 1760 the term “gentry” is too undiscriminating for the purposes of our analysis. There is a marked divergence between the Whig and Tory traditions of relations with the crowd. The Whigs, in those decades, were never convincing paternalists.²² But in the same decades there developed between some Tories and the crowd a more active, consenting alliance. Many small gentry, the victims of land tax and the losers in the consolidation of great estates against the small, hated the courtiers and the moneyed interest as ardently as did the plebs. And from this we see the consolidation of the specific traditions of Tory paternalism — for even in the nineteenth century, when we think of paternalism, it is Tory rather than Whig which we tend to couple with it. At its zenith, during the reigns of the first two Georges, this alliance achieved an ideological expression in the theatrical effects of popular Jacobitism.

By the ‘fifties this moment is passing, and with the accession of George III we pass into a different climate. Certain kinds of conflict between court and country had so far softened that it is possible to talk of the calculated paternalist style of the gentry as a whole. In times of disturbance, in handling the crowd, one may now forget the distinction between Whig and Tory — at any rate at the level of the practising JP — and one may see the magistracy as a whole as acting within an established tradition. To maintain a hold over the poor they must show themselves to be neither papists nor puritans. They must, at least in gestures, offer themselves as mediators. During episodes of riot, most JPs, of whatever persuasion, hung back from confrontation, preferred to intervene by moral suasion before summoning force. Indeed, the role of the JP in times of riot might almost be reduced to formula: “I was sure that one Firm Magestrate could have any day put an end to the Riot,” a Quaker merchant wrote to a friend about a sailors’ riot in North Shields in 1792:

By first speaking to the Sailors as a Majistrate ought to speak on such an Occasion, and, then put on the Man of feeling and Humanity and promise to lay all their grievances before Parliam^t. . .¹¹

This stance flowed sometimes from an element of active sympathy for the crowd, especially where the gentry felt themselves to be aggrieved at the profit which middlemen were making out of their own and their tenants’ corn. A riot in Taunton in 1753 (Newcastle was informed) had been provoked by “one Burcher who has the town mills, & who instead of corn grinds the poor, in short he is generally thought to deserve punishment, in a legal way, for malpractices of this kind. . .”²² Earl Poulett, the Lord Lieutenant of Somerset, clearly found men like Burcher to be a damned nuisance. They made work for him and for the bench; and, of course, order must be maintained. A general “rising” or state of riot brought other ill consequences in its train — the crowd became unmannerly, the locus for disloyal speeches and seditious thoughts, “for they will all follow one another sooner than listen to gentlemen when they are once risen”. Indeed, on this occasion “at last some of them came to talk a levelling language, viz. they did not see why some should be rich and others poor”. (There were even obscure murmurings about aid from France.)

The Impunity of those Rioters encouraged. . . subsequent ones. Gentlemen in the Commission are affraid to act, nor is it safe for them as their are no troops at Taunton, Ilminster &c &c only a grass guard. . . at Crewkerne without any officer. But it seems to be in general the disposition of those towns & of these gentlemen to let the spirit subside & not to provoke them for fear of the consequences.

The consequences feared were immediate ones: more damage to property, more disorder, perhaps physical threats to the magistracy. Earl Poulett was clearly in two minds on the matter himself. He would, if so advised by your Grace “get some of the principle Ring leaders convicted,” but “the disposition of the town, & neighbouring gentlemen (was) against it.” There is in any case, neither here nor in hundreds of similar exchanges in 1740, 1753, 1756, the 1760s and later, any sense that the social order as a whole was endangered: what was feared was local “anarchy”, the loss of prestige and hegemony in the locality, relaxing social discipline. It is usually assumed that the matter will, in the end, subside, and the degree of severity to be shown — whether a victim or two should or should not swing from the gallows — was a matter of calculated example and effect. We are back in a theatre once more. Poulett apologized to Newcastle for troubling him with these “little disturbances”. A Harwich fisherman giving a lewd Jacobite gesture had worried the king’s ministers more than many hundreds of men and women marching about the country thirty years later, demolishing mills and seizing grain.

In such situations there was a practised technique of crowd appeasement. The mob, Poulett wrote,

was appeased. . . by gentlemen going out & desiring to know what they wanted & what they wd have, apprising them of the consequences, & promising them the millers & bakers shd be prosecuted, that they wd buy up the corn & bring it to market themselves & that they shd have it in small quantitys as they wanted it.¹¹

But where the crowd offered a more direct threat to the gentry themselves, then the reaction was more firm. In the same year, 1753, West Yorkshire was disturbed by turnpike riots. Henry Pelham wrote to his brother that Mr Lascelles and his turnpike had been directly attacked: “at the head of his own tenants and followers only”. Lascelles had met the rioters and “gallantly thrashed them & took 10 prisoners”. The Recorder of Leeds had been threatened, “and all the active part of the magistrates with pulling down their houses, and even taking away their lives”. Against this, nothing but a maximum display of ruling-class solidarity would suffice:

I have endeavoured to persuade the few gentlemen that I have seen to be themselves more active. . . This affair seems to me of such consequence that I am persuaded nothing can entirely get the better of it but the first persons in the country taking an active part in defence of the laws; for if these people see themselves only overpowered by troops, and not convinced that their behaviour is repugnant to the sense of the first people of this country, when the troops are gone, hostilitys will return.²²

It is a text worth examination. In the first place, it is difficult to recall that it is the Prime Minister of England who is writing, and to the “Home Secretary”. What is being discussed appears to be the requisite style of private men of great property in dealing with an offence to their order: the Prime Minister is endeavouring to persuade “the few gentlemen that I have seen” to be more “active”. In the second place, the incident illustrates superbly the supremacy of cultural over physical hegemony. Troops afford less security than the reassertion of paternalist authority. Above all, the credibility of the gentry and magistracy must be maintained. At an early stage in disturbance, the plebs should be persuaded above all to abandon an insubordinate posture, to couch their demands in legitimate and deferential terms: they should learn that they were likely to get more from a loyal petition than from a riot. But if the authorities failed to persuade the crowd to drop their bludgeons and await redress, then they were willing on occasion to negotiate with them under duress; but in such cases it became far more probable that the full and terrible theatre of the Law would later perform its ghastly matinées in the troubled district. Punitive examples must be made, in order to re-establish the credibility of order. Then, once again, the cultural hegemony of the gentry would resume.

This symbolic contest acquires its significance only within a particular equilibrium of social relations. The plebeian culture cannot be analysed independently of this equilibrium; its definitions are, in some part, antitheses to the definitions of the polite culture. What I have been attempting to show, perhaps repetitiously, is that each element of this society, taken separately, may have precedents and successors, but that when all are taken together they add up to a sum which is more than the sum of the parts: it is a structured set of relations, in which the state, the law, the libertarian ideology, the ebullitions and direct actions of the crowd, all perform roles intrinsic to that system, and within limits assigned by that system, which limits are at the same time the limits of what is politically “possible”; and, to a remarkable degree, the limits of what is intellectually and culturally “possible” also. The crowd, at its most advanced, can rarely transcend the libertarian rhetoric of the radical Whig tradition; the poets cannot transcend the sensibility of the humane and generous paternalist.¹¹ The furious anonymous letters which spring up from society’s lower depths blaspheme against the gentry’s hegemony but offer no strategy to replace it.

In one sense this is a rather conservative conclusion, for I am endorsing eighteenth-century society’s rhetorical self-image — that the Settlement of 1688 defined its form and its characteristic relations. Given that that Settlement established the form of rule for an agrarian bourgeoisie¹¹ it seems that it was as much that form of State power as it was that mode of production and productive relations which determined the political and cultural expressions of the next hundred years. Indeed that State, weak as it was in some of its bureaucratic and rationalizing functions, was immensely strong and effective as an auxiliary instrument of production in its own right: in breaking open the paths for commercial imperialism, in imposing enclosure upon the countryside, and in facilitating the accumulation and movement of capital, both through its taxing, banking and funding functions and, more bluntly, through the parasitic extractions of its own officers. It is this specific combination of weakness and of strength which provides the “general illumination” in which all colours of that century are plunged; which assigned to the judges and the magistracy their roles; which made necessary the theatre of cultural hegemony and which wrote its paternalist and libertarian script; which afforded to the crowd its opportunity for protest and for pressures; which laid down the terms of negotiation between authority and plebs, and which established the limits beyond which negotiation might not go.

Finally, how far and in what sense do I use the concept of “cultural hegemony”? This can be answered at a practical or at a theoretical level. At a practical level it is evident that the gentry’s hegemony over the political life of the nation was effectively imposed until the 1790s. Neither blasphemy nor sporadic episodes of arson call this in question; these do not offer to displace the gentry’s rule but only to punish them. The limits of what was politically possible (until the French Revolution) were expressed externally in constitutional forms and, internally, within men’s minds, as taboos, limited expectations, and a disposition towards traditional forms of protest, aimed often at recalling the gentry to their paternalist duties.

But it is necessary also to say what this hegemony does not entail. It does not entail any acceptance by the poor of the gentry’s paternalism upon the gentry’s own terms or in their approved self-image. The poor might be willing to award their deference to the gentry, but only for a price. The price was substantial. And the deference was often without the least illusion: it could be seen from below as being one part necessary self-preservation, one part the calculated extraction of whatever could be extracted. Seen in this way, the poor imposed upon the rich some of the duties and functions of paternalism just as much as deference was in turn imposed upon them. Both parties to the question were constrained within a common field-of-force.

In the second place, we must recall once more the immense distance between polite and plebeian cultures, and the vigour of the authentic self-activity of the latter. Whatever this hegemony may have been, it did not envelop the lives of the poor and it did not prevent them from defending their own modes of work and leisure, and forming their own rituals, their own satisfactions and view of life. So that we are warned from this against pressing the notion of hegemony too far and into improper areas.¹¹ Such hegemony may have defined the outside limits of what was politically, socially, practicable, and hence influenced the forms of what was practised: it offered the bare architecture of a structure of relations of domination and subordination, but within that architectural tracery many different scenes could be set and different dramas enacted.

Eventually an independent plebeian culture as robust as this might even have nurtured alternative expectations, challenging this hegemony. This is not my reading of what took place, for when the ideological break with paternalism came, in the 1790s, it came in the first place less from the plebeian culture than from the intellectual culture of the dissenting middle class, and from thence it was carried to the urban artisans. But Painite ideas, carried through by such artisans to an ever wider plebeian culture, instantly struck root there; and perhaps the shelter provided by this robust and independent culture enabled them to flourish and propagate themselves, until they gave rise to the great and undeferential popular agitations at the end of the French Wars.

Theoretically I am saying this. The concept of hegemony is immensely valuable, and without it we would be at a loss to understand how eighteenth-century social relations were structured. But while such cultural hegemony may define the limits of what is possible, and inhibit the growth of alternative horizons and expectations, there is nothing determined or automatic about this process. Such hegemony can be sustained by the rulers only by the constant exercise of skill, of theatre and of concession. Second, such hegemony, even when imposed successfully, does not impose an all-embracing view of life; rather, it imposes blinkers, which inhibit vision in certain directions while leaving it clear in others. It can co-exist (as it did co-exist in eighteenth-century England) with a very vigorous self-activating culture of the people, derived from their own experience and resources. This culture, which may be resistant at many points to any form of exterior domination, constitutes an ever-present threat to official descriptions of reality; given the sharp jostle of experience, the intrusion of “seditious” propagandists, the Church-and-King crowd can become Jacobin or Luddite, the loyal Tsarist navy can become an insurrectionary Bolshevik fleet.

It follows that I cannot accept the view, popular in some structuralist and Marxist circles in Western Europe, that hegemony imposes an all-embracing domination upon the ruled — or upon all those who are not intellectuals — reaching down to the very threshold of their experience, and implanting within their minds at birth categories of subordination which they are powerless to shed and which their experience is powerless to correct. This may perhaps have happened here and there, but not in England, not in the eighteenth century.

It may now be helpful to restate, and also to qualify, some parts of this argument. When I first proposed it, in the nineteen-seventies, it was taken by some to have set up a more absolute dichotomy between patricians and plebs, with no intermediate forces of any serious influence, than I had intended. And criticism has turned upon the absence, in my analysis, of any role for the middle class. In such a reading, the emergence of a middle-class presence in the 1790s, and the radicalisation of a large section of the intelligentsia, appears as inexplicable, a deus ex machina.¹¹ And critics have complained of the “dualism” and bleak polarisation which ensues, of my failure to admit the middling orders as historical actors and “the neglect of the role of urban culture and bourgeois dissidence”.¹¹

I can agree that my bi-polar model may have more relevance to rural, small town and, especially, manufacturing districts expanding beyond any corporate controls (the locus of “proto-industrialisation”) than it does to the larger corporate towns and, certainly, to London. It was no part of my intention to diminish the significance of the growth throughout the century, in numbers, wealth and cultural presence, of the middling orders who came (in the terms of Jurgen Habermas²²) to create and occupy a “public sphere”. These include the groups described by John Brewer:

. . . lawyers, land agents, apothecaries, and doctors: middlemen in the coal, textile, and grain trades: carters, carriers, and innkeepers: booksellers, printers, schoolteachers, entertainers, and clerks: drapers, grocers, druggists, stationers, ironmongers, shopkeepers of every sort: the small masters in cutlery and toy making, or in all the various luxury trades of the metropolis.³³

The list could be much extended, and should certainly include the comfortable freeholders and substantial tenant farmers. And it is from such middling groups that Eley sees “the emergence and consolidation of a new and self-conscious bourgeois public”:

Ultimately related to processes of capitalist development and social transformation. . . processes of urban cultural formation, tendentially supportive of an emergent political identity and eventually linked to regional political networks; a new infra-structure of communications, including the press and other forms of literary production. . . and a new universe of voluntary association; and finally, a regenerate parliamentarism. . .⁴⁴

I can assent to all this. But this emergence and consolidation was a complex process, and a very slow one, eventuating over a hundred years and more. As Professor Cannon has noted:

Though there is much evidence that merchants and financiers, teachers and journalists, lawyers and architects, shopkeepers and industrialists prospered in Hanoverian England, the questions to be explained seem to me to be almost the opposite of Marxist historiography — not how did they come to control government, but why did they not challenge aristocratic domination until towards the end of the century?¹¹

The questions seem to me to be located in the actual historical record and not in any variety of historiography. And they continue to perplex historians of many persuasions. Certainly there were many prefigurements of middle-class “emergence” in urban politics. But, as John Brewer argues, middle-class independence was constantly constrained and brought back within the channels of dependency by the powerful controls of clientage:

The producers of luxury goods — of furniture, carriages, and clothing — retailers of all sorts, those, from prostitutes to dancing masters, who provided services for the rich, all these people (and they constituted a sizeable proportion of the metropolitan workforce) relied for their living on a culture centred upon the Court, Parliament and the London season.²²

This situation need not induce deference: it could generate resentment and hostility. What it could not do, until the arena of the market became more anonymous, was generate independence.

If we consider the ever-present controls of clientage, of patronage and “interest”, we are drawn back to the model of a bi-polar field of force, just as such bi-polar vocabulary was continually in the mouths of the historical actors themselves. Indeed, such a model of the social and political order was an ideological force in its own right. One of the ways in which patricians repelled the admission of the middle class to any share in real power was to refuse their admission to the vocabulary of political discourse. Patrician culture stubbornly resisted any allowance of vitality to the notion of “middle class” until the end of the century.¹¹ Moreover, it is an error to suppose that the growth in numbers and wealth of the “middling orders” necessarily modified and softened class polarisation in the society as a whole. In some circumstances it diverted hostilities; as we have seen (above pp. 43-46) the middling groups could serve to screen the landowner or great clothier. But so long as so many of the routes to office, preferment and contracts were controlled by the old and corrupt means of patronage, the growth in the numbers of the middling groups could only intensify the competition between them.²²

Hence my argument has not been about the numbers, wealth or even cultural presence of the middle class, but about its identity as an autonomous, self-motivated political actor, its effective influence upon power, its modification in any serious way of the patrician-plebs equilibrium. I do not wish to retreat from the propositions in this chapter, although I salute the significance of current research into middle-class institutions and into urban political life.

The argument is in part about power, and in part about cultural alienation. (See above, p. 5.) Critics have suggested that I and others of the older generation of “crowd historians”, by attending mainly to riots and protests, have excluded from view many other popular manifestations, including loyalist and patriotic ebullience, electoral partisanship, and uglier evidences of xenophobia or religious bigotry.³³ I am very willing to grant that these questions have not preoccupied me, and I am happy to see these absences being repaired by others.¹¹ Certainly, a more rounded view of the crowd is becoming available. But one hopes that the view does not become too round. Few generalisations as to the dominant political attitudes of the “plebs” across the eighteenth century are likely to stand, except that the crowd was highly volatile. Eighteenth-century crowds come in great variety, in every shape and size. In the early years of the century there were mughouse gangs, to be turned loose by politicians against their opponents. “I love a mob,” said the duke of Newcastle in his later years: “I headed a mob once myself. We owe the Hanoverian succession to a mob.”²² At no time is this volatility more manifest than at the end of the century. Generalisations as to the crowd’s political disposition will tell us one thing at the time of the Priestley Riots (1791); another at the height of the popularity of Tom Paine and Reform two or three years later. Revolutionary sentiments can be found in alehouse rhetoric and in anonymous threatening letters between 1797 and 1801 (years of the naval mutinies, the Irish insurrection, years of resistance to taxation and of fierce bread riots) and fervent popular loyalism and anti-Gallicanism can be found between 1803 and 1805 (years of invasion threat, of anger at Napoleon’s imperial expansion, which aroused the hostility even of former English “Jacobins”, years of mass enlistment in the Volunteers and of Nelson’s bitter-sweet victory at Trafalgar).

These swift transitions took place, of course, within individuals as well as within the mood of crowds. Allen Davenport, who came from a labouring family on the Gloucestershire-Wiltshire border, described how he came to Bristol in 1794, at the age of 19:

I was a bit of a patriot, and thought, at that time, that every thing that was undertaken by England was right, just, and proper; and that every other nation that opposed her was wrong and deserved chastisement. And that France who had just killed her king, exiled her nobles, and reviled and desecrated the Christian religion, was very wicked indeed; and I shouted “Church and King” as loud and as long as any priest or lord in the kingdom. And believed that England was not only justified, but that it was her bounden duty to put down, and if possible to exterminate such a desperate nation of levellers, blasphemers, and regicides! And that was the feeling of nine tenths of the people of England [in] 1794.¹¹

The eighteenth-century crowd was protean: now it employed Jacobite symbolism, now it gave full-throated endorsement to Wilkes, now it attacked Dissenting meetinghouses, now it set the price of bread. It is true that certain themes repeat themselves: xenophobia (especially anti-Gallicanism) as well as a fondness for anti-papist and libertarian (“free-born Englishman”) rhetoric. But easy generalisations should stop at that point. Perhaps in reaction to overmuch sympathy and defensiveness which was shown by crowd historians of my generation, some younger historians are willing to tell us what the crowd believed, and (it seems) it was always nationalistic and usually loyalist and imperialist in disposition. But not all of these historians have spent much time in searching the archives where the enigmatic and ambivalent evidence will be found, and those of us who have done so are more cautious. Nor can one read off “public opinion” in a direct way from the press, since this was written by and for the middling orders; an enthusiasm for commercial expansion among these readers was not necessarily shared by those who served by land or sea in the wars which promoted this expansion. In contrast to the populist tone of the 1960s it is very much the fashion of our own time for intellectuals to discover that working people were (and are) bigoted, racist, sexist, but/and at heart deeply conservative and loyal to Church and King. But a traditional (“conservative”) customary consciousness may in certain conjunctures appear as a rebellious one; it may have its own logic and its own solidarities which cannot be typed in a simple-minded way. “Patriotism” itself may be a rhetorical stratagem which the crowd employs to mount an assault upon the corruption of the ruling Hanoverian powers, just as in the next century the Queen Caroline agitation was a stratagem to assault King George IV and his court. When the crowd acclaimed popular admirals it might be a way of getting at Walpole or at Pitt.¹¹

We cannot even say how far explicit republican ideas were abroad, especially during the turbulent 1760s. It is a question more often turned aside with a negative than investigated. But we have the caveat of Sir John Plumb: “Historians, I feel, never give sufficient emphasis to the prevalence of bitter anti-monarchical, pro-republican sentiment of the 1760s and 1770s.”²² A similar thought has strayed across the mind of a more excitable historian, Mr J. C. D. Clark, who has quoted John Wesley in 1775, writing to the earl of Dartmouth about the “dangerously dissatisfied” state of the people “all over the nation” “in every city, town, and village where I have been”. The people “aim at” the king himself: “they heartily despise His Majesty and hate him with a perfect hatred. They wish to imbrue their hands in his blood; they are full of the spirit of murder and rebellion. . .”³³ One suspects that there are times during the 1760s and 1770s when a part of the English people were more ready to secede from the Crown than were the American colonists, but they had the misfortune not to be protected from it by the Atlantic ocean.

I stand, then, by the patrician/plebs model and the field-of-force metaphor, both for the structuring of power and for the dialectical tug-of-war of ideology. Yet it should not be supposed that these formulae supply an instant analytical resource to unpick the meaning of every action of the crowd. Each crowd action took place in a specific context, was influenced by the local balance of forces, and often found its opportunity and its script from the factional divisions within ruling groups or from issues thrown up in national political discourse. This question has been discussed cogently by Nicholas Rogers in Whigs and Cities; he (perhaps unfairly) suspects me of “essentialist” analytical procedures. If so, then Rogers is right and I am wrong, since his command of the material is superb, and his findings are supported by years of research and analysis of the urban crowd.¹¹ In Rogers’s view most urban crowd actions should be seen as taking place on “a terrain in which ideology, culture and power intersect”. In the early eighteenth century the rulers themselves, for their own reasons, opened this space for the crowd, allocating to it a client and subaltern role. High-church clergy and civic factionalists enlarged this space. The calendar of political aniversaries and celebrations — processions, illuminations, elections, effigy burnings, carnivalesque ebullitions — all allocated roles to the crowd and enlisted its participation. In this way in the four decades after 1680 “wide sections of the labouring populace” were drawn into the national political discourse:

Years of acute party strife, in a social context which allowed the common people greater cultural space, had created a dynamic and contentious political culture, centred around royal and national anniversaries, in which the populace itself was a vigorous participant.

It was only under this tutelage that the crowd learned to assert its own autonomy and, on occasion, select its own objectives. The crowd was now a phenomenon that “had to be cultivated, nurtured, and contained”, lest it should break out of its subaltern role.²²

I can accept and applaud Professor Rogers’s approach and its execution in his urban studies. It is preferable to a simple reduction to a dual patrician/plebs polarity, and — while it allows to the crowd less autonomy than I find (for example, in provincial food or turnpike or industrial or press-gang or anti-militia actions) — it replaces urban crowd actions within a more complex political and cultural context. But through all these complexities I still must posit the underlying polarity of power — the forces which pressed to enter upon and occupy any spaces which fell open when ruling groups came into conflict. Even where crowds were clearly managed and subaltern, they were never regarded by the rulers without anxiety. They might always exceed their permit, and the unlicensed crowd would fall back into the “essentialist” polarity, “transforming the official calendar into a carnival of sedition and riot”.¹¹ Underlying all crowd actions one can sense the formation which has been my object of analysis, the patrician/plebs equilibrium.

One component of this, the old pretences of paternalism and deference, were losing force even before the French Revolution, although they saw a temporary revival in the Church-and-King mobs of the early nineties, the military display and anti-Gallicanism of the wars. The Gordon Riots had seen the climax, and also the apotheosis, of plebeian licence; and inflicted a trauma upon the rulers which was registered in a growing disciplinary tone in the eighties. But by then the reciprocal relation between gentry and plebs, tipping now one way, now the other, had lasted for a century. Grossly unequal as this relationship was, the gentry nevertheless needed some kind of support from “the poor”, and the poor sensed that they were needed. For a hundred years they were not altogether the losers. They maintained their traditional culture; they secured a partial arrest of the work-discipline of early industrialism; they perhaps enlarged the scope of the poor laws; they enforced charities which may have prevented years of dearth from escalating into crises of subsistence; and they enjoyed liberties of pushing about the streets and jostling, gaping and huzzaing, pulling down the houses of obnoxious bakers or Dissenters, and a generally riotous and unpoliced disposition which astonished foreign visitors, and which almost misled them themselves into believing that they were “free”. The 1790s expelled that illusion, and in the wake of the experiences of those years the relationship of reciprocity snapped. As it snapped, so, in the same moment, the gentry lost their self-assured cultural hegemony. It suddenly appeared that the world was not, after all, bounded at every point by their rules and overwatched by their power. A man was a man, “for a’ that”. We move out of the eighteenth-century field-of-force and enter a period in which there is a structural reordering of class relations and of ideology. It is possible, for the first time, to analyse the historical process in terms of nineteenth-century notations of class.

¹ The Life of William Hutton (1817), p. 177.

² Jeanette Neeson gave me the term “gentry-made” for “the poor”.

³ F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (1963), p. 16.

⁴ See John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape (Cambridge, 1980).

¹ M. K. Ashby, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe (Cambridge 1961 and London, 1974).

² See my Whigs and Hunters (London and New York, 1975), and D. Hay, P. Linebaugh and E. P. Thompson (eds.), Albion’s Fatal Tree (London and New York, 1975).

³ P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford, 1989).

¹ “Proto-industrial” introduces new difficulties, but it is a more precise concept than “pre-industrial” and preferable for descriptive purposes.

² This impression was given in Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost (1965). For a stricter view of theories of patriarchy, see G. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (New York, 1975).

¹ This is from a very general passage in The German Ideology (1845). See Marx and Engels, Collected Works (1976), V, pp. 65-7. For the difficulties arising from the appropriation to somewhat different meanings of “patriarchy” in feminist theory, see below, pp. 499-503.

¹ Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780-1800 (1969), p. 42; Alexander Marchant, “Colonial Brazil”, in H. V. Livermore (ed.), Portugal and Brazil: an Introduction (Oxford, 1953), p. 297.

² See Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made (New York, 1969), esp. p. 96.

¹ They might have been surprised to learn that they belonged to a “consumer society”.

² See Laslett, ibid., p. 21.

¹ See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford, 1973), passim.

¹ See the instructive cases of Walpole’s entry into Richmond Park, and of General Pepper’s eviction from Enfield Chase in my Whigs and Hunters, Chapter 8.

¹ We should not forget that Namier’s great enquiry into the character of the parliamentary system originated as a study of “The Imperial Problem during the American Revolution”; see The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, Preface to first edition (1928).

¹ Blenheim MSS (Sunderland), D II, 8.

¹ J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole (1960), II, pp. 168-9.

² P. Langford, “William Pitt and public opinion, 1757”, English Historical Review, cccxlvi (1973). But when in power, Pitt’s “patriotism” was limited to the right hand of government only. The left hand, Newcastle, “took the treasury, the civil and ecclesiastical patronage, and the disposal of that part of the secret service money which was then employed in bribing members of Parliament. Pitt was Secretary of State, with the direction of war and of foreign affairs. Thus the filth of all the noisome and pestilential sewers of government was poured into one channel. Through the other passed only what was bright and stainless” (T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays (1880), p. 747.)

¹ Ibid., p. 746.

¹ I must emphasise that this is a view of the State as seen from “within”. From “without”, in its effective military, naval, fiscal, diplomatic and imperial presence, whether directly or indirectly (as in the para-State of the East India Company) it must be seen in a very much more aggressive aspect. John Brewer has helpfully analysed its military strength, and also the efficiency of its fiscal organisation and taxation bureaucracy — Treasury departments and the extensive excise service were comparatively free from the corruption and favours endemic in other government office — in The Sinews of Power (1989). This mixture of internal weakness and external strength, and the balance between the two (in “peace” and “war” policies) leads us to most of the real issues of principle thrown up in mid-eighteenth-century high politics. It was when the weaknesses inherent in the internal parasitism wreaked their revenges in external defeat (the loss of Minorca and the ritual sacrifice of Admiral Byng; the American disaster) that elements in the ruling class were shocked out of mere factionalism into a class politics of principle.

² But there has been a significant shift in recent historiography, to take more seriously into acccount relations between politicians and the political nation “without doors”. See J. H. Plumb, “Political man”, in James L. Clifford (ed.), Man versus Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1968); John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976); and Linda Colley, In Defence of Oligarchy: the Tory Party, 1714-1760 (Cambridge, 1982).

¹ “In our time the opposition is between a corrupt Court joined by an innumerable multitude of all ranks and stations bought with public money. and the independent part of the nation” (Political Disquisitions, or an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses (1774)). This, of course, is the critique of the old “country” opposition to Walpole also.

² C. F. Burgess (ed.), Letters of John Gay (Oxford, 1966), p. 45.

³ But note the relevant discussion in John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640-1832 (Cambridge, 1973), p. 49, note 1.

⁴ This is a consistent and persuasive theme of Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, op. cit., esp. chapter two.

⁵ See Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities (Cambridge, 1989).

¹ See especially P. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1700-1800 (Oxford, 1982); P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance (Oxford, 1989); P. Clark (ed.), The Transformation of English Provincial Towns, 1600-1800 (1984).

² Nicholas Rogers, “Aristocratic Clientage, Trade and Independency: Popular Politics in Pre-Radical Westminster”, Past and Present, 61, 1973.

³ “April 11 1779. . . There were Coaches at Church. Mr Custance immediately after the Ceremony came to me and desired me to accept a small Present; it was wrapped up in a Piece of white Paper very neat, and on opening of it, I found it contained nothing less than the sum of 4. 4. 0. He gave the Clerk also 0. 10. 6.” (The Diary of a Country Parson (1963), p. 152).

¹ “The letter-bag of every M.P. with the slightest pretensions to influence was stuffed with pleas and demands from voters for themselves, their relations or their dependents. Places in the Customs and Excise, in the Army and Navy, in the Church, in the East India, Africa and Levant Companies, in all the departments of state from door-keepers to clerks: jobs at Court for the real gentry or sinecures in Ireland, the diplomatic corps, or anywhere else where duties were light and salaries steady” (J. H. Plumb, “Political man”, p. 6).

² Hence Blake’s angry annotation to Sir Joshua Reynolds: “Liberality! we want not Liberality. We want a Fair Price & Proportionate Value & a General Demand for Art” (Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), The Complete Writings of William Blake (1957), p. 446).

³ For Place’s savage comments on deference and independence, see Mary Thale (ed.), The Autobiography of Francis Place (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 216-18, 250.

¹ Although the Country opposition to Walpole had central demands which were democratic in form (annual parliaments, curbs on placemen and corruption, no standing army, etc.), the democracy demanded was of course limited, in general, to the landed gentry (as against the Court and the moneyed interest) as is made clear by continued Tory support for landed property qualifications for MPs. See Quentin Skinner’s useful discussion (which, however, neglects the dimension of the political nation “without doors” to which Bolingbroke appealed). “The principles and practice of opposition: the case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole”, in Neil McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives (1974); H. T. Dickinson, “The eighteenth-century debate on the ‘Glorious Revolution’,” History, vol. lxi, 201 (February 1976), pp. 36-40; and (for the continuity between the platform of old Country party and new radical Whigs), Brewer, op. cit., pp. 19, 253-5. The Hanoverian Whigs also endorsed the high property qualifications for MPs: Cannon, op. cit., p. 36.

² See Brewer, op. cit., chapter 8; and, for one example of its provincial extension, John Money, “Taverns, coffee houses and clubs local politics and popular articulacy in the Birmingham area in the age of the American Revolution”, Historical Journal, (1971), vol. xiv, 1.

¹ Defoe, The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d (1724), p. 80. See Christopher Hill, “Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to Wage Labour in Sixteenth and Seventeenth century England”, in C. Feinstein (ed.), Socialism, Capitalism and Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1964).

¹ See A. Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981); R. W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, 1700-1780 (1981), pp. 71-4; Michael Roberts, “‘Waiting upon Chance’: English Hiring Fairs”, Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. I (1988).

¹ Defoe, op. cit., p. 97.

¹ Hants CRO, Eccles. II, 415809, E/BI2. See also Whigs and Hunters, pp. 126-30.

¹ Gwyn Williams in Artisans and Sansculottes (1968) writes of “the brief, bawdy, violent, colourful, kaleidoscopic, picaresque world of pre-industrial society, when anything from a third to a half of the population lived not only on the subsistence line but outside and sometimes against the law”. That is one way of seeing a part of this population: and this is confirmed by several studies in P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged (1991). However, another part of this population should not be stereotyped as bawdy, colourful and criminal: upward revisions of the numbers engaged in industry (including rural industries) — see especially P. H. Lindert, “English Occupations, 1670-1811”, J. Econ. Hist., 40, (1980) — the rediscovery of the “cottage economy” and of an English peasantry — see David Levine, Reproducing Families (Cambridge, 1987) and below p. 176 — and the whole body of work and discussion around “proto-industrialization” have all served to emphasise the substantial and growing sector of the eighteenth-century economy independent of gentry control.

² J. Mathews, Remarks on the Cause and Progress of the Scarcity and Dearness of Cattle (1797), p. 33.

¹ Memorial of John Hale, Clerk of Enfield manor court, to George II n.d. Cambridge Univ. Lib., Cholmondeley (Houghton) MSS, 45/40.

¹ Herald, or Patriot-Proclaimer, 24 September 1757. Even within the park gates the gentry complained of indiscipline. Thus, the servants in the great house were accused of intimidating house-guests by lining the hall on their departure and demanding tips or “vails”: see A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend, concerning the Custom of Giving and Taking Vails (1767).

¹ Even in the West of England, where clothiers were becoming gentlemen, a strong sense of distinction was still felt in the first half of the century. An “Englishman” wrote to Lord Harrington in 1738, to complain of “the contrivances and pride of the clothiers, as living in luxury, neglecting their business, trusting servants with the care of their affairs”, “beating down the wages of the poor”, and paying them in truck. The remedy (he suggested) lay in a commission of enquiry made up of “men of great fortunes”, who would be sufficiently independent to attend to the evidence of poor weavers: PRO, SP 36.47.

² Ibid.

³ Langhorne, The Country Justice (1774).

¹ As one example, on the marriage of Sir William Blacket with Lady Barbara Vilers, in 1725, much of Northumberland was enlisted in the celebrations. At Newcastle there were bonfires for two days, and the sounding of bells and guns. The great bell at Hexham burst with the boisterous ringing. At Wellington the crags were illuminated, and a large punchbowl cut in the rock, and filled with liquor, &c, Newcastle Weekly Courant, 2 October, 1725.

¹ London Magazine, viii, 1738, pp. 139-40. My thanks to Robert Malcolmson.

¹ Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law”, in Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree (1975).

² Montagu to Newcastle, 19 & 22 March 1727/8, PRO, SP 36.5, fos. 218-9, 230-1.

³ See Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged, op. cit. Thomas Laqueur’s assertion that the authorities had no “authorial” control over the executions is supported by anecdotal evidence of the Newgate Calendar kind (examples of cock-ups at Tyburn, sedulously copied in popular chronicles) but not by research into the sources (state papers, legal and military papers, etc.) relevant to such a judgement. Executions were not, as Laqueur supposes, “more risible than solemn”, and to present the Tyburn crowd as a “carnival crowd” is both to misunderstand the crowd and to libel “carnival”. Hanging days at Tyburn often enacted a conflict between alternative authorial scripts — that of the authorities and that of a resentful or brutalised Tyburn crowd. That sort of execution crowd was an execution crowd (and a carnival nothing). It was one of the most brutalised phenomena in history and historians ought to say so: see Laqueur, “Crowds, carnival and the state of English executions, 1604-1868”, in Beier et al, The First Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989). At times the crowd could express other kinds of solidarity with the condemned: see Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riots against the Surgeons”, in Hay et al., op. cit.

¹ John Brand and Henry Ellis, op. cit., Vol. I, p. xvii.

¹ Bodleian Library, MSS Hearne’s diaries, p. 175.

² R. W. Malcolmson, “Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850”, (Ph. D. thesis, Univ. of Warwick, 1970), pp. 11-17.

³ P. H. Ditchfield, Old English Customs (1896), p. 125.

⁴ Paul Bois, Paysans de l’Ouest (Paris, 1960), p. 307.

¹ Defoe, op. cit., p. 62.

¹ J. Horsfall Turner (ed.), The Rev. Oliver Heywood, B.A. (Brighouse, 1881), Vol. II, pp. 294, 271.

² Ibid., pp. 264, 294.

¹ J. Benson, Life of the Reverend John William de la Flechere (1805: 1835 edn.), p. 78, describing Madeley Wake in 1761. (My thanks to Barrie Trinder.)

² An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), in Henry Fielding, Complete Works (1967), Vol. xiii, p. 11. Cf. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (Penguin edn. 1970), pp. 257, 292-3.

¹ Ibid., p. 164.

¹ L. Brentano, On the History and Development of Guilds and the Origin of Trade Unions (1870).

² Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (1894/1920), chapter 1.

³ This question was re-opened by E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers”, in Labouring Men (1964), first published in Past and Present in 1952.

¹ For local and community trade union organisation, see Adrian Randall, “The Industrial Moral Economy of the Gloucestershire Weavers in the Eighteenth Century”, in John G. Rule (ed.), British Trade Unionism, 1750-1850 (1988), esp. pp. 29-35.

² Thus John Rule’s helpful collection on British Trade Unionism: the Formative Years takes 1750 as the starting date. C. R. Dobson, Masters and Journeymen: A prehistory of industrial relations (1980) covers the dates 1717-1800. See also R. W. Malcolmson’s valuable essay, “Workers’ combinations in eighteenth-century England”, in M. and J. Jacob (eds,), The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (1984), p. 160, note 38, gives a weavers’ combination in Bristol in 1707. John Rule discusses the question more closely in The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry (1981), esp. pp. 151-4. None of these authors seems to mention the extensive organisation of the Essex weavers in Colchester and region which much preoccupied the Privy Council in 1715. When the mayor of Colchester arrested some of their spokesmen, their fellows effected a rescue and “many hundreds of them Marched into Town, all armed with Pistols, Swords, or Clubs. . .” and also with a clear statement of their grievances and demands: see extensive documentation in PRO, PC 1.14. 101 Parts II and III.

¹ Depositions and examinations in PRO, KB 1.3. The offenders, who must have spent some months in prison, were ordered to pay £80 to the prosecutor (their master): British Journal, 19 February 1726; Newcastle Weekly Courant, 19 February 1726; Ipswich-Journal, 7 August 1725, cited by Malcolmson, op. cit., p. 160 (note 39), p. 157.

¹ A Particular Account of the Processions of the different Trades, in Manchester, on the day of the Coronation of their Majesties, King George the Third and Queen Charlotte (September 22, 1761), single sheet folio, Manchester Ref. Lib.

¹ J. M. Fewster, “The Keelmen of Tyneside in the Eighteenth Century”, Durham University Journal, n.s. Vol. 19, 1957-8.

² HMC Var. Coll. (1913), p. 581.

¹ Report of the Trial of Alexander Wadsworth against Peter Laurie before Lord Ellenborough, 18 May 1811 (1811), in Columbia Univ. Lib., Seligman Collection, Place Vol. xii.

² HMC Var. Coll. VIII (1913), pp. 578-584.

¹ Messrs Bytterwood, Cook, and Bradshaw to duke of Portland, 24 February 1799, PRO, HO 42.46. The magistrates complained that the military (at Hampton Court) failed to support them in suppressing the football or in enforcing the Riot Act, the officer-in-command absenting himself (despite prior notice). The duke of Portland annotated the complaint: “These Gentⁿ don’t appear to have managed this business as well as they might but their credit, as Magistrates, makes it necessary that care sh^d be taken of them.”

¹ I have improperly drawn lines from two different versions: Jon Raven, The Urban and Industrial Songs of the Black Country and Birmingham (Wolverhampton, 1977) version (b) p. 50, and Roy Palmer (ed.), Songs of the Midlands (Wakefield, 1972), p. 88.

¹ See my essay, “The Crime of Anonymity”, in Hay et al, op. cit.

¹ For the calendar of popular political symbolism (Jacobite and Hanoverian) see especially Rogers, Whigs and Cities, pp. 354-8.

² Despite the substantial advances in Jacobite historical studies, the evidence as to the dimensions of popular support remains slippery. An excellent assessment is in Nicholas Rogers, “Riot and Popular Jacobitism in Early Hanoverian England”, in Eveline Cruikshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759 (Edinburgh, 1982). Professor Rogers shows that the considerable volume of anti-Hanoverian and Jacobite manifestations (especially between 1714 and 1725) cannot be taken as an indication of organised commitment or of insurrectionary intent but should be considered as symbolic taunting of the Hanoverian rulers — “provocative, defiant, derisory” — and not the less important for that reason. Rogers has developed these insights in Whigs and Cities, passim, and he speculates (pp. 378-82) on the reasons for the marked decline in the Jacobite sympathies of English urban crowds between 1715 and 1745.

¹ Examinations and depositions in PRO, SP 44.124, fos. 116-132.

¹ Mayor and Corporation to “My Lord”, 7 July, 1772, PRO, WO 40.17.

² Mayor of Newcastle-upon-Tyne to duke of Newcastle, 27 June, 1740, PRO, SP 36.51.

³ Alderman Ridley, “Account of the Riots”, Northumberland CRO, 2 RI 27/8.

¹ PRO, WO 1.989.

¹ For a slightly different translation, see Grundrisse (Penguin, 1973), pp. 106-7. Even here, however, Marx’s metaphor relates not to class or social forms, but to co-existent dominant and subordinate economic relations.

¹ I am supporting here the argument of Gerald M. Sider, “Christmas mumming and the New Year in Outport Newfoundland”, Past and Present (May, 1976).

¹ HMC, Portland MSS, pp. vii, 245-6.

¹ PRO, KB 2 (1), Affidavits, Easter 10 G I, relating to Henstridge, Somerset, 1724. On George’s accession the common people of Bedford “put the May-pole in mourning” and a military officer cut it down. In August 1725 there was an affray about a maypole in Barford (Wilts.), between the inhabitants and a gentleman who suspected the pole had been stolen from his woods (as it probably was). The gentleman summoned a posse to his aid, but the inhabitants won: for Bedford, An Account of the Riots, Tumults and other Treasonable Practices since His Majesty’s Accession to the Throne (1715), p. 12; for Barford, Mist’s Weekly Journal, 28 August, 1725.

² However, as the maypole episodes remind us, the Tory tradition of paternalism, which looks backward to the Stuart “Book of Sports”, and which extends either patronage or a warm permissiveness to the recreations of the people, remains extremely vigorous even into the nineteenth century. This theme is too large to be taken into this chapter, but see R. W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850 (Cambridge, 1973); Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution (1980), chapters one and two.

³ William L. Clement Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Shelburne Papers, vol. 133, “Memorials of Dialogues betwixt several Seamen, a certain Victualler, & a S--l Master in the late Riot”.

¹ It is not clear whether the seamen who were preparing the handbill were authentic spokesmen for their fellows. Another eye witness of the seamen’s demonstrations recorded that “they boasted that they were for King and Parliament”: P. D. G. Thomas, “The St. George’s Fields ‘Massacre’ on 10 May 1768”, London Journal, Vol. 4, no. 2, 1978. See also G. Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford, 1962), p. 50; Brewer, op. cit., p. 190; W. J. Shelton, English Hunger and Industrial Disorders (1973), pp. 188, 190.

² See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power, op. cit., pp. 44-55.

³ See Tony Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Eighteenth-Century England (1978), chapters 2 and 3: also pp. 52-3 et passim.

¹ Despite his persuasive case for the strength of the English “fiscal-military state”, John Brewer concedes that “armed force was of very limited value in enforcing authority in England”: Brewer, op. cit., p. 63.

² Although great care was exercised to limit confrontations with the crowd: see Townshend’s correspondence with Vaughan, concerning the West of England weavers’ riots in January 1726/7, in PRO, SP 44.81 fos. 454-58: “His Majesty is always desirous that the Mildest Ways shou’d be used to quiet these Disturbances”; the employment of soldiers against the weavers is “very much against the King’s inclination”, “the King wou’d have no gentle ways omitted. . . [to] bring People to temper” etc.

¹ Friends House Library, Gibson MSS, Vol. ii, p. 113. Henry Taylor to James Phillips, 27 November 1792. My thanks to Malcolm Thomas.

² British Library, Newcastle MSS, Add. MSS 32, 732, Poulett to Newcastle, 11 July 1753.

¹ Ibid.

² Ibid., H. Pelham to Newcastle, 7 July 1753.

¹ I do not doubt that there was a genuine and significant paternalist tradition among the gentry and professional groups. But that is a different theme. My theme here is to define the limits of paternalism, and to present objections to the notion that eighteenth-century social (or class) relations were mediated by paternalism, on paternalism’s own terms.

¹ Professor J. H. Hexter was astonished when I uttered this improper copulation (“agrarian bourgeoisie”) at the Davis Center seminar in Princeton in 1976. Perry Anderson was also astonished ten years earlier: “Socialism and pseudo-empiricism”, New Left Review, xxxv (January-February 1966), p. 8, “A bourgeoisie is based on towns; that is what the word means.” See also (on my side of the argument), Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made, p. 249; and a judicious commentary on the argument by Richard Johnson, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, xi (Birmingham, Spring 1976). My re-statement of this (somewhat conventional) Marxist argument was made in “The peculiarities of the English”, Socialist Register (1965), esp. p. 318. Here I emphasise not only the economic logic of agrarian capitalism, but the specific amalgam of urban and rural attributes in the life-style of the eighteenth-century gentry: the watering-places; the London or town season; the periodic urban pasagerites, in education or in the various marriage markets; and other specific attributes of a mixed agrarian-urban culture. The economic arguments (already ably presented by Dobb) have been reinforced by Brenner, “Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe”, Past and Present, lxx, February 1976, esp, pp. 62-8. Additional evidence as to the urban facilities available to the gentry is in Peter Borsay, “The English urban renaissance: the development of provincial urban culture, c. 1680–c. 1760”, Social History, v (May 1977).

¹ In a relevant criticism of certain uses of the concept of hegemony, R. J. Morris notes that it can imply “the near impossibility of the working class or organized sections of that class being able to generate radical. . . ideas independent of the dominant ideology”. The concept implies the need to look to intellectuals for this, while the dominant value system is seen as “an exogenous variable generated independently” of subordinate groups or classes (“Bargaining with hegemony”, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, (Autumn 1977), pp. 62-3). See also Genovese’s sharp response to criticisms on this point in Radical History Review, Winter 1976-7, p. 98; and T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony”, American Hist. Rev. xc, 1985.

¹ See Geoff Eley’s helpful critique, “Re-Thinking the Political: Social History and Political Culture in 18th and 19th Century Britain”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte (Bonn), Band xxi, 1981. Also Eley, “Edward Thompson, Social History and Political Culture”, in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds.), E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Oxford, 1990).

¹ Linda Colley, “The Politics of Eighteenth-Century British History”, Journal of British Studies, 24, 1986, O. 366.

² Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere”, New German Critique, 3, Fall 1974.

³ John Brewer, “English Radicalism in the Age of George III”, in J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), Three British Revolutions (Princeton, N.J., 1980), p. 333.

⁴ Eley, “Re-Thinking the Political”, op. cit., p. 438.

¹ John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: the Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984), p. ix.

² Brewer, op. cit., p. 339. See also Brewer, “Commercialization and Politics”, in N. McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society (Bloomington, 1982).

¹ Paul Langford, op. cit., p. 653 notes the delay in the admission of “middle class” to general usage, and he comments that the middle class “was united in nothing more than in its members’ determination to make themselves gentlemen and ladies, thereby identifying themselves with the upper class”. I am indebted to Dror Wahrman of Princeton University for a sight of some of his unpublished research into the explicit and politically-motivated resistance to the admission of “middle class” to general usage.

² See Linda Colley, op. cit., p. 371: “If sociopolitical antagonisms were becoming sharper in the late eighteenth century (as I believe they were), one would expect to see both an increase in plebeian consciousness and bitterness, and a ruling group that was more avid for office, honors, wealth, and a discrete cultural identity.”

³ For one excellent study see John Walsh, “Methodism and the Mob in the Eighteenth Century”, in G. J. Cuming and D. Baker, Studies in Church History (Cambridge, 1971), Vol. 8.

¹ For example, Linda Colley, “The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760-1820”, Past and Present, 102, February 1984.

² James L. Fitts, “Newcastle’s Mob”, Albion, Vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 1973.

¹ Life of Allen Davenport (1845), pp. 18-19.

¹ Gerald Jordan and Nicholas Rogers, “Admirals as Heroes: Patriotism and Liberty in Hanoverian England”, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 28, no. 3, July 1989; Kathleen Wilson, “Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: the Case of Admiral Vernon”, Past and Present, 121, 1988.

² Plumb, “Political Man”, op. cit., p. 15.

³ J. Telford (ed.), Letters to the Rev. John Wesley (1931), Vol. vi, p. 178, cited in J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 236. It is not clear how far Mr Clark endorses Wesley’s alarmism.

¹ One looks forward eagerly to his forthcoming volume, Crowds, Politics, and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England, which promises to replace all previous studies. One also looks forward to Kathleen Wilson’s forthcoming, “The Sense of the People”: Urban Political Culture in England, 1715-1785.

² Rogers, Whigs and Cities, esp. pp. 351, 368-72.

¹ Ibid., p. 372.