Customs in Common

Chapter FourChapter Four

The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth CenturyThe Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century

He that withholdeth Corn, the People shall curse him: but Blessing shall be upon the Head of him that selleth it.

Proverbs xi. 26

We have been warned in recent years, by George Rudé and others, against the loose employment of the term “mob”. I wish in this chapter to extend the warning to the term “riot”, especially where the food riot in eighteenth-century England is concerned.

This simple four-letter word can conceal what may be described as a spasmodic view of popular history. According to this view the common people can scarcely be taken as historical agents before the French Revolution. Before this period they intrude occasionally and spasmodically upon the historical canvas, in periods of sudden social disturbance. These intrusions are compulsive, rather than self-conscious or self-activating: they are simple responses to economic stimuli. It is sufficient to mention a bad harvest or a downturn in trade, and all requirements of historical explanation are satisfied.

Unfortunately, even among those few British historians who have added to our knowledge of such popular actions, several have lent support to the spasmodic view. They have reflected in only a cursory way upon the materials which they themselves disclose. Thus Beloff comments on the food riots of the early eighteenth century: “this resentment, when unemployment and high prices combined to make conditions unendurable, vented itself in attacks upon corn-dealers and millers, attacks which often must have degenerated into mere excuses for crime”.¹¹ But we search his pages in vain for evidence as to the frequency of this “degeneration”. Wearmouth, in his useful chronicle of disturbance, allows himself one explanatory category: “distress”.²² Ashton, in his study of food riots among the colliers, brings the support of the paternalist: “the turbulence of the colliers is, of course, to be accounted for by something more elementary than politics: it was the instinctive reaction of virility to hunger”.³³ The riots were “rebellions of the belly”, and there is a suggestion that this is somehow a comforting explanation. The line of analysis runs: elementary — instinctive — hunger. Charles Wilson continues the tradition: “Spasmodic rises in food prices provoked keelmen on the Tyne to riot in 1709, tin miners to plunder granaries at Falmouth in 1727”. One spasm led to another: the outcome was “plunder”.⁴⁴

For decades systematic social history has lagged in the rear of economic history, until the present day, when a qualification in the second discipline is assumed to confer, automatically, proficiency in the first. One cannot therefore complain that recent scholarship has tended to sophisticate and quantify evidence which is only imperfectly understood. The dean of the spasmodic school is of course Rostow, whose crude “social tension chart” was first put forward in 1948.¹¹ According to this, we need only bring together an index of unemployment and one of high food prices to be able to chart the course of social disturbance. This contains a self-evident truth (people protest when they are hungry): and in much the same way a “sexual tension chart” would show that the onset of sexual maturity can be correlated with a greater frequency of sexual activity. The objection is that such a chart, if used unwisely, may conclude investigation at the exact point at which it becomes of serious sociological or cultural interest: being hungry (or being sexy), what do people do? How is their behaviour modified by custom, culture, and reason? And (having granted that the primary stimulus of “distress” is present) does their behaviour contribute towards any more complex, culturally-mediated function, which cannot be reduced — however long it is stewed over the fires of statistical analysis — back to stimulus once again?

Too many of our growth historians are guilty of a crass economic reductionism, obliterating the complexities of motive, behaviour, and function, which, if they noted it in the work of their marxist analogues, would make them protest. The weakness which these explanations share is an abbreviated view of economic man. What is perhaps an occasion for surprise is the schizoid intellectual climate, which permits this quantitative historiography to co-exist (in the same places and sometimes in the same minds) with a social anthropology which derives from Durkheim, Weber, or Malinowski. We know all about the delicate tissue of social norms and reciprocities which regulates the life of Trobriand islanders, and the psychic energies involved in the cargo cults of Melanesia; but at some point this infinitely-complex social creature, Melanesian man, becomes (in our histories) the eighteenth-century English collier who claps his hand spasmodically upon his stomach, and responds to elementary economic stimuli.

To the spasmodic I will oppose my own view.¹¹ It is possible to detect in almost every eighteenth-century crowd action some legitimising notion. By the notion of legitimation I mean that the men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs; and, in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community. On occasion this popular consensus was endorsed by some measure of licence afforded by the authorities. More commonly, the consensus was so strong that it overrode motives of fear or deference.

The food riot in eighteenth-century England was a highly complex form of direct popular action, disciplined and with clear objectives. How far these objectives were achieved — that is, how far the food riot was a “successful” form of action — is too intricate a question to tackle within the limits of a chapter; but the question can at least be posed (rather than, as is customary, being dismissed unexamined with a negative), and this cannot be done until the crowd’s own objectives are identified. It is of course true that riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpractices among dealers, or by hunger. But these grievances operated within a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc. This in its turn was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action.

While this moral economy cannot be described as “political” in any advanced sense, nevertheless it cannot be described as unpolitical either, since it supposed definite, and passionately held, notions of the common weal — notions which, indeed, found some support in the paternalist tradition of the authorities; notions which the people re-echoed so loudly in their turn that the authorities were, in some measure, the prisoners of the people. Hence this moral economy impinged very generally upon eighteenth-century government and thought, and did not only intrude at moments of disturbance. The word “riot” is too small to encompass all this.

As we speak of the cash-nexus which emerged through the industrial revolution, so there is a sense in which we can speak of the eighteenth-century bread-nexus. The conflict between the countryside and the town was mediated by the price of bread. The conflict between traditionalism and the new political economy turned upon the Corn Laws. Economic class-conflict in nineteenth-century England found its characteristic expression in the matter of wages; in eighteenth-century England the working people were most quickly inflamed to action by rising prices.

This highly-sensitive consumer-consciousness co-existed with the great age of agricultural improvement, in the corn belt of the East and South. Those years which brought English agriculture to a new pitch of excellence were punctuated by the riots — or, as contemporaries often described them, the “insurrections” or “risings of the poor” — of 1709, 1740, 1756-7, 1766-7, 1773, 1782, and, above all, 1795 and 1800-1. This buoyant capitalist industry floated upon an irascible market which might at any time dissolve into marauding bands, who scoured the countryside with bludgeons, or rose in the market-place to “set the price” of provisions at the popular level. The fortunes of those most vigorous capitalist classes rested, in the final analysis, upon the sale of cereals, meat, wool; and the first two must be sold, with little intermediary processing, to the millions who were the consumers. Hence the frictions of the market-place take us into a central area of the nation’s life.

The labouring people in the eighteenth century did not live by bread alone, but (as the budgets collected by Eden and David Davies show) many of them lived very largely on bread. This bread was not altogether wheaten, although wheaten bread gained ground steadily over other varieties until the early 1790s. In the 1760s Charles Smith estimated that of a supposed population of about six millions in England and Wales, 3,750,000 were wheat-eaters, 888,000 ate rye, 739,000 ate barley, and 623,000 oats.¹¹ By 1790 we may judge that at least two-thirds of the population were eating wheat.²² The pattern of consumption reflected, in part, comparative degrees of poverty, and, in part, ecological conditions. Districts with poor soils and upland districts (like the Pennines) where wheat will not ripen, were the strongholds of other cereals. Still, in the 1790s, the Cornish tinners subsisted largely on barley bread. Much oatmeal was consumed in Lancashire and Yorkshire — and not only by the poor.³³ Accounts from Northumberland conflict, but it would seem that Newcastle and many of the surrounding pit villages had by then gone over to wheat, while the countryside and smaller towns subsisted on oatmeal, rye bread, maslin,⁴⁴ or a mixture of barley and “gray pease”.⁵⁵

Through the century, again, white bread was gaining upon darker wholemeal varieties. This was partly a matter of status-values which became attached to white bread, but by no means wholly so. The problem is most complex, but several aspects may be briefly mentioned. It was to the advantage of bakers and of millers to sell white bread or fine flour, since the profit which might be gained from such sales was, in general, larger. (Ironically, this was in part a consequence of paternalist consumer-protection, since the Assize of Bread was intended to prevent the bakers from taking their profit from the bread of the poor; hence it was in the baker’s interest to make as little “household” bread as possible, and that little nasty.¹¹) In the cities, which were alert to the dangers of adulteration, dark bread was suspect as offering easy concealment for noxious additives. In the last decades of the century many millers adapted their machinery and bolting-cloths, so that they were not in fact able to dress the flour for the intermediary “household” loaf, producing only the finer qualities for the white loaf and the “offal” for a brown loaf which one observer found “so musty, griping, and pernicious as to endanger the constitution”.²² The attempts of the authorities, in times of scarcity, to impose the manufacture of coarser grades (or, as in 1795, the general use of the “household” loaf), were attended by many difficulties, and often resistance by both millers and bakers.³³

By the end of the century feelings of status were profoundly involved wherever wheaten bread prevailed, and was threatened by a coarser mixture. There is a suggestion that labourers accustomed to wheaten bread actually could not work — suffered from weakness, indigestion, or nausea — if forced to change to rougher mixtures.⁴⁴ Even in the face of the outrageous prices of 1795 and 1800-1, the resistance of many of the working people was impermeable.⁵⁵ The Guild Stewards of Calne informed the Privy Council in 1796 that “creditable” people were using the barley-and-wheat mixture required by authority, and that the manufacturing and labouring poor with large families

have in general used barley bread alone. The rest, making perhaps something about one-third of the poor manufactures and others, with smaller families (saying they could get nothing but bread) have, as before the scarcity, eat nothing but baker’s bread, made of wheatmeal called seconds.¹¹

The Bailiff of Reigate reported in similar terms:

. . . as to the poor labourers who have scarce any sustenance but bread, & from the custom of the neighbourhood have always eaten bread made of wheat only; amongst these I have neither urged nor wished a mixture of bread, least they should not be nourished sufficiently to support their labour.

Those few labourers who had tried a mixture “found themselves feeble, hot, & unable to labour with any degree of vigor”.²² When, in December 1800, the government introduced an Act (popularly known as the Brown Bread Act or “Poison Act”) which prohibited millers from making any other than wholemeal flour, the response of the people was immediate. At Horsham (Sussex),

A number of women. . . proceeded to Gosden wind-mill, where, abusing the miller for having served them with brown flour, they seized on the cloth with which he was then dressing meal according to the directions of the Bread Act, and cut it into a thousand pieces; threatening at the same time to serve all similar utensils he might in future attempt to use in the same manner. The amazonian leader of this petticoated cavalcade afterwards regaled her associates with a guinea’s worth of liquor at the Crab Tree public-house.

As a result of such actions, the Act was repealed in less than two months.¹¹

When prices were high, more than one-half of the weekly budget of a labourer’s family might be spent on bread.²² How did these cereals pass, from the crops growing in the field, to the labourers’ homes? At first sight it appears simple. There is the corn: it is harvested, threshed, taken to market, ground at the mill, baked, and eaten. But at every point within this process there are radiating complexities, opportunities for extortion, flash-points around which riots could arise. And it is scarcely possible to proceed further without sketching out, in a schematic way, the paternalist model of the marketing and manufacturing process — the traditional platonic ideal appealed to in Statute, pamphlet, or protest movement — against which the awkward realities of commerce and consumption were in friction.

The paternalist model existed in an eroded body of Statute law, as well as common law and custom. It was the model which, very often, informed the actions of government in times of emergency until the 1770s; and to which many local magistrates continued to appeal. In this model, marketing should be, so far as possible, direct, from the farmer to the consumer. The farmers should bring their corn in bulk to the local pitching market; they should not sell it while standing in the field, nor should they withhold it in the hope of rising prices. The markets should be controlled; no sales should be made before stated times, when a bell would ring; the poor should have the opportunity to buy grain, flour, or meal first, in small parcels, with duly-supervised weights and measures. At a certain hour, when their needs were satisfied, a second bell would ring, and larger dealers (duly licensed) might make their purchases. Dealers were hedged around with many restrictions, inscribed upon the musty parchments of the laws against forestalling, regrating and engrossing, codified in the reign of Edward VI. They must not buy (and farmers must not sell) by sample. They must not buy standing crops, nor might they purchase to sell again (within three months) in the same market at a profit, or in neighbouring markets, and so on. Indeed, for most of the eighteenth century the middleman remained legally suspect, and his operations were, in theory, severely restricted.¹¹

From market-supervision we pass to consumer-protection. Millers and — to a greater degree — bakers were considered as servants of the community, working not for a profit but for a fair allowance. Many of the poor would buy their grain direct in the market (or obtain it as supplement to wages or in gleaning); they would take it to the mill to be ground, where the miller might exact a customary toll, and then would bake their own bread. In London and those large towns where this had long ceased to be the rule, the baker’s allowance or profit was calculated strictly according to the Assize of Bread, whereby either the price or the weight of the loaf was ordered in relation to the ruling price of wheat.²²

This model, of course, parts company at many points with eighteenth-century realities. What is more surprising is to note how far parts of it were still operative. Thus Aikin in 1795 is able to describe the orderly regulation of Preston market:

The weekly markets. . . are extremely well regulated to prevent forestalling and regrating. None but the town’s-people are permitted to buy during the first hour, which is from eight to nine in the morning: at nine others may purchase: but nothing unsold must be withdrawn from the market till one o’clock, fish excepted. . .¹¹

J. Aikin, A Description of the Country from thirty to forty Miles round Manchester (1795), p. 286. One of the best surviving records of a well-regulated market in the eighteenth century is that of Manchester. Here market lookers for fish and flesh, for corn weights and measures, for white meats, for the Assize of Bread, aletasters, and officers to prevent “engrossing, forestalling and regretting” were appointed throughout the century, and fines for short weight and measure, unmarketable meat, etc. were frequent until the 1750s; supervision thereafter was somewhat more perfunctory (although continuing) with a revival of vigilance in the 1790s. Fines were imposed for selling loads of grain before the market bell in 1734, 1737, and 1748 (when William Wyat was fined 20s. “for selling before the Bell rung and declaring he would sell at any Time of the Day in Spite of either Lord of the Mannor or any person else”), and again in 1766. The Court Leet Records of the Manor of Manchester, ed. J. P. Earwaker (Manchester, 1888/9), vii, viii and ix, passim. For the regulation of forestalling at Manchester, see note 3 on p. 209.

In the same year in the South-West (another area noted for traditionalism) the city authorities at Exeter attempted to control “hucksters, higlers, and retailers” by excluding them from the market between 8 a.m. and noon, at which hours the Guildhall bell would be rung.²² The Assize of Bread was still effective throughout the eighteenth century in London and in many market towns.³³ If we follow through the case of sale by sample we may observe how dangerous it is to assume prematurely the dissolution of the customary restrictions.

It is often supposed that sale of corn by sample was general by the middle of the seventeenth century, when Best describes the practice in East Yorkshire,⁴⁴ and certainly by 1725, when Defoe gave his famous account of the corn trade.⁵⁵ But, while many large farmers were no doubt selling by sample in most counties by this date, the old pitching markets were still common, and even survived in the environs of London. In 1718 a pamphleteer described the decline of country markets as having taken place only in recent years:

One can see little else besides toy-shops and stalls for bawbles and knickknacks. . . The tolls are sunk to nothing; and where, in the memory of many inhabitants, there us’d to come to town upon a day, one, two, perhaps three, and in some boroughs, four hundred loads of corn, now grass grows in the market-place.

The farmers (he complained) had come to shun the market and to deal with jobbers and other “interlopers” at their doors. Other farmers still brought to market a single load “to make a show of a market, and to have a Price set”, but the main business was done in “parcels of corn in a bag or handkerchief which are called samples”.¹¹

This was, indeed, the drift of things. But many smaller farmers continued to pitch their grain in the market as before; and the old model remained in men’s minds as a source of resentment. Again and again the new marketing procedures were contested. In 1710 a petition on behalf of the poor people of Stony Stratford (Buckinghamshire) complains that the farmers and dealers were “buying and selling in the farmyards and att their Barne Doores soo that now the poor Inhabitants cannot have a Grist at reasonable rates for our money which is a Great Calamity”.²² In 1733 several boroughs petitioned the House of Commons against the practice: Haslemere (Surrey) complained of millers and mealmen engrossing the trade — they “secretly bought great quantities of corn by small samples, refusing to buy such as hath been pitch’d in open market”.³³ There is a suggestion of something underhand in the practice, and of a loss of transparency in the marketing procedure.

As the century advances the complaints do not die down, although they tend to move northwards and westwards. In the dearth of 1756 the Privy Council, in addition to setting in motion the old laws against forestalling, issued a proclamation enjoining “all farmers, under severe penalties, to bring their corn to open market, and not to sell by sample at their own dwellings”.¹¹ But the authorities did not like to be pressed on the point too closely: in 1766 (another year of scarcity) the Surrey magistrates enquired whether buying by sample in fact remained a punishable offence, and received a portentously evasive reply — H.M.’s Secretary is not by his office entitled to give interpretation to the Laws.²²

Two letters give some insight into the spread of new practices towards the West. A correspondent writing to Lord Shelburne in 1766 accused the dealers and millers at Chippenham of “confederacy”:

He himself sent to market for a quarter of wheat, and though there were many loads there, and it soon after the market bell rang, wherever his agent applied, the answer was “ ’Tis sold”. So that, though. . . to avoid the penalty of the law, they bring it to market, yet the bargain is made before, and the market is but a farce. . .³³

(Such practices could be the actual occasion of riot: in June 1757 it was reported that “the population rose at Oxford and in a few minutes seized and divided a load of corn that was suspected to have been bought by sample, and only brought to the market to save appearances”.⁴⁴) The second letter, from a correspondent in Dorchester in 1772, describes a different practice of market-fixing: he claimed that the great farmers got together to fix the price before the market,

and many of these men won’t sell less than forty bushels, which the poor can’t purchase. Therefore the miller, who is no enemy to the farmer, gives the price he asks and the poor must come to his terms.⁵⁵

Paternalists and the poor continued to complain at the extension of market practices which we, looking back, tend to assume as inevitable and “natural”.¹¹ But what may now appear as inevitable was not, in the eighteenth century necessarily a matter for approval. A characteristic pamphlet (of 1768) exclaimed indignantly against the supposed liberty of every farmer to do as he likes with his own. This would be a “natural”, not a “civil” liberty.

It cannot then be said to be the liberty of a citizen, or of one who lives under the protection of any community; it is rather the liberty of a savage; therefore he who avails himself thereof, deserves not that protection, the power of Society affords.

Attendance of the farmer at market is “a material part of his duty; he should not be suffered to secret or to dispose of his goods elsewhere”.²² But after the 1760s the pitching markets performed so little function in most parts of the South and the Midlands that, in these districts, the complaint against sample-sale is less often heard, although the complaint that the poor cannot buy in small parcels is still being made at the end of the century.³³ In parts of the North it was a different matter. A petition of Leeds labourers in 1795 complains of the “corn factors and the millers and a set of peopul which we call hucksters and mealmen who have got the corn into thare hands that they may hold it up and sell it at thare owne price or they will not sell it.” “The farmers carry no corn to market but what they carre in thare pocket for thare sample. . . which cause the poore to groane very much.”¹¹ So long it took for a process, which is often dated from at least one hundred years earlier, to work its way out.

This example has been followed to illustrate the density and particularity of the detail, the diversity of local practices, and the way in which popular resentment could arise as old market practices changed. The same density, the same diversity, exists throughout the scarcely-charted area of marketing. The paternalist model was, of course, breaking down at many other points. The Assize of Bread, although effective in checking the profits of bakers, simply reflected the ruling price of wheat or flour, and could in no way influence these. The millers were now, in Hertfordshire and the Thames Valley, very substantial entrepreneurs, and sometimes dealers in grain or malt as well as large-scale manufacturers of flour.²² Outside the main corn-growing districts, urban markets simply could not be supplied without the operation of factors whose activities would have been nullified if legislation against forestallers had been strictly enforced.

How far did the authorities recognise that their model was drifting apart from reality? The answer must change with the authorities concerned and with the advance of the century. But a general answer can be offered: the paternalists did, in their normal practice, recognise much of the change, but they referred back to this model whenever emergency arose. In this they were in part the prisoners of the people, who adopted parts of the model as their right and heritage. There is even an impression that ambiguity was actually welcomed. It gave magistrates in disturbed districts, in time of dearth, some room for manoeuvre, and some endorsement to their attempts to reduce prices by suasion. When the Privy Council authorised (as it did in 1709, 1740, 1756 and 1766) the posting of proclamations in unreadable Gothic type threatening dire penalties against forestallers, badgers, laders, broggers, hucksters, etc., it helped the magistrates to put the fear of God into local millers and dealers. It is true that the legislation against forestallers was repealed in 1772; but the repealing act was not well drawn, and during the next major scarcity in 1795 Lord Kenyon, the chief justice, took it upon himself to announce that “forestalling remained an indictable offence at common law: “though the act of Edward VI be repealed (whether wisely or unwisely I take not upon me to say) yet it still remains an offence at common law, co-eval with the constitution. . .”.¹¹ The trickle of prosecutions which can be observed throughout the century — usually for petty offences and only in years of scarcity — did not dry up: indeed, there were probably more in 1795 and 1800-1 than at any time in the previous twenty-five years.²² But it is clear that they were designed for symbolic effect, as demonstrations to the poor that the authorities were acting vigilantly in their interests.

Hence the paternalist model had an ideal existence, and also a fragmentary real existence. In years of good harvests and moderate prices, the authorities lapsed into forgetfulness. But if prices rose and the poor became turbulent, it was revived, at least for symbolic effect.

III

Few intellectual victories have been more overwhelming than that which the proponents of the new political economy won in the matter of the regulation of the internal corn trade. Indeed, so absolute has the victory seemed to some historians that they can scarcely conceal their impatience with the defeated party.¹¹ The model of the new political economy may, with convenience, be taken as that of Adam Smith, although The Wealth of Nations may be seen not only as a point of departure but also as a grand central terminus to which many important lines of discussion in the middle of the eighteenth century (some of them, like Charles Smith’s lucid Tracts on the Corn Trade (1758-9), specifically concerned to demolish the old paternalist market regulation) all run. The debate between 1767 and 1772 which culminated in the repeal of legislation against forestalling, signalled a victory, in this area, for laissez-faire four years before Adam Smith’s work was published.

This signified less a new model than an anti-model — a direct negative to the disintegrating Tudor policies of “provision”. “Let every act that regards the corn laws be repealed”, wrote Arbuthnot in 1773; “Let corn flow like water, and it will find its level”.²² The “unlimited, unrestrained freedom of the corn trade” was also the demand of Adam Smith.³³ The new economy entailed a de-moralising of the theory of trade and consumption no less far-reaching than the more widely-debated dissolution of restrictions upon usury.⁴⁴ By “de-moralising” it is not suggested that Smith and his colleagues were immoral⁵⁵ or were unconcerned for the public good.¹¹ It is meant, rather, that the new political economy was disinfested of intrusive moral imperatives. The old pamphleteers were moralists first and economists second. In the new economic theory questions as to the moral polity of marketing do not enter, unless as preamble and peroration.

In practical terms, the new model worked in this way. The natural operation of supply and demand in the free market would maximise the satisfaction of all parties and establish the common good. The market was never better regulated than when it was left to regulate itself. In the course of a normal year, the price of corn would adjust itself through the market mechanism. Soon after harvest the small farmers, and all those with harvest wages and Michaelmas rents to pay, would thresh out their corn and bring it to market, or release what they had pre-contracted to sell. From September to Christmas low prices might be expected. The middling farmers would hold their corn, in the hope of a rising market, until the early spring; while the most opulent farmers and farming gentry would hold some of theirs until still later — from May to August — in expectation of catching the market at the top. In this way the nation’s corn reserves were conveniently rationed, by the price mechanism, over fifty-two weeks, without any intervention by the State. Insofar as middlemen intervened and contracted for the farmers’ crops in advance, they performed this service of rationing even more efficiently. In years of dearth the price of grain might advance to uncomfortable heights; but this was providential, since (apart from providing an incentive to the importer) it was again an effective form of rationing, without which all stocks would be consumed in the first nine months of the year, and in the remaining three months dearth would be exchanged for actual famine.

The only way in which this self-adjusting economy might break down was through the meddlesome interference of the State and of popular prejudice.¹¹ Corn must be left to flow freely from areas of surplus to areas of scarcity. Hence the middleman played a necessary, productive, and laudable role. The prejudices against forestallers Smith dismissed curtly as superstitions on a level with witchcraft. Interference with the natural pattern of trade might induce local famines or discourage farmers from increasing their output. If premature sales were forced, or prices restrained in times of dearth, excessive stocks might be consumed. If farmers did hold back their grain too long, they would be likely to suffer when prices broke. As for the other popular culprits — millers, mealmen, dealers, bakers — much the same logic applied. Their trades were competitive. At the most they could only distort prices from their natural level over short periods, and often to their ultimate discomfiture. When prices began to soar at the end of the century, the remedy was seen not in a return to the regulation of trade, but in more enclosure, tillage of waste lands, improvement.

It should not be necessary to argue that the model of a natural and self-adjusting economy, working providentially for the best good of all, is as much a superstition as the notions which upheld the paternalist model — although, curiously, it is a superstition which some economic historians have been the last to abandon. In some respects Smith’s model conformed more closely to eighteenth-century realities than did the paternalist; and in symmetry and scope of intellectual construction it was superior. But one should not overlook the specious air of empirical validation which the model carries. Whereas the first appeals to a moral norm — what ought to be men’s reciprocal duties — the second appears to say: “this is the way things work, or would work if the State did not interfere”. And yet if one considers these sections of The Wealth of Nations they impress less as an essay in empirical enquiry than as a superb, self-validating essay in logic.

When we consider the actual organisation of the eighteenth-century corn trade, empirical verification of neither model is to hand. There has been little detailed investigation of marketing;¹¹ no major study of that key figure, the miller.²² Even the first letter of Smith’s alphabet — the assumption that high prices were an effective form of rationing — remains no more than an assertion. It is notorious that the demand for corn, or bread, is highly inelastic. When bread is costly, the poor (as one highly-placed observer was once reminded) do not go over to cake. In the view of some observers, when prices rose labourers might eat the same quantity of bread, but cut out other items in their budgets; they might even eat more bread to compensate for the loss of other items. Out of one shilling, in a normal year, 6d. might go on bread, 6d. on “coarse meat and plenty of garden stuff”; but in a high-price year the whole shilling would go on bread.³³

Emanuel Collins, Lying Detected (Bristol, 1758), pp. 66-7. This seems to be confirmed by the budgets of Davies and Eden (see note 2 on p. 193), and of nineteenth-century observers: see The Unknown Mayhew, eds. E. P. Thompson and E. Yeo (1971), App. II. E. H. Phelps Brown and S. V. Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables compared with Builders’ Wages rates”, Economica, xxii (1956), pp. 297-8 allow only 20% of the total household budget to farinaceous food, although the budgets of Davies and Eden (taken in high-price years) show an average of 53%. This again suggests that in such years bread consumption remained stable, but other items were cut out altogether. In London there may already have been a greater diversification of diet by the 1790s. P. Colquhoun wrote to Portland, 9 July 1795, that there was abundance of vegetables at Spitalfields market, especially potatoes, “the great substitute for Bread”, carrots and turnips: PRO, PC 1/27/A.54.

In any event, it is well known that the price movements of grain cannot be accounted for by simple supply-and-demand price mechanisms; and the bounty paid to encourage corn exports distorted matters further. Next to air and water, corn was a prime necessity of life, abnormally sensitive to any deficiency in supply. In 1796 Arthur Young calculated that the overall crop deficiency in wheat was less than 25 per cent; but the price advance was 81 per cent: giving (by his calculation) a profit to the agricultural community of £20 millions over a normal year.¹¹ Traditionalist writers complained that the farmers and dealers acted from the strength of “monopoly”; they were rebutted in pamphlet after pamphlet, as “too absurd to be seriously treated: what! more than two hundred thousand people. . .!”.²² The point at issue, however, was not whether this farmer or that dealer could act as a “monopolist”, but whether the producing and trading interests as a whole were able, with a long-continuing train of favourable circumstances, to take advantage of their command of a prime necessity of life and to enhance the price to the consumer, in much the same way as the advanced industrialised nations today have been able to enhance the price of certain manufactured goods to the less advanced nations.

Annals of Agriculture, xxvi (1796), pp. 470, 473. Davenant had estimated in 1699 that a deficiency in the harvest of one-tenth raised the price by three-tenths: Sir C. Whitworth, The Political and Commercial Works of Charles Davenant (1771), ii, p. 244. The problem is discussed in W. M. Stern, “The Bread Crisis in Britain, 1795-6”, Economica, new series, xxxi (1964), and J. D. Gould, “Agricultural Fluctuations and the English Economy in the Eighteenth Century”, Jl. Econ. Hist., xxii (1926). Dr Gould puts weight on a point often mentioned in contemporary apologetics for high prices, e.g. Farmer’s Magazine, ii (1801), p. 81, that the small growers, in a year of scarcity, required their entire crop for seed and for their own consumption: in such factors as this he finds the “chief theoretical explanation of the extreme volatility of grain prices in the early modern period”. One would require more investigation of the actual operation of the market before such explanations carry conviction.

As the century advanced marketing procedures became less transparent, as the corn passed through the hands of a more complex network of intermediaries. Farmers were selling, not in an open competitive market (which, in a local and regional sense, was the aim of the paternalist rather than the laissez-faire model) but to dealers or millers who were in a better position to hold stocks and keep the market high. In the last decades of the century, as population rose, so consumption pressed continually upon production, and the producers could more generally command a seller’s market. Wartime conditions, while not in fact inhibiting greatly the import of grain during conditions of scarcity, nevertheless accentuated psychological tensions in such years.¹¹ What mattered in setting the post-harvest price, was the expectation of the harvest yield: and there is evidence in the last decades of the century of the growth of a farming lobby, well aware of the psychological factors involved in post-harvest price levels, assiduously fostering an expectation of shortage.²² Notoriously, in years of dearth the farmers’ faces were wreathed in smiles,³³ while in years of abundant harvest Dame Nature’s inconsiderate bounty called forth agricultural cries of “distress”. And no matter how bountiful the yield might appear to the eye of the townsman, every harvest was accompanied by talk of mildew, floods, blighted ears which crumbled to powder when threshing commenced.

The free market model supposes a sequence of small to large farmers, bringing their corn to market over the year; but at the end of the century, as high-price year succeeded high-price year, so more small farmers were able to hold back supply until the market rose to their satisfaction. (It was, after all, for them not a matter of routine marketing but of intense, consuming interest: their profit for the year might depend very largely upon the price which three or four cornstacks might fetch.) If rents had to be paid, the growth in country banking made it easier for the farmer to be accommodated.¹¹ The September or October riot was often precipitated by the failure of prices to fall after a seemingly plentiful harvest, and indicated a conscious confrontation between reluctant producer and angry consumer.

These comments are offered, not in refutation of Adam Smith, but simply to indicate places where caution should be exercised until our knowledge is greater. We need only say of the laissez-faire model that it is empirically unproven; inherently unlikely; and that there is some evidence on the other side. We have recently been reminded that “merchants made money in the eighteenth century”, and that grain merchants may have made it “by operating the market”.²² Such operations are occasionally recorded, although rarely as frankly as was noted by a Whittlesford (Cambridgeshire) farmer and corn merchant in his diary in 1802:

I bought Rey this Time Twelve Month at 50s per Qr. I could have sold it 122s per Qr. The poor had their flower, good rey, for 2s 6d per peck. Parish paid the difference to me, which was Is 9d per peck. It was a Blessing to the Poor and good to me. I bought 320 Quarters.³³

The profit on this transaction was above £1,000.

If one can reconstruct clear alternative models behind the policies of traditionalists and of political economists, can one construct the same for the moral economy of the crowd? This is less easy. One is confronted by a complex of rational analysis, prejudice, and traditional patterns of response to dearth. Nor is it possible, at any given moment, clearly to identify the groups which endorsed the theories of the crowd. They comprise articulate and inarticulate, and include men of education and address. After 1750 each year of scarcity was accompanied by a spate of pamphlets and letters to the press, of unequal value. It was a common complaint of the protagonists of free trade in corn that misguided gentry added fuel to the flames of mob discontent.

There is truth in this. The crowd derived its sense of legitimation, in fact, from the paternalist model. Many gentlemen still resented the middleman as an interloper. Where lords of the manor retained market rights they resented the loss (through sample-sales etc.) of their market tolls. If they were landlord-farmers, who witnessed meat or flour being marketed at prices disproportionately high in relation to their own receipts from the dealers, they resented the profits of these common tradesmen the more. The essayist of 1718 has a title which is a precis of his matter: An Essay to prove that Regrators, Engrossers, Forestallers, Hawkers and Jobbers of Corn, Cattle, and other Marketable Goods. . . are Destructive of Trade, Oppressors to the Poor, and a Common Nuisance to the Kingdom in General. All dealers (unless simple drovers or carters, moving provisions from one point to the next) appeared to this not unobservant writer as a “vile and pernicious set of men”; and, in the classic terms of reproval adopted by men of settled estate to the bourgeois,

they are a vagabond sort of people. . . They carry their all about them, and their. . . stock is no more than a plain riding habit, a good horse, a list of the fairs and markets, and a prodigious quantity of impudence. They have the mark of Cain, and like him wander from place to place, driving an interloping trade between the fair dealer and the honest consumer.¹¹

Adam Smith noted nearly sixty years later that the “popular odium. . . which attends the corn trade in years of scarcity, the only years in which it can be very profitable, renders people of character and fortune averse to enter into it. It is abandoned to an inferior set of dealers”. Twenty-five years later again Earl Fitzwilliam was writing: “Dealers in corn are withdrawing from the trade, afraid to traffic in an article trafficking in which had render’d them liable to so much obloquy & calummy, and to be run at by an ignorant populace, without confidence in protection from those who ought to be more enlighten’d”: Fitzwilliam to Portland, 3 Sept. 1800, PRO, HO 42/51. But an examination of the fortunes of such families as the Howards, Frys and Gurneys might call in question such literary evidence.

This hostility to the dealer existed even among many country magistrates, some of whom were noted to be inactive when popular disturbances swept through the areas under their jurisdiction. They were not displeased by attacks on dissenting or Quaker corn factors. A Bristol pamphleteer, who is clearly a corn factor, complained bitterly in 1758 to the JPs of “your law-giving mob”, which prevented, in the previous year, the export of corn from the Severn and Wye valleys, and of “many fruitless applications to several Justices of the Peace”.¹¹ Indeed, the conviction grows that a popular hubbub against forestallers was not unwelcome to some in authority. It distracted attention from the farmers and rentiers; while vague Quarter Sessional threats against forestallers gave to the poor a notion that the authorities were attending to their interests. The old laws against forestallers, a dealer complained in 1766,

are printed in every newspaper, and stuck up in every corner, by order of the justices, to intimidate the engrossers, against whom many murmurings are propagated. The common people are taught to entertain a very high opinion and reverence for these laws. . .

Indeed, he accused the justices of encouraging “the extraordinary pretence, that the power and spirit of the mob is necessary to enforce the laws”.²² But if the laws were actually set in motion, they were directed almost without exception against petty culprits — local wide-boys or market-men, who pocketed small profits on trivial transactions — while the large dealers and millers were unaffected.³³

Contrary to the common assumption, the forestalling legislation had not fallen into desuetude in the first half of the eighteenth century. Prosecutions were infrequent, but sufficiently evident to suggest that they had some effect upon regulating petty dealing in the open market. At Manchester (see note 1 on p. 195) fines for forestalling or regrating took place sometimes annually, sometimes every two or three years, from 1731 to 1759 (seven fines). Commodities involved included butter, cheese, milk, oysters, fish, meat, carrots, pease, potatoes, turnips, cucumbers, apples, beans, gooseberries, currants, cherries, pigeons, fowls, but very rarely oats and wheat. Fines are less frequent after 1760 but include 1766 (wheat and butter), 1780 (oats and eels), 1785 (meat), and 1796, 1797 and 1799 (all potatoes). Symbolically, the Court Leet officers to prevent forestalling jumped from 3 to 4 appointed annually (1730-1795) to 7 in 1795, 15 in 1796, 16 in 1797. In addition offenders were prosecuted on occasion (as in 1757) at Quarter Sessions. See Earwaker, Court Leet Records (cited p. 195), vii, viii and ix and Constables’ Accounts (p. 212), ii, p. 94. For other examples of offences, see Essex Quarter Sessions, indictments, 2 Sept. 1709, 9 July 1711 (engrossing oats), and also 1711 for cases involving forestallers of fish, wheat, rye, butter, and, again, 13 Jan. 1729/30: Essex CRO, Calendar and Indictments, Q/SR 541, Q/SR 548, Q/SPb b 3; Constables’ presentments for forestalling hogs, Oct. 1735 and Oct. 1746: Bury St. Edmunds and West Suffolk CRO, DB/1/8 (5); ditto for forestalling of butter, Nottingham, 6 Jan. 1745/5, Records of the Borough of Nottingham (Nottingham, 1914), vi, p. 209; conviction for forestalling of fowls (fine 13s. 4d.) at Atherstone Court Leet and Court Baron, 18 Oct. 1748: Warwicks. CRO, L2/24 23; cautions against the forestalling of butter etc., Woodbridge market, 30 Aug. 1756: Ipswich and East Suffolk CRO, V 5/9/6-3. In most Quarter-Sessional or market records the odd prosecution is to be found, before 1757. The author of Reflections (cited p. 209) writing in 1766, says these “almost-forgotten and disregarded statutes” were employed for the prosecution of “some submissive hucksters and indigent or terrified jobbers”, and implies that the “principal factors” have despised “these menaces”, believing them to be bad law (p. 37). For 1795 and 1800 see note 2, p. 200: the most important cases of the prosecution of large dealers were those of Rushby, for regrating oats (1799): see Barnes, op. cit., pp. 81-3; and of Waddington, convicted for forestalling hops at Worcester Assizes: see Times, 4 Aug. 1800 and (for conviction upheld on appeal) I East 143 in ER, cii, pp. 56-68.

Thus, to take a late example, an old-fashioned and crusty Middlesex JP, J. S. Girdler, instituted a general campaign of prosecutions against such offenders in 1796 and 1800, with handbills offering rewards for information, letters to the press, etc. Convictions were upheld at several Quarter Sessions, but the amount gained by the speculators amounted only to ten or fifteen shillings. We can guess at the kind of offender whom his prosecutions touched by the literary style of an anonymous letter which he received:

We no you are an enemy to Farmers, Mealmen and Bakers and our Trade if it had not bene for me and another you you son of a bitch you wold have bene murdurd long ago by offering your blasted rewards and persecuting Our Trade God dam you and blast you you shall never live to see another harvest. . .¹¹

Compassionate traditionalists like Girdler were joined by townsmen of various ranks. Most Londoners suspected everyone who had any part in handling grain, flour or bread of every kind of extortion. The urban lobby was, of course, especially powerful in the middle years of the century, pressing for an end to the export bounty, or for the prohibition of all exports in time of dearth. But London and the larger towns harboured inexhaustible reserves of resentment, and some of the wildest accusations came from this milieu. A certain Dr Manning, in the 1750s, published allegations that bread was adulterated not only with alum, chalk, whiting and beanmeal, but also with slaked lime and white lead. Most sensational was his claim that millers turned into their flour “sacks of old ground bones”: “the charnel houses of the dead are raked, to add filthiness to the food of the living”, or, as another pamphleteer commented, “the present age [is] making hearty meals on the bones of the last”.

Manning’s accusations went far beyond the bounds of credibility. (A critic computed that if lime was being used on the scale of his allegations, more would be consumed in the London baking than building industry.)¹¹ Apart from alum, which was widely used to whiten bread, the commonest form of adulteration was probably the admixture of old, spoiled flour with new flour.²² But the urban population was quick to believe that far more noxious adulterations were practised, and such belief contributed to the “Shude-hill Fight” at Manchester in 1757, where one of the mills attacked was believed to mix “Accorns, Beans, Bones, Whiting, Chopt Straw, and even dried Horse Dung” with its flour, while at another mill the presence of suspicious adulterants near the hoppers (discovered by the crowd) led to the burning of bolters and sieves, and the destruction of mill-stones and wheels.¹¹

There were other, equally sensitive, areas where the complaints of the crowd were fed by the complaints of traditionalists or by those of urban professional people. Indeed, one may suggest that if the rioting or price-setting crowd acted according to any consistent theoretical model, then this model was a selective reconstruction of the paternalist one, taking from it all those features which most favoured the poor and which offered a prospect of cheap corn. It was, however, less generalised than the outlook of the paternalists. The records of the poor show more particularity: it is this miller, this dealer, those farmers hoarding grain, who provoke indignation and action. This particularity was, however, informed by general notions of rights which disclose themselves most clearly only when one examines the crowd in action. For in one respect the moral economy of the crowd broke decisively with that of the paternalists: for the popular ethic sanctioned direct action by the crowd, whereas the values of order underpinning the paternalist model emphatically did not.

The economy of the poor was still local and regional, derivative from a subsistence-economy. Corn should be consumed in the region in which it was grown, especially in times of scarcity. Profound feeling was aroused, and over several centuries, by export in times of dearth. Of an export riot in Suffolk in 1631 a magistrate wrote: “to see their bread thus taken from them and sent to strangers has turned the impatience of the poor into licentious fury and desperation”.²² In a graphic account of a riot in the same county seventy-eight years later (1709), a dealer described how “the Mobb rose, he thinks several hundreds, and said that the corn should not be carryed out of town”: “of the Mobb some had halberds, some quarter staffs, and some clubbs. . .”. When travelling to Norwich, at several places on the way:

the Mobb hearing that he was to goe through with corn, told him that it should not go through the Towne, for that he was a Rogue, and Corn-Jobber, and some cry’d out Stone him, some Pull him off his horse, some Knock him down, and be sure you strike sure; that he. . . questioned them what made them rise in such an inhuman manner to the prejudice of themselves and the countrey, but that they still cryed out that he was a Rogue & was going to carry the corn into France. . .¹¹

Except in Westminster, in the mountains, or in the great sheep-grazing districts, men were never far from the sight of corn. Manufacturing industry was dispersed in the countryside: the colliers went to their labour by the side of cornfields; domestic workers left their looms and workshops for the harvest. Sensitivity was not confined to overseas export. Marginal exporting areas were especially sensitive, where little corn was exported in normal years, but where, in times of scarcity, dealers could hope for a windfall price in London, thereby aggravating local dearth.²² The colliers — Kingswood, the Forest of Dean, Shropshire, the North-East — were especially prone to action at such times. Notoriously the Cornish tinners had an irascible consumer-consciousness, and a readiness to turn out in force. “We had the devil and all of a riot at Padstow”, wrote a Bodmin gentleman in 1773, with scarcely-concealed admiration:

Some of the people have run to too great lengths in exporting of corn. . . Seven or eight hundred tinners went thither, who first offered the corn-factors seventeen shillings for 24 gallons of wheat; but being told they should have none, they immediately broke open the cellar doors, and took away all in the place without money or price.³³

The worst resentment was provoked in the middle years of the century, by foreign exports upon which bounty was paid. The foreigner was seen as receiving corn at prices sometimes below those of the English market, with the aid of a bounty paid out of English taxes. Hence the extreme bitterness sometimes visited upon the exporter, who was seen as a man seeking private, and dishonourable, gain at the expense of his own people. A North Yorkshire factor, who was given a ducking in the river in 1740, was told that he was “no better than a rebel”.¹¹ In 1783 a notice was affixed to the market-cross in Carlisle, commencing:

Peter Clemeseson & Moses Luthart this is to give you Warning that you must Quit your unlawfull Dealing or Die and be Damed your buying the Corn to starve the Poor Inhabitants of the City and Soborbs of Carlisle to send to France and get the Bounty Given by the Law for taking the Corn out of the Country but by the Lord God Almighty we will give you Bounty at the Expence of your Lives you Damed Roagues. . .

“And if Eany Publick House in Carlisle [the notice continued] Lets you or Luthart put up. . . Corn at their Houses they shall suffer for it.”²² This feeling revived in the last years of the century, notably in 1795, when rumours flew around the country as to secret exports to France. Moreover, 1795 and 1800 saw the efflorescence of a regional consciousness once more, as vivid as that of one hundred years before. Roads were blockaded to prevent export from the parish. Wagons were intercepted and unloaded in the towns through which they passed. The movement of grain by night-convoy assumed the proportions of a military operation:

Deep groan the waggons with their pond’rous loads,

As their dark course they bend along the roads;

Wheel following wheel, in dread procession slow,

With half a harvest, to their points they go. . .

The secret expedition, like the night

That covers its intents, still shuns the light. . .

While the poor ploughman, when he leaves his bed,

Sees the huge barn as empty as his shed.³³

Threats were made to destroy the canals.⁴⁴ Ships were stormed at the ports. The miners at Nook Colliery near Haverfordwest threatened to close the estuary at a narrow point. Even lighters on the Severn and Wye were not immune from attack.¹¹

Indignation might also be inflamed against a dealer whose commitment to an outside market disrupted the customary supplies of the local community. A substantial farmer and publican near Tiverton complained to the War Office in 1795 of riotous assemblies “threatening to pull down or fire his house because he takes in Butter of the neighbouring Farmers & Dairymen, to forward it by the common road waggon, that passes by his door to. . . London”.²² In Chudleigh (Devon) in the same year the crowd destroyed the machinery of a miller who had ceased to supply the local community with flour since he was under contract to the Victualling Department of the Navy for ship’s biscuits: this had given rise (he says in a revealing phrase) “to an Idea that ive done much infimy to the Community”.³³ Thirty years before a group of London merchants had found it necessary to seek the protection of the military for their cheese-warehouses along the river Trent:

The warehouses. . . in danger from the riotous colliers are not the property of any monopolizers, but of a numerous body of cheese-mongers, and absolutely necessary for the reception of their cheese, for the conveyance to Hull, there to be ship’d for London.⁴⁴

These grievances are related to the complaint, already noted, of the withdrawal of goods from the open market. As the dealers moved further from London and attended more frequently at provincial markets, so they were able to offer prices and buy in quantities which made the farmers impatient to serve the small orders of the poor. “Now it is out of the course of business”, wrote Davies in 1795, “for the farmer to retail corn by the bushel to this or that poor man; except in some particular places, as a matter of favour, to his own labourers”. And where the poor shifted their demand from grain to flour, the story was much the same:

Neither the miller nor the mealman will sell the labourer a less quantity than a sack of flour under the retail price at shops; and the poor man’s pocket will seldom allow of his buying a whole sack at once.¹¹

Hence the labourer was driven to the petty retail shop, at which prices were enhanced.²² The old markets declined, or, where they were kept up, they changed their functions. If a customer attempted to buy a single cheese or half flitch of bacon, Girdler wrote in 1800, “he is sure to be answered by an insult, and he is told that the whole lot has been bought up by some London contractor”.³³

We may take as expressive of these grievances, which sometimes occasioned riot, an anonymous letter dropped in 1795 by the door of the mayor of Salisbury:

Gentlemen of the Corporation I pray you put a stop to that practice which is made use of in our Markits by Rook and other carriers in your giving them the Liberty to Scower the Market of every thing so as the Inhabitance cannot buy a singel Artickel without going to the Dealers for it and Pay what Extortionat price they think proper and even Domineer over the Peopel as thow they was not Whorthy to Look on them. But their time will soon be at an End as soon as the Solders ear gon out of town.

The corporation is asked to order carriers out of the market until the townspeople have been served, “and stop all the Butchers from sending the meat away by a Carces at a time But make them cut it up in the Markit and sarve the Town first”. The letter informs the mayor that upwards of three hundred citizens have “posetively swor to be trow to each other for the Distruction of the Carriers”.⁴⁴

Where the working people could buy cereals in small parcels intense feeling could arise over weights and measures. We are exhorted in Luke: “Give, and it shall be given unto you, good measure pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give unto your bosom.” This was not, alas, the practice of all farmers and dealers in protestant England. An enactment of Charles II had even given the poor the right to shake the measure, so valuable was the poor man’s corn that a looseness in the measure might make the difference to him of a day without a loaf. The same Act had attempted, with total lack of success, to enforce the Winchester measure as the national standard. A great variety of measures, varying even within county boundaries from one market-town to the next, gave abundant opportunities for petty profiteering. The old measures were generally larger — sometimes very much larger — than the Winchester; sometimes they were favoured by farmers or dealers, more often they were favoured by the customers. One observer remarked that “the lower orders of people detest it [the Winchester measure], from the smallness of its contents, and the dealers. . . instigate them to this, it being their interest to retain every uncertainty in weights and measures”.¹¹

Attempts to change the measure often encountered resistance, occasionally riot. A letter from a Clee Hill (Shropshire) miner to a “Brother Sufferer” declared:

The Parliament for our relief to help to Clem [starve] us Thay are going to lesson our Measure and Wait [weight] to the Lower Standard. We are about Ten Thousand sworn and ready at any time And we wou’d have you get Arms and Cutlasses and swear one another to be true. . . We have but one Life to Loose and we will not clem. . .²²

Letters to farmers in Northiam (Sussex) warned:

Gentlemen all ie hope you whill take this as a wharning to you all for you to put the little Bushels bie and take the oald measher [measure] again for if you dont there whill be a large company that shall borne [burn] the little measher when you are all abade and asleep and your cornehouses and cornstacks and you along with them. . .³³

A Hampshire contributor to the Annals of Agriculture explained in 1795 that the poor “have erroneously conceived an idea that the price of grain is increased by the late alteration from a nine-gallon bushel to the Winchester, from its happening to take place at a moment of a rising market, by which, the same money was paid for eight as used to be paid for nine gallons”. “I confess”, he continues,

I have a decided predeliction for the nine-gallon measure, for the reason that it is the measure which nearest yields a bushel of flour; whence, the poor man is enabled to judge of what he ought to pay for a bushel of flour, which, in the present measure, requires more arithmetic than comes to his share to ascertain.¹¹

Even so, the arithmetical notions of the poor may not have been so erroneous. Changes in measures, like changes to decimal currency, tend by some magic to disadvantage the consumer.

If less corn was being bought (at the end of the century) in the open market by the poor, this also indicated the rise to greater importance of the miller. The miller occupies a place in popular folklore, over many centuries, which is both enviable and unenviable. On one hand he was noted as a fabulously successful lecher, whose prowess is still perhaps perpetuated in a vernacular meaning of the word “grinding”. Perhaps the convenience of the village mill, tucked around a secluded corner of the stream, to which the village wives and maidens brought their corn for grinding; perhaps also his command over the means of life; perhaps his status in the village, which made him an eligible match — all may have contributed to the legend:

A brisk young lass so brisk and gay

She went unto the mill one day. . .

There’s a peck of corn all for to grind

I can but stay a little time.

Come sit you down my sweet pretty dear

I cannot grind your corn I fear

My stones is high and my water low

I cannot grind for the mill won’t go.

Then she sat down all on a sack

They talked of this and they talked of that

They talked of love, of love proved kind

She soon found out the mill would grind. . .¹¹

Then the miller he laid her against the mill hopper

Merry a soul so wantonly

He pulled up her cloaths, and he put in the stopper

For says she I’ll have my corn ground small and free.

On the other hand, the miller’s repute was less enviable. “Loving!”, exclaims Nellie Dean in Wuthering Heights: “Loving! Did anybody ever hear the like? I might as well talk of loving the miller who comes once a year to buy our corn”. If we are to believe all that was written about him in these years, the miller’s story had changed little since Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale. But where the small country miller was accused of quaintly medieval customs — over-size toll dishes, flour concealed in the casing of the stones, etc. — his larger counterpart was accused of adding new, and greatly more enterprising, peculations:

For ther-biforn he stal but curteisly,

But now he was a thief outrageously.

At one extreme we still have the little country mill, exacting toll according to its own custom. The toll might be taken in flour (always from “the best of the meal and from the finer flour that is in the centre of the hopper”); and since the proportion remained the same with whatever fluctuation in price, it was to the miller’s advantage if prices were high. Around the small toll-mills (even where toll had been commuted for money payments) grievances multiplied, and there were fitful attempts at their regulation.²² Since the millers entered increasingly into dealing, and into grinding corn on their own account for the bakers, they had little time for the petty customers (with a sack or two of gleaned corn); hence endless delay; hence also, when the flour was returned it might be the product of other, inferior, grain. (It was complained that some millers purchased at half-price damaged corn which they then mixed with the corn of their customers.¹¹) As the century wore on, the translation of many mills to industrial purposes gave to the surviving petty corn-mills a more advantageous position. In 1796 these grievances were sufficiently felt to enable Sir Francis Bassett to carry the Miller’s Toll Bill, intended to regulate their practices, weights and measures, more strictly.²²

But these petty millers were, of course, the small fry of the eighteenth century. The great millers of the Thames Valley and of the large towns were a different order of entrepreneurs, who traded extensively in flour and malt. Millers were quite outside the Assize of Bread, and they could immediately pass on any increase in the price of corn to the consumer. England also had its unsung banalités in the eighteenth century, including those extraordinary survivals, the soke mills, which exercised an absolute monopoly of the grinding of grain (and the sale of flour) in substantial manufacturing centres, among them Manchester, Bradford, Leeds.³³ In most cases the feoffees who owned the soke rights sold or leased these to private speculators. Most stormy was the history of the School Mills at Manchester, whose soke rights were intended as a charitable endowment to support the grammar school. Two unpopular lessees of the rights inspired, in 1737, Dr Byrom’s rhyme:

Bone and Skin, two millers thin,

Would starve the town, or near it;

But be it known, to Skin and Bone,

That Flesh and Blood can’t bear it.

When, in 1757, new lessees sought to prohibit the importation of flour to the growing town, while at the same time managing their mills (it was alleged) with extortion and delay, flesh and blood could indeed bear it no longer. In the famous “Shude-hill Fight” of that year at least four men were killed by musketry, but the soke rights were finally broken.¹¹ But even where no actual soke right obtained, one mill might command a populous community, and could provoke the people to fury by a sudden advance in the price of flour or an evident deterioration in its quality. Mills were the visible, tangible targets of some of the most serious urban riots of the century. The Albion Mills at Blackfriars Bridge (London’s first steam mills) were governed by a quasi-philanthropic syndicate; yet when they burned down in 1791 Londoners danced and sang ballads of rejoicing in the streets.²² The first steam mill at Birmingham (Snow Hill) fared little better, being the target of a massive attack in 1795.

It may appear at first sight as curious that both dealers and millers should continue to be among the objectives of riot at the end of the century, by which time in many parts of the Midlands and South (and certainly in urban areas) working people had become accustomed to buying bread at the baker’s shops rather than grain or flour in the market-place. We do not know enough to chart the change-over with accuracy, and certainly much home-baking survived.³³ But even where the change-over was complete, one should not underestimate the sophistication of the situation and of the crowd’s objectives. There were, of course, scores of petty riots outside bread shops, and the crowd very often “set the price” of bread. But the baker (whose trade in times of high prices can sacrcely have been an enviable one) was, alone of all those who dealt in the people’s necessities (landlord, farmer, factor, carrier, miller), in daily contact with the consumer; and he was, more than any of the others, protected by the visible paraphernalia of paternalism. The Assize of Bread clearly and publicly limited their lawful profits (thereby also tending to leave the baking trade in the hands of numerous small traders with little capital), and thus protected them, to some degree, from popular wrath. Even Charles Smith, the able exponent of free trade, thought the continuation of the Assize to be expedient: “in large Towns and Cities it will always be necessary to set the Assize, in order to satisfy the people that the price which the Bakers demand is no more than that what is thought reasonable by the Magistrates”.¹¹

The psychological effect of the Assize was, therefore, considerable. The baker could hope to enhance his profit beyond the allowance calculated in the Assize only by small stratagems, some of which — short-weight bread, adulteration, the mixing in of cheap and spoiled flour — were subject either to legal redress or to instant crowd retaliation. Indeed, the baker had sometimes to attend to his own public relations, even to the extent of enlisting the crowd on his side: when Hannah Pain of Kettering complained to the justices of short-weight bread, the baker “raised a mob upon her. . . and said she deserved to be whipped, there were enough of such scambling scum of the earth”.²² Many corporations throughout the century, made a great show of supervising weights and measures, and of punishing offenders.³³ Ben Jonson’s “Justice Overdo” was still busy in the streets of Reading, Coventry, or London:

Marry, go you into every alehouse, and down into every cellar; measure the length of puddings. . . weigh the loaves of bread on his middle finger. . . give the puddings to the poor, the bread to the hungry, the custards to his children.

In this tradition we find a London magistrate in 1795 who, coming on the scene of a riot in Seven Dials where the crowd was already in the act of demolishing the shop of a baker accused of selling light-weight bread, intervened, seized the baker’s stock, weighed the loaves, and finding them indeed deficient, distributed the loaves among the crowd.¹¹

No doubt the bakers, who knew their customers, sometimes complained of their powerlessness to reduce prices, and diverted the crowd to the mill or the corn-market. “After ransacking many bakers’ shops”, the miller of Snow Hill, Birmingham, related of the 1795 attack, “they came in great numbers against us. . .”.²² But in many cases the crowd clearly selected its own targets, deliberately by-passing the bakers. Thus in 1740 at Norwich the people “went to every Baker in the City, and affix’d a Note on his Door in these words, Wheat at Sixteen Shillings a Comb”. In the same year at Wisbech they obliged “the Merchants to sell Wheat at 4d per Bushel. . . not only to them, but also to the Bakers, where they regulated the Weight & Price of Bread”.³³

But it is clear at this point that we are dealing with a far more complex pattern of action than one which can be satisfactorily explained by a face-to-face encounter between the populace and particular millers, dealers or bakers. It is necessary to take a larger view of the actions of the crowd.

It has been suggested that the term “riot” is a blunt tool of analysis for so many particular grievances and occasions. It is also an imprecise term for describing popular actions. If we are looking for the characteristic form of direct action, we should take, not squabbles outside London bakeries, nor even the great affrays provoked by discontent with the large millers, but the “risings of the people” (most notably in 1740, 1756, 1766, 1795 and 1800) in which colliers, tinners, weavers and hosiery workers were prominent. What is remarkable about these “insurrections” is, first, their discipline, and, second, the fact that they exhibit a pattern of behaviour for whose origin we must look back several hundreds of years: which becomes more, rather than less, sophisticated in the eighteenth century; which repeats itself, seemingly spontaneously, in different parts of the country and after the passage of many quiet years. The central action in this pattern is not the sack of granaries and the pilfering of grain or flour but the action of “setting the price”.

What is extraordinary about this pattern is that it reproduces, sometimes with great precision, the emergency measures in time of scarcity whose operation, in the years between 1580 and 1630, were codified in the Book of Orders. These emergency measures were employed in times of scarcity in the last years of Elizabeth, and put into effect, in a somewhat revised form, in the reign of Charles I, in 1630. In Elizabeth’s reign the magistrates were required to attend the local markets,

and where you shall fynde that there is insufficiente quantities broughte to fill and serve the said marketts and speciallie the poorer sorte, you shall thereupon resorte to the houses of the Farmers and others using tyllage. . . and viewe what store and provision of graine theye have remayninge either thrashed or unthrashed. . .

They might then order the farmers to send “convenient quantities” to market to be sold “and that at reasonable price”. The justices were further empowered to “sett downe a certen price upon the bushell of everye kynde of graine”.¹¹ The queen and her Council opined that high prices were in part due to engrossers, in part to the “greedie desier” of corn-growers who “bee not content w^th anie moderate gayne, but seeke & devise waies to kepe up the prices to the manifest oppression of the poorer sort”. The Orders were to be enforced “w^th out all parciality in sparing anie man”.¹¹

In essence, then, the Book of Orders empowered magistrates (with the aid of local juries) to survey the corn stocks in barns and granaries;²² to order quantities to be sent to market; and to enforce with severity every part of the marketing, licensing and forestalling legislation. No corn was to be sold except in open market, “unlesse the same be to some pore handicrafts Men, or Day-Labourers within the parish wherein you doe dwell, that cannot conveniently come to the Market Townes”. The Orders of 1630 did not explicitly empower justices to set the price, but ordered them to attend the market and ensure that the poor were “provided of necessary Corne. . . with as much favour in the Prices, as by the earnest Perswasion of the Justices can be obtained”. The power to set a price upon grain or flour rested, in emergency, half-way between enforcement and persuasion.³³

By an Act of 1534 (25 Henry VIII, c. 2) the Privy Council had the power to set prices on corn in emergency. In a somewhat misleading note, Gras (op. cit., pp. 132-3) opines that after 1550 the power was never used. It was in any case not forgotten: a proclamation of 1603 appears to set prices (Seligman Collection, Columbia Univ. Lib., Proclamations, James I, 1603); the Book of Orders of 1630 concludes with the warning that “if the Corne-masters and other Owners of Victuall. . . shall not willingly performe these Orders”, His Majesty will “give Order that reasonable Prices shall be set”; the Privy Council attempted to restrain prices by Proclamation in 1709, Liverpool Papers, Brit. Mus., Add. MS. 38353, fo. 195; and the matter was actively canvassed in 1757 — see Smith, Three Tracts on the Corn Trade, pp. 29, 35. And (apart from the Assize of Bread) other price-fixing powers lingered on. In 1681 at Oxford market (controlled by the University) prices were set for butter, cheese, poultry, meat, bacon, candles, oats, and beans: “The Oxford Market”, Collectanea 2nd ser. (Oxford, 1890), pp. 127-8. It seems that the Assize of Ale lapsed in Middlesex in 1692 (Lipson, op. cit., ii, p. 501), and in 1762 brewers were authorized (by 2 Geo. III, c. 14) to raise the price in a reasonable manner; but when in 1773 it was proposed to raise the price by

d. a quart Sir John Fielding wrote to the earl of Suffolk that the increase “cannot be thought reasonable; nor will the subject submit to it”: Calendar of Home Office Papers, 1773, pp. 9-14; P. Mathias, The Brewing Industry in England, 1700-1830 (Cambridge, 1959), p. 360.

This emergency legislation was falling into disrepair during the Civil Wars.¹¹ But the popular memory, especially in a pre-literate society, is extraordinarily long. There can be little doubt that a direct tradition extends from the Book of Orders of 1630 to the actions of clothing workers in East Anglia and the West in the eighteenth century. (The literate had long memories also: the Book of Orders itself was republished, unofficially in 1662, and again in 1758, with a prefatory address to the reader referring to the present “wicked combination to make scarcity”.)²²

The Orders were themselves in part a response to the pressure of the poor:

The Corne is so dear

I dout mani will starve this yeare —

So ran a doggerel notice affixed in the church porch in the parish of Wye (Kent) in 1630:

If you see not to this

Sum of you will speed amis.

Our souls they are dear,

For our bodys have sume ceare

Before we arise

Less will safise. . .

You that are set in place

See that youre profesion you doe not disgrace. . .³³

One hundred and thirty years later (1768) incendiary papers were once again being nailed to church doors (as well as to inn-signs) in parishes within the same lathe of Scray in Kent, inciting the poor to rise.¹¹ Many similar continuities can be observed, although undoubtedly the pattern of direct action spread to new districts in the eighteenth century. In many actions, especially in the old manufacturing regions of the East and West, the crowd claimed that since the authorities refused to enforce “the laws” they must enforce them for themselves. In 1693 at Banbury and Chipping Norton the crowd “took away the corne by force out of the waggons, as it was carrying away by the ingrossers, saying that they were resolved to put the law in execution, since the magistrates neglected it”.²² During the extensive disorders in the West in 1766 the sheriff of Gloucestershire, a gentleman clothier, could not disguise his respect for the rioters who

went. . . to a farmhouse and civilly desired that they wou’d thresh out and bring to market their wheat and sell it for five shillings per bushel, which being promised, and some provisions given them unasked for, they departed without the least violence or offence.

If we follow other passages of the sheriffs accounts we may encounter most of the features found in these actions:

On Friday last a Mobb was rais’d in these parts by the blowing of Horns &c consisting entirely of the lowest of the people such as weavers, mecanicks, labourers, prentices, and boys, &c. . .

“They proceeded to a gristmill near the town. . . cutting open Baggs of Flower and giving & carrying it away & destroying corn &c.” They then attended at the main markets, setting the price of grain. Three days later he sent a further report:

They visited Farmers, Millers, Bakers and Hucksters shops, selling corn, flower, bread, cheese, butter, and bacon, at their own prices. They returned in general the produce [i.e. the money] to the proprietors or in their absence left the money for them; and behaved with great regularity and decency where they were not opposed, with outrage and violence where they was: but pilferd very little, which to prevent, they will not now suffer Women and boys to go with them.

After visiting the mills and markets around Gloucester, Stroud and Cirencester, they divided into parties of fifty and a hundred and visited the villages and farms, requesting that corn be brought at fair prices to market, and breaking in on granaries. A large party of them attended on the sheriff himself, downed their cudgels while he addressed them on their misdeameanours, listened with patience, “chearfully shouted God Save the King”, and then picked up their cudgels and resumed the good work of setting the price. The movement partook of the character of a general strike of the whole clothing district: “the rioters come into our workshops. . . and force out all the men willing or unwilling to join them”.¹¹

This was an unusually large-scale and disciplined action. But the account directs us to features repeatedly encountered. Thus the movement of the crowd from the market-place outwards to the mills and thence (as in the Book of Orders) to farms, where stocks were inspected and the farmers ordered to send grain to market at the price dictated by the crowd — all this is commonly found. This was sometimes accompanied by the traditional round of visits to the houses of the great, for contributions, forced or voluntary. At Norwich in 1740 the crowd, after forcing down prices in the city, and seizing a keel loaded with wheat and rye on the river, solicited contributions from the rich of the city:

Early on Thursday Morning, by Sound of Horns, they met again; and after a short Confabulation, divided into Parties, and march’d out of Town at different Gates, with a long Streamer carried before them, purposing to visit the Gentlemen and Farmers in the neighbouring Villages, in order to extort Money, Strong Ale, &c, from them. At many places, where the Generosity of People answer’d not their Expectation, ’tis said they shew’d their Resentment by treading down the Corn in the Fields. . .

Perambulating crowds were active in this year, notably in Durham and Northumberland, the West Riding, and several parts of North Wales. Anti-export demonstrators, commencing at Dewsbury (April 1740) were led by a drummer and “a sort of ensign or colours”; they performed a regular circuit of the local mills, destroying machinery, cutting sacks, and carrying away grain and meal. In 1766 a perambulating crowd in the Thames Valley called themselves “the Regulators”; a terrified farmer allowed them to sleep in the straw in his yard, and “could hear from his Chamber that they were telling one another whom they had most frightened, & where they had the best success”. The pattern continues in the 1790s: at Ellesmere (Shropshire) the crowd stopping the corn as it goes to the mills and threatening the farmers individually; in the Forest of Dean the miners visiting mills and farmers’ houses, and exacting money “from persons they meet in the road”; in West Cornwall the tinners visiting farms with a noose in one hand and an agreement to bring corn at reduced prices to market in the other.¹¹

It is the restraint, rather than the disorder, which is remarkable; and there can be no doubt that the actions were approved by an overwhelming popular consensus. There is a deeply-felt conviction that prices ought, in times of dearth, to be regulated, and that the profiteer put himself outside of society. On occasion the crowd attempted to enlist, by suasion or force a magistrate, parish constable, or some figure of authority to preside over the taxation populaire. In 1766 at Drayton (Oxfordshire) members of the crowd went to John Lyford’s house “and asked him if he were a Constable — upon his saying ‘yes’ Cheer said he sho’d go with them to the Cross & receive the money for 3 sacks of flour which they had taken from one Betty Smith and which they w’d sell for 5s a Bushel”; the same crowd enlisted the constable of Abingdon for the same service. The constable of Handborough (also in Oxfordshire) was enlisted in a similar way, in 1795; the crowd set a price — and a substantial one — of 40s a sack upon a wagon of flour which had been intercepted, and the money for no fewer than fifteen sacks was paid into his hands. In the Isle of Ely, in the same year, “the mob insisted upon buying meat at 4d per lb, & desired Mr Gardner a Magistrate to superintend the sale, as the Mayor had done at Cambridge on Saturday sennight”. Again in 1795 there were a number of occasions when militia or regular troops supervised forced sales, sometimes at bayonet-point, their officers looking steadfastly the other way. A combined operation of soldiery and crowd forced the mayor of Chichester to accede in setting the price of bread. At Wells men of the 122nd Regiment began

by hooting those they term’d forestallers or jobbers of butter, who they hunted in different parts of the town — seized the butter — collected it together — placed sentinels over it — then threw it, & mix’t it together in a tub — & afterwards retail’d the same, weighing it in scales, selling it after the rate of 8d per lb. . . though the common price given by the jobbers was rather more than 10d.¹¹

It would be foolish to suggest that, when so large a breach was made in the outworks of deference, many did not take the opportunity to carry off goods without payment. But there is abundant evidence the other way, and some of it is striking. There are the Honiton lace-workers, in 1766, who, having taken corn from the farmers and sold it at the popular price in the market, brought back to the farmers not only the money but also the sacks; the Oldham crowd, in 1800, which rationed each purchaser to two pecks a head; and the many occasions when carts were stopped on the roads, their contents sold, and the money entrusted to the carter.²²

Moreover, in those cases where goods were taken without payment, or where violence was committed, it is wise to enquire whether any particular aggravation of circumstances enters into the case. The distinction is made in an account of an action at Portsea (Hampshire) in 1795. The bakers and butchers were first offered by the crowd the popular price: “those that complied in those demands were paid with exactness”. But those who refused had their shops rifled “without receiving any more money than the mob chose to leave”. Again, the quarrymen at Port Isaac (Cornwall) in the same year seized barley warehoused for export, paying the reasonably high price of 11s. a bushel, at the same time warning the owner that “if he offer’d to ship the Remainder they would come & take it without making him any recompence”. Very often the motive of punishment or revenge comes in. The great riot in Newcastle in 1740, when pitmen and keelmen swept into the Guildhall, destroyed the town books and shared out the town’s hutch, and pelted aldermen with mud and stones, came only after two phases of aggravation: first, when an agreement between the pitmen’s leaders and the merchants (with an alderman acting as arbitrator) setting the prices of grain had been broken; second, when panicky authorities had fired into the crowd from the Guildhall steps. At one house in Gloucestershire in 1766 shots were fired at the crowd which (writes the sheriff) —

they highly resented by forceing into the house, and destroying all the furniture, windows, &c and partly untiled it; they have given out since that they greatly repented of this act because ’twas not the master of the house (he being from home) that fired upon them.

In 1795 the tinners mounted an attack upon a Penryn (Cornwall) merchant who was contracted to send them barley, but who had sent them spoiled and sprouting grain. When mills were attacked, and their machinery damaged, it was often in furtherance of a long-standing warning, or as punishment for some notorious practice.¹¹

Indeed, if we wish to call in question the unilinear and spasmodic view of food riots, we need only point to this continuing motif of popular intimidation, when men and women near to starvation nevertheless attacked mills and granaries, not to steal the food, but to punish the proprietors. Repeatedly corn or flour was strewn along the roads and hedges; dumped into the river; mill machinery was damaged and mill-dams let off. To examples of such behaviour the authorities reacted both with indignation and astonishment. It was symptomatic (as it seemed to them) of the “frantic” and distempered humours of a people whose brain was inflamed by hunger. In 1795 both the Lord Chief Justice and Arthur Young delivered lectures to the poor, pointing out that the destruction of grain was not the best way to improve the supply of bread. Hannah More added a Half-penny Homily. An anonymous versifier of 1800 gives us a rather more lively example of these admonitions to the lower orders:

When with your country Friends your hours you pass,

And take, as oft you’re wont, the copious glass,

When all grow mellow, if perchance you hear

“That ‘tis th’ Engrossers make the corn so dear;

“They must and will have bread; they’ve had enough

“Of Rice and Soup, and all such squashy stuff:

“They’ll help themselves: and strive by might and main

“To be reveng’d on all such rogues in grain”:

John swears he’ll fight as long as he has breath,

“‘Twere better to be hang’d than starv’d to death:

“He’ll burn Squire Hoardum’s garner, so he will,

“Tuck up old Filchbag, and pull down his mill”.

Now when the Prong and Pitchfork they prepare

And all the implements of rustick war. . .

Tell them what ills unlawful deeds attend,

Deeds, which in wrath begun, and sorrow end,

That burning barns, and pulling down a mill,

Will neither corn produce, nor bellies fill.¹¹

But were the poor really so silly? One suspects that the millers and dealers, who kept one wary eye on the people and the other on the maximisation of their profits, knew better than the poetasters at their escritoires. For the poor had their own sources of information. They worked on the docks. They moved the barges on the canals. They drove the carts and manned the toll-gates. They worked in the granaries and the mills. They often knew the local facts far better than the gentry; in many actions they went unerringly to hidden supplies of grain whose existence the JPs, in good faith, denied. If rumours often grew beyond all bounds, they were always rooted in at least some shallow soil of fact. The poor knew the one way to make the rich yield was to twist their arms.

Initiators of the riots were, very often, the women. In 1693 we learn of a great number of women going to Northampton market, “with knives stuck in their girdles to force corn at their own rates”. In an export riot in 1737 at Poole (Dorset) it was reported: “The Numbers consist of so many Women, & the Men supporting them, & Swear, if any one offers to molest any of the Women in their Proceedings they will raise a Great Number of Men & destroy both Ships & Cargoes”. The mob was raised in Stockton (Durham) in 1740 by a “Lady with a stick and a horn”. At Haverfordwest (Pembroke) in 1795 an old-fashioned JP who attempted, with the help of his curate, to do battle with the colliers, complained that “the women were putting the Men on, & were perfect furies. I had some strokes from some of them on my Back. . .”. A Birmingham paper described the Snow Hill riots as the work of “a rabble, urged on by furious women”. In dozens of cases it is the same — the women pelting an unpopular dealer with his own potatoes, or cunningly combining fury with the calculation that they had slightly greater immunity than the men from the retaliation of the authorities: “the women told the common men”, the Haverfordwest magistrate said of the soldiers, “that they knew they were in their Hearts for them & would do them no hurt”.¹¹