Customs in Common

It is not a significant matter whether women took part in more or less than 50 per cent of the recorded riots. What remains significant — and indeed remarkable — is the extensive evidence of women’s active part in food riots over a period of more than two hundred years, and in many parts of Great Britain.¹¹ No other issue commanded women’s support so wholeheartedly and consistently, at least in England.²² On a review of indictments in the Western and Oxford Assize circuits in the second half of the eighteenth century, there are a few cases of what appear to be the community’s defence of trade practices (but not of formal trade unionism), of resistance to enclosures, of rough music, and of civic politics in old clothing towns, all of which appear to have significant female involvement. But food riots are the indictments where the women are most often to be found. There are some all-male indictments,³³ just as there are some all-female ones.⁴⁴ There are indictments where there seems to be the selection of a token woman,⁵⁵ just as there seem to be token men.⁶⁶ There are other cases where the prosecution appears to be even-handed in serving out indictments.¹¹ But the indictments testify to the vigorous presence of women.

There is room for further research into this, for as yet no-one appears to have interrogated the legal records systematically over a long period of time. Nor should we expect that uniform answers will be forthcoming. John Bohstedt notes that of fifty-four rioters committed for trial in Devon in 1795 and 1801, only seven were women; but that at Manchester in 1795, of twelve persons charged for food rioting, nine were women.²² My own searches into Assize records show a similar discrepancy between the Western circuit (taking in Devon, Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset riots in 1765-72) with 114 men and only fourteen women indicted; and the Oxford circuit (taking in food rioters indicted in Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire in 1767 to 1774), where there are twenty women and only five men.³³ Do these figures indicate differential gender behaviour or differential practices in policing and prosecution?⁴⁴

We do not know how far the authorities were as willing to prosecute women as men, or whether women must have committed particular “outrages” before they were indicted.⁵⁵ There is a little evidence to suggest that in the deeply traditional West of England, where food rioting was almost a tolerated mode of “negotiation”, the authorities found the indictment of female rioters to be distasteful. In 1765 Tiverton was convulsed by community-and-trade riots against the Mayor and Corporation, in which (according to literary evidence) the women were most prominent, dashing in upon the Mayor through the windows of an inn, pulling off his wig and threatening to kill him if he did not sign a paper. But of twenty-six indicted for these riots, only six were women.¹¹ But, then, what was the function of prosecution? In the Western circuit the prosecution of food rioters seems to have been a haphazard and often a lenient process. It was often difficult to persuade the grand jury to find a true bill against food rioters, and (once found) the petty jury might not convict. For a Devon attack on a bolting-mill in 1767, twenty-one were discharged and in two cases a bill could “not be found” by the grand jury, and for another attack on a mill all of eighteen indicted in Ottery St Mary were “not to be found”.²² And so on. A little more zeal was shown in 1795 and 1800-1, but a Devon forced sale in 1801 resulted in the acquittal of five men charged and no process against the only woman, while the prosecution was abandoned of two men indicted for terrorising a farmer (with a rope about his neck) to sign a paper. On the other hand four women from Montacute (Somerset) were indicted for grand larceny for compelling Elizabeth Hopkins to sell seventy-two loaves at a lower rate than she was willing, and Mary Gard and Sarah Baker were convicted.³³

In several other cases in both Western and Oxford circuits the offenders were bound over with one shilling fine, or were discharged as “paupers”.⁴⁴ This suggests that the function of prosecution was to inspire momentary terror until order could be restored, and that the accused would be brought to a due state of contrition by the anxiety and nuisance of the trial itself. Prosecution was attended with difficulties — the selection of offenders, the drilling of reluctant witnesses, the odium attaching to the prosecutor — and local magistrates (notoriously in the West) were reluctant to set the process in motion.¹¹ Since prosecution was both selective and uncertain — that is, it was undertaken to provide an “example” but had no necessary direct relation to the incidence of riot — it cannot be assumed that it was gender-blind. Except in cases where women were manifestly predominant in riots, the authorities might have found it to be more convenient to make an example of men.

There might even have been a hierarchy of levels of prosecution, with differing gender ratios at each level. At the top of the hierarchy would be the Special Commissions of Oyer and Terminer which government instituted in late 1766 with the aim of making “examples” in the disturbed districts. Those brought to trial here were predominantly male: thirteen men in Berkshire, and no women; fifteen men in Wiltshire, and four women; and in Gloucestershire fifty-four men and twelve women.²² There may have been some reluctance to launch women into a process which might end in their execution,³³ but once so launched it is difficult to say whether they received any preferential treatment from the courts.⁴⁴ Of the Wiltshire women, Priscilla Jenkins was sentenced to death for stealing in a dwelling-house (commuted to life transportation), Elizabeth Moody and Mary Nash were transported for seven years for stealing to the value of 1s. 7d. in a dwelling-house, and Sarah Pane, a widow, found guilty of stealing flour to the value of 6d., was privately whipped and discharged. This seems severe enough. But these were the counts upon which juries had been willing to convict. On a closer view it seems that they had been selected for trial because all except Sarah Pane, went beyond “food riot” to theft from the homes of farmers or traders. Priscilla Jenkins was supposed to have taken off a gammon of bacon, a pair of boots, a bundle of things on her head tied up in a handkerchief. . . and a gun. Elizabeth Moody and Mary Nash were not such desperate felons, but they were accused of breaking into a house, smashing the windows and some of the furniture, and carrying off the family’s clothes.¹¹

A little more can be worked out about the Gloucestershire accused.²² The Special Commission at Gloucester was restrained by a grand jury which refused to act as a rubber-stamp and perhaps by a reluctant petty jury. Of twenty-one women who were being prepared for trial, one was not indicated, presumably as feme covert. More than one-half of the remainder were either acquitted (eight) or the grand jury found “ignoramus” (three). Of seventy-five male prisoners, about the same proportion got off, with eighteen acquittals and twenty “no true bills”. And there is no great difference in the conviction rate: seven out of twenty-one women as against thirty-five out of seventy-five men. The marked difference is in the severity of the convictions and sentencing. Sixteen of the men were convicted of felonies, nineteen of misdemeanours, whereas only two of the women were found felons and five were found guilty of misdemeanours. Nine rioters were sentenced to death — all men, although in six cases the condemned were reprieved — and nine were sentenced to seven years’ transportation, of whom two were women.

A closer view of the cases does not tell us much. Six of the female acquittals were for a cheese riot at Farmer Collett’s, for which one man was also acquitted and one other man convicted. Mary Hillier ran after the mob in Minchinhampton and “told them Mr Butt was come home & had fired a gun and killed 2 children and desired them to come back and pull down the House”. The grand jury found no true bill. Elizabeth Rackley and Elizabeth Witts, both sentenced to transportation, were convicted of stealing 10d. worth of flour, but as part of several night-time break-ins of the mill of Richard Norris. It was the night-time breaking and entering which made the offence felony.¹¹ The clearest case of gender discrimination concerned John Franklyn and Sarah Franklyn, his wife, jointly committed for entering a shop in Stroud and carrying off in their laps soap, glue and other things. But Sarah was not indicted, presumably because while acting with her husband she was, according to the legal doctrine of feme couvert, not responsible for her actions. That was fortunate for her, since John Franklyn was found guilty of grand larceny and was transported for seven years.²²

This suggests that the heavier exercises of the courts might fall a little less heavily on women. But the lighter exercises need not show the same gender inflection. Summary committals to Bridewells or convictions for minor public order offences were used by magistrates to cool off a crowd, without respect for differences of sex. For example, a letter from Lincolnshire in 1740 notes that “we have had a Disturbance by the Mobb at Bourn they Cutt Some Sacks of Wheat in the Boat & Obstructed its passage to Spalding for a time, but was Quel’d seasonably by the Officers of the Town & 5 Women Committed to the House of Correction”.³³ Such episodes are unlikely to have left traces in national records, although after the 1760s they were more likely to be brought to Quarter Sessions.¹¹

John Bohstedt tells us that “repression did not know gender”, and he is right that troops were frequently ordered to fire into mixed crowds. From Anne Carter of Maldon, Essex, in 1629 to Hannah Smith of Manchester in 1812, a trickle of victims or heroines were sent to the gallows, while others were sentenced to transportation.²² Yet I am undecided; it remains possible that, while “examples” were made from time to time, the examples made of women were fewer, that they sometimes enjoyed the “privilege of their sex”, and that much depended upon place, time and the temper of the authorities.

If the central authorities insisted that examples had to be made, then gender did not matter. In 1766 government and law officers were pressing hard for capital offenders to be selected, and the Treasury Solicitor regretted that “at Leicester, the Evidence is very slight, against a Woman for throwing Cheese out of a Waggon to the Mob, which if not a Highway Robbery, is not Capital”.³³ (Hannah Smith was convicted of highway robbery nearly fifty years later, for selling off butter cheaply to the crowd.) In the end, no women were hanged for the riots of 1766, although Sarah Hemmings was capitally convicted for her part in a riot in Wolverhampton: the town petitioned for her life, and the sentence was commuted to life transportation.⁴⁴ In 1800 The Times correspondent lamented from Nottingham and its environs that “there is not even a prospect of the riot subsiding”, owing to the non-arrest of the women, who were “the principal aggressors”.¹¹ In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, women rioters had been liminal people with an “ambivalent legal status at the margins of the law’s competence”. They claimed, in enclosure riots, “that women were lawlesse, and not subject to the lawes of the realme as men are but might. . . offend without drede or punishment of law”.²² If the sex had been disabused of that illusion in the eighteenth century, yet perhaps some notion of “privilege”, both among offenders and prosecutors, lingered on in such regions as the West.

Were there other peculiarities of the feminine input into food riots? I doubt the value of tabulating disorder and violence according to gender, partly because of the imperfect nature of the evidence, partly because all riot must involve disorder and violence of some kind. When an affair involved outright confrontation, with cudgels against fire-arms — the attack on a mill, the break-in to a keep to rescue prisoners — the predominant sex would be male. The women are more commonly reported as throwing missiles — stones or potatoes — and on one occasion, in the Midlands in 1766 “planted in rows five or six deep”, defending a bridge with stones and brickbats against horsemen.³³ Whatever conclusions we reach as to the gender reciprocities and respect between women and men in these communities, it would be foolish to suppose that these dissolved sexual differences. Without doubt the physical confrontation of men and women, of soldiers and crowd, aroused sexual tensions, perhaps expressed by the women in robust ribaldry, by the male forces of “order” in a contest between the inhibition of violence and sexually-excited aggression.⁴⁴ On occasion the military affected contempt for the women. The commander of troops sent to deal with a riot in Bromsgrove in 1795 complained loftily that they found the cause was “a parcel of old women. . . as in all pretended riots in this part of the country”. But this parcel of women (not all of whom were old) had given a good account of themselves, some seventy of them stopping a wagon and six horses, and carrying off twenty-nine sacks of wheaten flour.¹¹

When women rioted they made no attempt to disguise their sex or to apologise for it. In my view there was very little cross-dressing in food riots, although once or twice there are unconfirmed reports of men in women’s clothes.²² These “rites of inversion” or, maybe, simple exercises in the most available disguise, were more commonly encountered in turnpike riots, in “carnival” protests, and, later, in Luddism.³³ But inversion, whether intentional or not, was exactly what the women did not wish to achieve. So far from wishing to present an ominous androgynous image, they sought to present their particular right, according to tradition and gender role, as guardians of the children, of the household, of the livelihood of the community. That symbolism — the blood-stained loaves on poles, the banging of kitchen ware — belonged especially to the women’s protests. They evinced what Temma Kaplan has called “female consciousness” rather than feminist, which rested upon “their acceptance of the sexual division of labor” which is one which “assigns women the responsibility of preserving life”. “Experiencing reciprocity among themselves and competence in preserving life instills women with a sense of their collective right to administer daily life, even if they must confront authority to do so.¹¹

Nothing pleased female rioters more than the humiliation of pompous male “aggro”. In a Tiverton riot in 1754 a certain Lieutenant Suttie attracted the crowd’s notice by his zeal; he was heard to say to a JP, “Give me leave sir, to order the men to fire, and you shall see the fellows hop like peas”. The troopers were unleashed upon the crowd and they “rode through the streets hacking with their broad-swords and stabbing with their bayonets”:

While the troopers were dashing about in the execution of their orders, some women seized Lieutenant Suttie by the collar and took away his sword, which he never recovered. This was a sore blow to his pride, and a favourite subject of banter on the part of his friends, who, very cruelly, would not allow him to forget his skirmish with the women and the inglorious loss of his weapon.²²

Men in authority still feared the violence and the incitement of the female tongue (see below pp. 501-2), and women could sometimes attain their ends by mockery, insult, or by shaming farmers or dealers by their expostulations. Susannah Soons was convicted in Norwich in 1767 for “uttering several scandalous and inflammatory speeches”, and Mary Watts in Leicester for “assaulting” the magistrates “with indecent and opprobrious Language and Gestures”.³³ In Montrose in 1812, when the Riot Act was being read and the military were deployed to disperse the crowd, Elizabeth Beattie called out, “Will no person take that paper out of his hand?” and tried to snatch the Act from the magistrate.⁴⁴

Elizabeth Beattie knew what she was doing. But so did Anne Carter, in 1629. She clearly despised the pomp of the local authorities, calling one of Maldon’s chief magistrates in 1622 “bloud sucker and. . . many other unseemely tearmes”. When the bailiff had questioned her about her absence from church, she had answered back: “that yf he woold prouid [provide] wone to doe hir worke shee would goe”. In the riots she described herself as “Captain”, calling out: “Come, my brave lads of Maldon, I will be your leader for we will not starve.”¹¹ “General Jane Bogey” in Newcastle in 1740 knew what she was doing, and so did “Lady Ludd”, the title claimed by leaders of riots in 1812 in both Nottingham and Leeds.²² So too did fifty-four-year-old Hannah Smith who “headed up the mob” for some days in Manchester in the same year, bringing down the prices of potatoes, butter and milk, and boasting that she could raise a crowd in a minute.³³ It was lack of deference as much as rioting which got Anne Carter and Hannah Smith hanged. What clergyman was likely to give a character reference, what nobleman to intercede, on behalf of such viragos?

The women’s riots may not have been precisely of the same violence quotient as the men’s, but they were not shrinking, demure affairs. Frequently they came to a climax when women led off the fore-horses, climbed aboard the wagons and threw down the sacks to their fellows, sometimes took the horses out of the shafts and pulled the wagon back themselves to a place for convenient distribution of its load.⁴⁴ In the engagement at Newport Pagnell in 1740 (above pp. 319-20), the women fought with the farmers for a considerable time, declaring that they were “unwilling that so much Wheat should go out of the Kingdom, while they wanted bread, [and] swore they would lose their lives before they would part with it”. At length “with great acclamations of joy the waggons were unloaded”. The reporter of the Northampton Mercury found that the affair merited a little comment:

The Conquerors are now holding a Grand Council to consider what to do with it among themselves. Such uncommon Bravery and Resolution appearing in the soft & tender Sex is a Matter of Surprize to those who stile themselves their despotick Sovereigns, & the Lords of Creation.¹¹

Such bravery was not uncommon. Repeatedly women faced troops and were fired upon. In one of the only letters that survives from a food rioter, he wrote of a great riot in Nottingham (1800): “your hearts would have ached to have seen the women Calling for Bread and Declaring they would fight till they died Before they would be used so any longer. . . the conduct of the people. . . who stood the fire from the yeomanry with such undaunted courage that astonished the gentlemen for they poured such showers of stones on them in all directions that they could load their pieces no more after they had fired them. . .”.²²

Perhaps the poor of both sexes partnered each other better in bad times than we suppose. Maybe men were more prominent in food riots than women, and maybe not.³³ But if one adds up all that is already known (and there is much still to find out) there were an awful lot of women involved in food riots, sometimes on their own, more often in mixed affairs in which there was a loyal gender partnership.

For two hundred and more years these food riots were the most visible and public expressions of working women’s lack of deference and their contestation with authority. As such these evidences contest, in their turn, the stereotypes of feminine submission, timidity, or confinement to the private world of the household. Robert Southey (p. 234) may not have been so silly after all. Indeed, when once aroused the women may have been more passionate than men in their eloquence, less heedful of the consequences, and, in their role as guardians of the family, more determined to get quick results.¹¹ Perhaps — as John Bohstedt suggests — many women were more immersed than were men “in the moral, less in the market, economy”, and they were among the last to give the practices of the moral economy up.²²

That is not the whole truth about women and authority, but food riots provide an important and weighty chunk of evidence, which must not be tidied away. It may enlarge our sense of the possibilities of feminine “nature”. The more difficult question may be, not why women sometimes rioted, but why, in the mid nineteenth century, the tradition of public protest became so much weaker and women’s presence retreated into a serial world of private households.³³ Perhaps (in contrast to what came after) a “myth of the feminine food riot” should be rehabilitated after all?

I do not know how far back one must go to find the origin of the term, “moral economy”. I think that it comes from the late eighteenth century, but I cannot now find references. It was certainly around in the 1830s,¹¹ and it was used by Bronterre O’Brien, the Chartist, in 1837 in a polemic against political economists:

True political economy is like true domestic economy; it does not consist solely in slaving and saving; there is a moral economy as well as political. . . These quacks would make wreck of the affections, in exchange for incessant production and accumulation. . . It is, indeed, the MORAL ECONOMY that they always keep out of sight. When they talk about the tendency of large masses of capital, and the division of labour, to increase production and cheapen commodities, they do not tell us of the inferior human being which a single and fixed occupation must necessarily produce.²²

This directly anti-capitalist usage is close to that which I introduce into The Making of the English Working Class, when I referred to food riots as being “legitimized by the assumptions of an older moral economy, which taught the immorality of. . . profiteering upon the necessities of the people”. And I went on to describe the food riots of 1795 as “a last desperate effort” to re-impose the “old paternalist moral economy” as against the economy of the free market.³³

I subsequently defined more carefully the term, the practices associated with it, and the contradictory components of paternalist control and crowd rebellion. The reason for this retrospective enquiry is that the theory of a moral economy has now taken off in more than one direction and in several fields of specialist study, and my essay is sometimes cited as authority. But while the term is available for every development which can be justified, my own usage has in general been confined to confrontations in the market-place over access (or entitlement) to “necessities” — essential food. It is not only that there is an identifiable bundle of beliefs, usages and forms associated with the marketing of food in time of dearth, which it is convenient to bind together in a common term, but the deep emotions stirred by dearth, the claims which the crowd made upon the authorities in such crises, and the outrage provoked by profiteering in life-threatening emergencies, imparted a particular “moral” charge to protest. All of this, taken together, is what I understand by moral economy.¹¹

If the term is to be extended to other contexts, then it must be redefined or there will be some loss of focus. Adrian Randall has so redefined it, in applying it to “The Industrial Moral Economy of the Gloucestershire Weavers” in the eighteenth century.²² The same weaving communities that were involved in food riots (1766) were involved in industrial actions (1756); these were informed by the same values, showed the same community solidarities and sanctions (such as rough music against those who broke the norms of the trade), a similar appeal to custom and to Tudor and Stuart statute law (when this protected their own interests), and a similar insistence that, where the community’s economic well-being was concerned, market forces and the profits of individuals should be subdued to custom. Moreover, Randall shows that the industrial crowd also would seek to press the gentry into the role of conciliators and arbitrators, so that “the moral economy was the obverse of the paternalist model”.

I am more than half persuaded by this argument. In those West of England clothing towns there was a dense texture of trade rituals and customary usages, endorsed by community sanctions, which may be seen as the stubborn plebeian underside to mercantilist industry. Of course these workers were habituated to an economy with markets, but markets conducted within customary norms; in times of conflict they affirmed the priorities of “the Trade”, or they elevated the defence of the interests of the working community above those of the profits of the few, and if the term “moral economy” helps us to identify these norms and practices, then let it be used. It certainly helps us to see the strongly defensive, and, in that sense, conservative nature of this plebeian culture.

But where are we to draw the line? Pirates had strongly-transmitted usages and customs: did they have a moral economy.¹¹ Keith Snell suggests that the poor’s right to a settlement “formed a consistent part of those ‘moral economy’ values” which I have analysed. And he extends the list of candidates for inclusion in this moral economy to the poor laws generally, to yearly hirings and “fair wages”, and even to “popular consumption, fashion [and] leisure activities”. Then he turns around and gives me a dressing-down for “the amorphous character” of my moral economy.²²

I admire Dr Snell’s work, but on this occasion I am perplexed, because I can see little evidence — that he knows much about the tensions around the nexus of food in time of dearth. What is “amorphous” is his own extension of the term’s use, and this stems from the error of supposing that what are at issue are “moral economy values”. But if values, on their own, make a moral economy then we will be turning up moral economies everywhere. My own notion of the moral economy of the crowd in the food market includes ideal models or ideology (just as political economy does), which assigns economic roles and which endorses customary practices (an alternative “economics”), in a particular balance of class or social forces. It is by taking “values” or “moral attitudes” out of the context of a particular historical formation that Snell gets his amorphous results.

However, I have no right to patent the term. Some historians prefer a more descriptive and looser use. No other term seems to offer itself to describe the way in which, in peasant and in early industrial communities, many “economic” relations are regulated according to non-monetary norms. These exist as a tissue of customs and usages until they are theatened by monetary rationalisations and are made self-conscious as a “moral economy”. In this sense, the moral economy is summoned into being in resistance to the economy of the “free market”.¹¹ As Charlesworth and Randall have argued, “The basis of the moral economy was that very sense of community which a common experience of capitalist industry generated”.²² The rationalisations or “modernisations” of the capitalist market offended against community norms and continually called into being a “moral” antagonist.

This is an extension which is further generalised by William Reddy in The Rise of Market Culture, for whom the moral economy is “a set of values and moral standards that were violated by technical and commercial change”:

Defence of such moral standards need not have been motivated by memory of the past. The inadequacy of market language was constantly being brought to the laborer’s attention by the very conditions of work.

And Reddy concludes that “something like a moral economy is bound to surface anywhere that industrial capitalism spreads”.¹¹ This has the advantage of discarding the notion that “moral economy” must always be traditional, “backward-looking”, etc.; on the contrary, it is continuously regenerating itself as anti-capitalist critique, as a resistance movement.²² We are close to the language of Bronterre O’Brien. But what this gains in breadth it loses in focus, and in inexpert hands may bleed off the edge into uncontextual moralistic rhetoric.³³

There is less danger of this in the alert theoretical discussions in the field of peasant studies, where a “moral economy theory” is now at the centre of controversy. This is thanks to James C. Scott whose The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976) generalised an argument derived from studies in Lower Burma and Vietnam. The term is drawn from my own essay but it is now brought to bear upon “peasant conceptions of social justice, of rights and obligations, of reciprocity”. But what distinguishes Scott’s use is that it goes much further than descriptive accounts of “values” or “moral attitudes”. Since for the peasantry, subsistence depends upon access to land, customs of land use and of entitlement to its produce are now at the centre of analysis rather than the marketing of food. And custom is seen (against a background of memories of famine) as perpetuating subsistence imperatives, and usages which insure the community against risk. These imperatives are also expressed in protective landlord-tenant (or patron-client) relations, and in resistances to technical innovations and to market rationalisations, where these might entail risks in the event of crisis. Scott analyses village redistributive institutions and religious charitable obligations, and shows that “there is good reason for viewing both the norm of reciprocity and the right to subsistence as genuine moral components of the ‘little tradition’. . .” — that is, in peasant culture universally. The threat to these institutions and norms associated with European expansion and with market rationalisations has often provoked the peasantry to participation in revolutionary movements.¹¹

There is some likeness here to the moral economy of the eighteenth-century English crowd, although Scott does not elaborate the comparison and he is in fact more interested in patron-client relations in the village rather than in those confrontations or negotiations which mark the European tradition of food riot.²² Predictably his theories have been vigorously contested by protagonists of “market forces”, and Samuel L. Popkin delivered a polemic against what were presented as “the moral economists” in The Rational Peasant (1979). This offered the characteristic peasant as a rational actor, shrewdly adjusting to the market economy in a satisfactorily self-interested and normless manner. So that the old debate between moral and political economists seemed likely to re-enact itself over the paddy fields of South-East Asia — a debate into which it would be foolish for me to enter, although my sympathies are certainly with James Scott.

However, Professor Scott has moved the debate forwards (and sideways) in his Weapons of the Weak, and onto territory where comparisons may be explored with advantage. This territory is not only that of the tenacious forms of resistance to power of the weak and of the poor: “in ridicule, in truculence, in irony, in petty acts of non-compliance, in dissimulation. . . in the disbelief in elite homilies, in the steady and grinding efforts to hold one’s own against overwhelming odds”.¹¹ It is also, and at the same time, into the limits which the weak can impose upon power. As Barrington Moore has argued in Injustice:

In any stratified society. . . there is a set of limits on what both rulers and subjects, dominant and subordinate groups can do. There is also a set of mutual obligations that bind the two together. Such limits and obligations are not set down in formal written constitutions or contracts. . .

There is (rather) “an unverbalized set of mutual understandings”, and “what takes place is a continual probing on the part of rulers and subjects to find out what they can get away with, to test and discover the limits of obedience and disobedience”. This takes us, by way of the concept of social reciprocity, or, as Moore prefers, mutual obligation (“a term that does not imply equality of burdens or obligations”),²² back to the “moral economy”, in the sense of the equilibrium or “field of force” which I examined in Chapter 1 and in the bargaining between unequal social forces in which the weaker still has acknowledged claims upon the greater. Of those who have recently developed these ideas I find a particular sympathy with Michael Watts, whose Silent Violence examines food and famine among the Hausa in northern Nigeria. He sees the norms and practices of an imperative collective subsistence ethic as permeating the peasant universe, but he sees this without sentimentality:

The moral economy was not especially moral and the Caliphate was certainly no Rousseauian universe of peasant welfare and benevolent patrons. Rather, the moral economy was necessary to the survival of ruler and ruled, and the price was paid by prevailing power blocs for the maintenance and reproduction of the social relations of production replete with its exploitative relations and class struggles. “There is no need to saddle the moral economy with the legacy of Durkheim, Rousseau, and Ruskin.”¹¹

Much of the very interesting discussion which is now extending under the rubric of “moral economy” from African and Asian to Latin American²² or to Irish studies has little to do with my (1971) usage but is concerned with the social dialectic of unequal mutuality (need and obligation) which lies at the centre of most societies. The term “moral economy” has won acceptance because it is less cumbersome than other terms (such as “dialectical asymmetrical reciprocity”) which we might otherwise be clobbered with. When an Irish historian writes of “moral economy”, he is writing of eighteenth-century paternalism, deference, and non-economic (i.e. unprofitable) “easygoing farming practices” such as low rents and tolerance of arrears.³³ A scholar (Paul Greenough) writing on the Bengal famine of 1943-44 has an even more extended definition:

By ‘moral economy’ I mean the cluster of relations of exchange between social groups, and between persons, in which the welfare and the merit of both parties to the exchange takes precedence over other considerations such as the profit of the one or the other.⁴⁴

These capacious definitions will certainly allow in most things we might wish to introduce, and if the term will encourage historians to discover and write about all those areas of human exchange to which orthodox economics was once blind, then this is a gain.

If we employ the terminology of class, then “moral economy” in this definition may be concerned with the way in which class relations are negotiated. It shows how hegemony is not just imposed (or contested) but is articulated in the everyday intercourse of a community, and can be sustained only by concession and patronage (in good times), by at least the gestures of protection in bad.¹¹ Of the two parts of the term, the “economy” can probably now look after itself, since it will be defined in each scholar’s practice. It is the “moral” part which may now require more attention. One benefit that has accrued from the term’s transportation into peasant studies is that it can be viewed in operation within cultures whose moral premises are not identical with those of a Judeo-Christian inheritance.²²

No-one has made this more explicit than has Professor Greenough in his study of Bengal famine, and he has done this on the directly comparative ground of the crisis of subsistence. Greenough presents a conspectus of the Bengali peasants’ value-system,³³ and he derives this, not (as does Scott) from remembered scarcity and from risk-avoiding strategies, but, on the contrary, from a Bengal tradition of abundance. At the centre of this value-system is Laksmi, both a conception of order and abundance and a benevolent goddess of prosperity. Prosperity flows down from above, from Laksmi, or from “kings”, patrons or parents. In its simplest form there are two situations only: the givers and the receivers of rice, and in time of crisis the peasant’s reflex is to seek refuge in the patron-client relationship, to search for new patrons, or to wait in patience for Laksmi’s gifts to be restored. Greenough also finds “an unyielding Bengali antipathy to individual assertion”:

Temple art, learned texts, and folk apothegms reiterate that whatever success one has comes only through a superior’s benevolence. . . There is no widely accepted creed of commercial accumulation.⁴⁴

This brief summary will serve if it leaves us with the expectation that “giving” and beseeching “protection” are critical to the peasantry’s discourse of crisis, rather than “duties” or “rights”. Greenough finds in this an explanation for the Bengali response to famine. In the appalling conditions of 1943-44 attacks on granaries or shops were rare. “Food of all sorts lay before their eyes”, while people were starving on the streets of Calcutta, “but no one attempted to seize it by force”. The attitude of the people was one of “complete resignation”, and “they attribute their misery to fate or karma alone. . .”. An English medical officer contrasted this with the Punjab or the United Provinces where “you would have had terrific riots”, and:

The husbands and brothers would have had those food shops opened, but in Bengal they died in front of bulging food shops.

A. Yes, and it was due to the passive, fatalistic attitude of those people that there were no riots. . .¹¹

A leading Bengali Communist wrote with admiration of these villagers, “saturated with the love of peace and honesty”, turning away from the path of looting, and with “unbounded fortitude. . . standing in the queue of death”.²² And, regarding this evidence, Greenough concludes that this behaviour represented “the continued acceptance in a crisis of the very values which hitherto had sustained the victims”:

Abandoned victims could do no more than to dramatize their helplessness in the hope of re-stimulating a flow of benevolence. Mendicancy, cries and wails, imploring gestures, the exhibition of dead or dying children — all were part of the destitutes’ attempts to evoke charity and to transfer responsibility for their nurture to new ‘destined providers’.³³

Professor Greenough’s intervention is most welcome. But it does present certain difficulties. One set of difficulties arises from his interpretation of complex evidence. His reconstruction of the value-system of Bengali peasants bears the mark of a certain school of holistic anthropology and allows no space for variety and contradiction. This is most evident in his discussion of the demoralisation induced by prolonged dearth, the break-up of families, and the abandonment of wives and children by the father. Greenough concludes that “familial disintegration did not occur randomly but seems to have been a result of the intentional exclusion of less-valued family members from domestic subsistence”. Such exclusion was “desperate but not reprehensible” and was “explicable in terms of Bengali moral conceptions”. The most favoured member of the family (in this account) is the male family head, who might — even if he should be the only survivor — reconstitute the familial lineage. So deeply are these patriarchal values internalised that the abandoned passively assent to their own abandonment.¹¹

This may be true, or may be part of the truth.²² But Greenough hangs his interpretive apparatus upon slender evidence — a few accounts of the “banishment” of wives or desertion of families — and alternative interpretations are not tested.³³ And he affirms his conclusions in increasingly confident form, as if they were incontestible findings. What were “desperate” measures on one page becomes, fifty pages later, the sweeping assertion that “authority figures in peasant households abandoned numerous dependents deemed inessential for the reconstitution of family and society in the post-crisis period”.¹¹ What is found in extremity is now offered as if it were the norm: “husbands and heads of families appropriated domestic assets and abandoned their spouses, and parents sold children for cash”.²²

We must leave these questions to specialists in Bengali culture. But they strongly influence Greenough’s comparative findings as to riot:

This pattern of victimization has nothing in common with European traditions of rage and revolt. In Europe famine violence was turned ‘outward’ and ‘upward’ against offending landlords, merchants, and officials; in Bengal the tradition was to turn violence ‘inward’ and ‘downward’ against clients and dependents. This was the cold violence of abandonment, of ceasing to nourish, rather than the hot violence of bloodshed and tumult.³³

The comparison would be more convincing if Greenough had not misread the European evidence in such a way as to accentuate the violence of that tradition. He prefers an exciteable letter from the Abbé Raynal, in which European food rioters in the 1780s are shown as pursuing each other with daggers in their hands, “massacring each other”, “tearing and devouring their own limbs”, etc., to the less sensational conclusions of historians of riot.⁴⁴ This rigging of the evidence, in which submissive sufferers are contrasted with “enraged looters”, devalues his comparative study.

There remains, however, the significant interrogation of “moral” premises, in relation to subsistence, in differing cultures. In criticising The Moral Economy of the Peasant, Greenough argues that:

Scott’s model of the moral economy. . . is essentially legal in nature. Scott says that peasants everywhere assert a right to subsistence, that this assertion is felt to be just, and that it arises from a norm of reciprocity; further, it is the duty of elites to subsist their peasants, and any failure to do so entails a loss of their legitimacy. This Latinate terminology is derived from study of the numerous food riots that erupted in Western Europe in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries; its appropriateness in explaining Bengali conditions is doubtful. Bengalis in crisis have spoken of their needs for “boons” (bar), “help” (sahajya), and “gifts” (dan), but rarely of their “rights”; of “indulgence” rather than “reciprocity”; of kingly dharma. . . but rarely of an enforceable class “duty”.

This is not just “a narrow matter of terminology, but of the cognitive structures and customary paths for action that are conjured by the use of such terms”.¹¹

This is partly an academic language-game which, unfortunately, is rigged once more in order to score points off Scott. For Greenough has confused the language (and cognitive structures) of the historical subjects and of the academic interpreter. Neither English food rioters nor Burmese peasants acted with a vocabulary of “norms”, “reciprocity” or “legitimacy” on their lips, and, equally, Professor Greenough’s interpretive terminology (“cosmology”, “hierarchical”, “anthropomorphized”) can be as Latinate (or Hellenic), as Scott’s and, perhaps, even less likely to be found on the lips of a Bengal peasant.

But let us forgive him his polemical zeal. For he has reminded us of two important things. The first is that even extreme hunger, and even the simplest act of preparing food, may have differential cultural expression: “to cultivate, cook, share, and eat rice in Bengal is to perform a series of rituals. . . To dissect out an area of economic activity and label it ‘subsistence’ is to sever the social, sacral and even cosmic links” that food preparation and commensality may represent. For these reasons Greenough suspects that “the moral economy of rice in much of Asia is more truly moral, more pregnant with implication, than economic and political historians have been ready to admit”.²² But there is no reason to confine these thoughts to Asia or to rice. Bread, which is “the staff of life”, features in the Lord’s Prayer, bread and salt are the gifts with which European peasants once welcomed visitors, and the wafer of the sacrament of Eucharist was unleavened bread.

We are also reminded that we are always in danger of confusing the historical evidence with the terms of interpretation which we have ourselves introduced. Food rioters did sometimes appeal to justice (or “fair” prices) and they certainly protested against unfair practices; but the language of “duties”, “obligations”, “reciprocity” and even of “rights” is mostly our own. Rioters abused those accused of sharp practices in marketing as “rogues”, and, in the theatre of confrontation, anonymous letter-writers elaborated a rhetoric of threat — murder, arson, even revolt.¹¹ Yet if we were to find ways of interrogating the cognitive structure of food rioters, we might find certain essential premises, whether expressed in the simplest biblical terms of “love” and “charity”, or whether in terms of notions of what humans “owe” to each other in time of need, notions which may have little to do with any Christian instruction but which arise from the elementary exchanges of material life.

There was a plebeian “discourse” here, almost beneath the level of articulacy, appealing to solidarities so deeply assumed that they were almost nameless, and only occasionally finding expression in the (very imperfect) record which we have. Walter Stephens, indicted for riot before the Gloucestershire Special Commission in December 1766, was alleged to have declared that “what the Mob had done was right and justifiable, and that for all the Justices’ acting they would have it all on a Level before it were long”.²² That certainly is not reputable political thought, and it will not be allowed to pass by King’s College, Cambridge. But Walter Stephens said this at a time when he stood in danger of being tried for his life for these opinions (which, at the present moment, is not — so far as I know — the case with any Fellow of King’s) and his meanings deserve our respect.

Comparative enquiry into what is “the moral” (whether as norm or as cognitive structure) will help us to understand these meanings. It is an agenda for forward research. It would be a shame to leave future historians with nothing to do. In any case, if I did father the term “moral economy” upon current academic discourse, the term has long forgotten its paternity. I will not disown it, but it has come of age and I am no longer answerable for its actions. It will be interesting to see how it goes on.

¹ Mark Harrison reprimands me for applying the term “crowd” to what was “a very specific category of mass formation”: Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns, 1790-1835 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 13. I followed George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm in preferring the term “crowd” to the pejorative “mob” which some previous historians had used. No-one ever supposed that all crowds were riotous, although Harrison’s attention to their variety is helpful. Harrison also pronounces that my article “has a number of shortcomings, which will be examined more fully in chapter 6”. Since chapter 6 does not mention my article, and the shortcomings are identified nowhere else in his book, I am still waiting for the blow to fall.

¹ J. Stevenson, “Food Riots in England, 1792-1818”, in R. Quinault and J. Stevenson (eds.), Popular Protest and Public Order (London, 1974), p. 67. Also J. Stevenson, “The ‘Moral Economy’ of the English Crowd: Myth and Reality”, in Anthony Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds.), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985) — an essay which adds little to the discussion.

¹ Past and Present, no. 71, May 1976.

¹ R. C. Cobb, The Police and the People (Oxford, 1970), p. 323. For a comparative overview, see David Arnold, Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (Oxford, 1988).

¹ John Walter and Keith Wrightson, “Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern England”, Past and Present, 71 (1976). See also (for a sharper assertion of authority) John Walter, “Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law: Maldon and the Crisis of 1629” in John Brewer and John Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People (1980). For the Book of Orders, see A. Everitt, “The Marketing of Agricultural Produce”, in J. Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. iv, 1500-1640 (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 581-6; P. Slack, “The Book of Orders: The Making of English Social Policy, 1577-1631”, TRHS, xxx (1980); R. B. Outhwaite, “Food Crisis in Early Modern England: Patterns of Public Response”, Proceedings of the Seventh International Economic History Congress (Edinburgh, 1978), pp. 367-74; R. B. Outhwaite, “Dearth and Government Intervention in English Grain Markets, 1590-1700”, Econ. Hist. Rev., xxxiii, 3 (1981); and Buchanan Sharp, “Popular Protest in 17th-Century England”, in Barry Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in 17th-Century England (1985), esp. pp. 274-289. Sharp argues (p. 279) that seventeenth century food riots “were often attempts to enforce officially-sanctioned market regulations and can be regarded, in many instances, not as attacks upon established order but as efforts to reinforce it”.

² Sharp, op. cit., p. 275; A. B. Appleby, in the classic account of famine mortality in Cumberland and Westmorland in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, reports no disturbances: see Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Liverpool, 1978).

³ Cecil Woodham Smith, The Great Hunger (1970), pp. 120-1; James S. Donnelly, Jr., The Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork (1975), pp. 89-91.

¹ W. H. Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal (1883), i, pp. 26-27. Many of the poor in the western counties of Ireland were overcome by fever in their own homes: see Sir W. P. MacArthur, “Medical History of the Famine”, in R. D. Edwards and T. D. Williams (eds.), The Great Famine (Dublin, 1956), esp. pp. 270-89.

² Sir Richard Temple, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, memorandum on the scarcity of 1873-4, Extra Supplement of the Gazette of India, 26 Feb. 1875, pp. 25, 56-7.

¹ J. Mitchell, Bankura Wesleyan College Magazine, January 1916.

² Much curious and contradictory evidence as to responses to famine is in Robert Dirks, “Social Response during Severe Food Shortages and Famines”, Current Anthropology, xxi (1980), pp. 21-44.

³ Past and Present, 104 (1984).

¹ A. Charlesworth and Adrian Randall, “Morals, Markets and the English Crowd in 1766”, Past and Present, 114 (1987), pp. 200-13. On the 1766 riots see also A. J. Randall, “The Gloucestershire Food Riots in 1766”, Midland History, x (1985); W. J. Shelton, English Hunger & Industrial Disorder (1973), and reviews of Shelton by myself in Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd series, xxvii (1974), pp. 480-4 and by Peter Linebaugh in Bull. Soc. Lab. Hist., 28 (1974), pp. 57-61.

² Univ. of Wales Ph.D. thesis, 1978. Dale Williams’s excellent article on “Midland Hunger Riots in 1766” in Midland History, iii, 4 (1976), might even have been written in illustration of the moral economy thesis. What happened between 1976 and 1984 to change the events of 1766?

¹ A. w. Coats, “Contrary Moralities: Plebs, Paternalists and Political Economists”, Past and Present, 54 (1972), pp. 130-3.

¹ W. Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics (1963), pp. 147-8. See however Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978), pp. 258-9 for qualifications.

¹ Douglas Hay, “The State and the Market: Lord Kenyon and Mr. Waddington”, Past and Present (forthcoming).

¹ P. S. Atiyah, The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract (Oxford, 1979), p. 84.

² Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “The Many Faces of Moral Economy”, Past and Present, 58 (1973) .

¹ One is reminded of David Thorner’s wise caveat: “We are sure to go astray, if we try to conceive of peasant economies as exclusively ‘subsistence’ oriented and to suspect capitalism wherever the peasants show evidence of being ‘market’ oriented. It is much sounder to take it for granted, as a starting point, that for ages peasant economies have had a double orientation towards both. In this way, much fruitless discussion about the nature of so-called ‘subsistence’ economies can be avoided”. Would that the same warning was borne in mind in discussions of “proto-industrial” economies! See “Peasant Economy as a Category in History”, in Teodor Shanin (ed.), Peasants and Peasant Societies, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1987), p. 65.

² The outstanding exception is Wendy Thwaites, “The Marketing of Agricultural Produce in Eighteenth Century Oxfordshire” (Univ. of Birmingham Ph.D. thesis, 1980). See also the same author’s “Dearth and the Marketing of Agricultural Produce: Oxfordshire, c. 1750-1800”, Agric, Hist. Rev., xxxiii (1985), pt. ii; John Chartres, “Markets and Marketing in Metropolitan Western England in the late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, in Michael Havinden (ed.), Husbandry and Marketing in the South-West (Exeter, 1973), pp. 63-74, and John Chartres, “The Marketing of Agricultural Produce”, in Joan Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. v, pt. 2 (Cambridge, 1985), ch. 17. The silence as to corn milling has at last broken by John Orbell, “The Corn Milling Industry, 1750-1820”, in C. H. Feinstein and S. Pollard (eds.), Studies in Capital Formation in the United Kingdom (Oxford, 1988), which shows (p. 162) the rapidly rising rate of annual capital investment in milling, from 1761 rising to a peak in the dearth (and riot) year of 1801.

¹ Edmund Burke, “Thoughts and Details on Scarcity” (1795), in Works (1801), vii, pp. 348-51.

¹ Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, “Needs and Justice in The Wealth of Nations”, in I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and Virtue (Cambridge, 1983), p. 43.

² Ibid., pp. 14-15.

¹ Ibid., p. 18.

¹ See Roger Wells, Wretched Faces (Gloucester, 1988), p. 88.

² See Douglas Hay, “The State and the Market”, op. cit.,; C. B. Macpherson, Burke (Oxford, 1980), passim; Burke, “Thoughts and Details on Scarcity”, p. 354: “the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God”.

¹ Adam Smith’s “real contact” with the French thinkers came during his visit to Paris, December 1765 to October 1766: see Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford, 1976), i, pp. 22-3, note 8. He will therefore have been absent from Britain during the height of the 1766 rioting. But Smith himself insisted that his views of laissez-faire were already formed in 1749: see Jacob Viner, The Long View and the Short (Glencoe, Illinois, 1958), p. 215.

² Even Smith’s famous comparison of the popular prejudices against forestallers to belief in “witchcraft” might have been borrowed from an earlier pamphleteer: see Reflections on the Present High Price of Provisions; and the complaints and disturbances arising therefrom (1766), p. 39, which refers also to witchcraft and notes that in the Commission for the appointment of magistrates “inchantments, sorceries, arts of magic, forestalling, regratings, and ingrossings are ranged together, as offences of a similar nature, because they were committed by wicked persons, in a manner both amazing and unknown”.

¹ Hont and Ignatieff, op. cit., pp. 16-19.

² These passages are selected for emphasis by Salim Rashid in “The Policy of Laissez-faire during Scarcities”, Economic Journal, 90 (1980), pp. 493-503.

¹ Sir James Steuart, “A dissertation on the policy of grain”, in Works (1805; reprint 1967), v, pp. 347-77. Steuart’s proposal was first made in 1757, but was maintained in subsequent years.

² Dugald Stewart, Lectures on Political Economy (Edinburgh, 1855; reprint 1968), ii, p. 52.

³ Wells, Wretched Faces, p. 238.

¹ Roger Wells, “The Grain Crisis in England, 1794-96, 1799-1801” (Univ. of York Ph.D. thesis, 1978), pp. 472-3. Also Wells, Wretched Faces, pp. 238-9.

² Srinivasa Ambirajan, “Economic Ideas and Indian Economic Policies in the 19th Century” (Manchester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1964), pp. 363-4. A similar circular, quoting almost verbatim from The Wealth of Nations, originated from the Board of Revenue in Madras in 1811: Arnold, Famine, p. 113. See also Ambirajan, S., Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India (Cambridge, 1978).

¹ Ibid., p. 366. The view that famines were always the consequence of well-intentioned interventions by the authorities which disrupted the “natural” flow of trade is one of Adam Smith’s least well-supported assertions: “Whoever examines, with attention, the history of the dearths and famines which have afflicted any part of Europe during either the course of the present, or that of the two preceding centuries” will find that dearths arise in a few cases from the waste of war but in the greatest number of cases “by the fault of the seasons; and that a famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of dearth”. (My italics.) Upon this pretence to omniscience, Smith and his disciples could denounce protective measures as iniquitous. Smith also asserted that “the drought in Bengal, a few years ago, might probably have occasioned a very great dearth. Some improper regulations, some injudicious restraints, imposed by the servants of the East India Company upon the rice trade, contributed, perhaps, to turn that dearth into a famine.” This assertion has been challenged by H. Sur, “The Bihar Famine of 1770”, Indian Econ. & Social Hist. Review, xiii, 4 (1976), who finds a better explanation in the collapse of the traditional Moghul administration and the ensuing vacuum.

² B. M. Bhatia, Famines in India (Bombay, 1967), p. 105.

³ Ambirajan, thesis, p. 367.

⁴ See S. Ambirajan, “Malthusian Population Theory and Indian Famine Policy in the 19th Century”, Population Studies, xxx, 1 (1976).

¹ Ambirajan, thesis, pp. 366-7.

² See Bhatia, op. cit., p. 105.

³ The absolutes of political economy were modified by the Famine Code of 1880, although the general principle of non-intervention in the grain trade “remained inviolate until the Second World War”: Arnold, op. cit., p. 114.

¹ Hont and Ignatieff, op. cit., p. 20. Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976), p. 27, found “violent hunger” to be an offence against “propriety”. Though sometimes “unavoidable” it “is always indecent”.

² Ibid., p. 22.

¹ Thus in Bengal in 1873 the first to starve were “non-agricultural classes” — weavers, metal workers, carpenters, fishermen, menials. The field labourers and small cultivators followed: Extra Supplement to the Gazette of India, 26 Feb. 1875, p. 33.

² Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines (Oxford, 1981), pp. 161-2. “Food being exported from famine-stricken areas may be a ‘natural’ characteristic of the market, which respects entitlement rather than needs.”

¹ Douglas Hay, “War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century”, Past and Present, 95 (1982), p. 132.

² See Bhatia, op. cit., p. 39.

¹ Sen, op. cit., p. 154.

² Ibid., pp. 75, 79.

³ See Louise Tilly, “Food Entitlement, Famine, and Conflict”, in R. I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (eds.), Hunger and History (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 135-152.

¹ See Sen, op. cit., p. 154. And see A. K. Ghose, “Food Supply and Starvation: a Study of Famines with reference to the Indian Sub-Continent”, Oxford Economic Papers, xxxiv (1982).

² G. E. Mingay, “The Course of Rents in the Age of Malthus”, in Michael Turner (ed.), Malthus in his Time (Basingstoke, 1986), pp. 90-1.

¹ Michael Turner, “Corn Crises in Britain in the Age of Malthus”, in Turner, op. cit., p. 120.

² Adam Smith’s doctrine of non-interference in the grain trade was limited, in his digression, to the inland trader. Wells is mistaken when he supposes (e.g. Wretched Faces, p. 7) that vigorous governmental exercises in the import of corn during a time of shortage was in breach of Smithian precepts. But (in Smith’s doctrine) government must not then intervene in the internal market by selling off imports beneath the self-regulating market rate, and this was generally avoided in the 1790s by selling off the cargo immediately at the port of arrival, at which sales representatives from inland towns and parishes often attended.

³ Roger Wells, “The Revolt of the South-West, 1800-01”, Social History, 6 (1977), p. 743; Wells, Wretched Faces, p. 230.

¹ Ibid., pp. 178-181, 230-6.

² Ibid., p. 181.

³ John Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790-1810 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 27.

¹ W. Thwaites, “The Assize of Bread in 18th-Century Oxfordshire”, Oxoniensia, li (1986), pp. 171-81.

² Differing explanations for the rarity of food riots in London are to be found in George Rudé, Paris and London in the 18th Century (1970), pp. 55-7; John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700-1870 (1979), pp. 99-100; Bohstedt, op. cit., pp. 208-9. Undoubtedly securing the provisioning of London was a priority of State.

³ See Wells, Wretched Faces, pp. 180-1.

¹ Anon, “A Record of the Staff of Life from 1796 to 1900: at the Old Mill of the City”, Birmingham Magazine of Arts and Industries, iii (1899). See also J. Tann, “Co-operative Corn Milling; Self-help during the grain crises of the Napoleonic Wars”, Agric. Hist. Rev., 28 (1980), p. 52; the Union Mill was founded in 1796 with 1360 subscribers, principally labouring workmen.

² MS notebook of Edward Pickard, Birmingham Reference Library, MS 22/11.

¹ These points are developed by Bohstedt, op. cit., passim, especially in his contrast between Manchester and Devon’s markets. Still in 1800 the Birmingham Union Mill normally obtained their supply in Birmingham market or within a radius of twenty miles: J. Tann, op. cit., p. 54.

² Walter and Wrightson, op. cit., p. 41.

¹ Bohstedt, op. cit., esp. chs. 2 and 9 and pp. 54, 202, 220-1. Cf. Thwaites, thesis, pp. 522-7, for an estimate of riot’s effectiveness in prompting consumer protection.

² China provides an example of successful bureaucratic management of food supplies, during the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth century. The Chinese state undertook far-reaching measures to feed the people during times of scarcity; these included public granaries, the provision of loans, discouragement of hoarders, encouragement of circulation by canals and roads. This was supported by a “Confucian” value-system which endorsed the imperative of “benevolence”, and by the popular belief that any regime which presided over disasters such as famine and flood had “lost the mandate of heaven”. Hence everything to do with the distribution of food in time of scarcity was of highly-sensitive political import. The Chinese peasant did not beg for charity, he demanded relief and saw the bureaucracy as bound by its office to provide this, and the rich as bound by duty. Many actions of Chinese food rioters closely resembled European riots — blockading transport, attacking hoarders, lobbying bureaucrats and the rich — and riot was a recognised way of putting the state measures of relief in motion: Lillian M. Li, “Introduction: Food, Famine and the Chinese State”; R. Bin Wong, “Food Riots in the Qing dynasty”; Paul R. Greenough, “Comment”; all in Journal of Asian Studies, August 1982.

¹ For the interplay of other factors in different national histories, see Charles Tilly, “Food Supply and Public Order in Modern Europe”, in C. Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Europe (Princeton, 1975), pp. 380-455; and Louise Tilly in Rotberg and Rabb (eds.), Hunger and History, pp. 143-8.

² For threatening letters, see my “The Crime of Anonymity”, in Douglas Hay et. al., Albion’s Fatal Tree, pp. 325-41. For arson, see Wells, Wretched Faces, pp. 165-7.

¹ David Arnold, “Looting, Grain Riots and Government Policy in South India, 1918”, Past and Present, 84 (1979).

² See for example George Rudé, Protest and Punishment (Oxford, 1978), p. 57, who says that food riot “played little part” before 1829-31.

³ These examples were collected in a pamphlet published by the Foreign Office and Irish Office, Famine in Ireland, 1740-41 (1847).

⁴ Gentleman’s Magazine, May (1757).

⁵ Wesley’s Journal, 27 May 1758.

¹ But food riots are reported in 1792, Samuel Clark and J. S. Donnelly (eds.), Irish Peasants (Manchester, 1983), p. 55; and in 1793, C. H. E. Philpin (ed.), Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland (Cambridge, 1987), p. 196 (counties Cork and Waterford).

² See L. M. Cullen and T. C. Smout, Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Economic and Social History (Edinburgh, 1977), p. 10 and ch. 2.

³ John Walter, “The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England”, in John Walter and Roger Schofield (eds.), Famine, Disease, and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 82, 121.

¹ John Walter and Roger Schofield, “Famine, Disease and Crisis Mortality in Early Modern Society”, in ibid., p. 47.

² E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population of England, 1541-1871 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), p. 653. The riot years 1766-7 show a death rate 10.4% above trend.

³ See ibid., pp. 668-9.

¹ Ibid., p. 692.

² See John Walter, “The Social Economy of Dearth”, a good deal of which still applies in the early eighteenth century.

³ “Philo-Georgius” to duke of Newcastle, 7 Dec. 1741, Brit. Lib. Add MS 32, 698, f. 496.

¹ Professor Sen continues to lay great stress on the political context of famine in the twentieth century. Governments which are accountable to public opinion are more likely to exert themselves in relief measures than those which are not, and “it is hard to find a case in which a famine has occurred in a country with a free press and an active opposition within a democratic system”: Amartya Sen, “Individual Freedom as a Social Commitment”, New York Review of Books, 14 June, 1990.

² Outhwaite, “Dearth and Government Intervention”, p. 404.

³ The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary of Oxford, 1632-95, ed. A. Clark, cited in W. Thwaites, “The Corn Market and Economic Change: Oxford in the 18th Century”, Midland History (forthcoming).

⁴ Reflections on the Present High Price of Provisions, p. 27.

¹ Much of what John Walter writes about seventeenth-century charities in time of dearth applies equally to the first seven decades of the eighteenth century: Walter, “Social Economy of Dearth”.

² So widespread was the abuse of Quaker dealers that the Friends issued a public statement in 1800: “The Society of Friends. . . having been for some time calumniated as oppressors of the laborious and indigent classes of the community, by combining to monopolize those necessary articles of life, Corn and Flour, think themselves called upon to vindicate their own innocence and integrity. . .”: Meetings for Sufferings, xl, pp. 404-6, 6 October 1800 (Friends House Library, London). My thanks to the Librarian, Malcolm Thomas.

³ In 1766 local gentry raised a subscription in Melksham “in consideration of the poor not having joined in the late riots which occurred all round the town”, and beef was distributed to over 1,600 poor persons. But the beef was given in November, months after the height of the crisis had passed. Dr Randall suggests that the riotous poor of Chippenham, Stroud, Frome or Bradford (Wiltshire) might have done better: A. J. Randall, “Labour and the Industrial Revolution in the West of England Woollen Industry” (Univ. of Birmingham Ph.D. thesis, 1979), p. 166.

¹ Bohstedt, op. cit., pp. 96-7, 48. See also Peter Mandler’s discussion of the conversion of the landed gentry in these years from a weak paternalism which acknowledged the customary rights of the poor to a language of the “natural order” (as defined by Smith and by Malthus) in which “the only true natural right” is that of property: “The Making of the New Poor Law Redivivus”, Past and Present, 117 (November 1987).

² Walter, “Social Economy of Dearth”, pp. 127-8; Walter and Schofield, “Famine, Disease and Crisis Mortality”, p. 48.

¹ Wendy Thwaites, who kindly read these pages in manuscript, has very sensibly rebuked me for even making this joke. She points out that the resources of modernised hungry nations have advanced since the eighteenth century, and (citing Nigel Twose, Cultivating Hunger (Oxfam, 1984)) describes a vehicle developed to deter rioters in the Dominican Republic or Haiti: “the AMAC-1 has nineteen weapon points, four multiple grenade launchers, a water cannon, an infra-red video camera for surveillance, and its bodywork can be electrified with a 7,000 volt charge”. She concludes that for riot to work there “have to be certain constraints on how far the authorities will go in repression”. I have left my jest in because it enables me also to include her thoughtful caution.

¹ Adam Smith in his digression took a benign view of profiteers, since (a) the high profits of years of scarcity compensated dealers for the modest returns of normal years, and (b) the excessive profits of a few might be the inevitable price to pay for the market’s functions for the general public. In any case, hoarders and profiteers (if they misjudged the market) would be caught out when prices fell. No-one has as yet succeeded in finding a way to study systematically the question of hoarding and profiteering in eighteenth-century high-price years, nor is it easy to see how it could be done. But that is no reason for the widely-held dogma that its effect (if it happened at all) was insignificant, and that no case can be made for excessive prices (in a seller’s market, shored up by Corn Laws) which transferred wealth from the petty consumers to the grain-growing interests. Some scholars show great expertise in such matters as the behaviour of rats and fleas, or in the ratios of seed-corn to available harvest surplus, while stubbornly refusing to acknowledge rather large factors such as human greed.

¹ We are fortunate in having excellent studies of these groups of workers, both in their capacities as (hard-bargaining) producers and (riotous) consumers. Even “custom” was not pre-market or non-market but a particular community consensus as to the regulation of wages and prices. See J. G. Rule, “The Labouring Miner in Cornwall, c. 1740-1820”, (Univ. of Warwick Ph.D. thesis, 1971), esp. pp. 116-80; R. W. Malcolmson, “A Set of Ungovernable People”, in J. Brewer and J. Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People (1980) (the mining population of Kingswood); A. J. Randall, “Labour and the Industrial Revolution in the West of England Woollen Industry” (Univ. of Birmingham Ph.D. thesis, 1979).

¹ Mist’s Weekly Journal, 12 March 1726 reported that the mob rose on market days in Northampton, Kettering, Oundle, Wellingborough, Stony Stratford, because farmers would not bring corn to the market-place “but kept it in the Inns”. At Towcester a riot was prevented by the Cryer giving notice that corn must be brought “into open market”.

² Malcolm I. Thomis and Jennifer Grimmett, Women in Protest, 1800-1850 (1982), ch. 2. This is based on a survey of published sources and some use of newspapers in 1800 and 1812.

¹ Kenneth J. Logue, Popular Disturbances in Scotland, 1780-1815 (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 199, 202-3.

² John Bohstedt, “Gender, Household and Community Politics: Women in English Riots, 1790-1810”, Past and Present, no. 120 (August 1988), pp. 88-122. The claim to have demolished “the myth of the feminine food riot” is at pp. 90, 93.

³ Ibid., p. 88. J. L. and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer (1911; reprint 1966), pp. 116-8.

¹ The best comment is Roger Wells, “Counting riots in eighteenth-century England”, Bulletin of Lab. Hist. Soc., 37 (1978), pp. 68-72. Alan Booth discusses successive errors in estimates in his excellent and dense study, “Food Riots in the North-West of England, 1790-1801”, Past and Present, 77 (1977), esp. pp. 89-90.

² Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics, pp. 11-14, 230-1; Booth, op. cit., pp. 98-9.

¹ Ipswich Journal, 26 July 1740. I am indebted to Robert Malcolmson for this.

² Bristol Journal, 11 June 1757, cited in Jeremy N. Caple, “Popular Protest and Public Order in 18th-century England: the Food Riots of 1756-7” (Queens Univ. Ontario, M.A. thesis, 1978), p. 102.

¹ G. Blenkinsop, 14 Oct. 1738 in PRO, T 1/299(15).

² Northampton Mercury, 6 Oct. 1740; R. Malcolmson in Brewer and Styles, op. cit., p. 117.

¹ Edward Goddard, 24 May 1740 in PRO, SP 36/50/431 and miscellaneous depositions in SP 36/51.

² J. J. Williamson, Sheriff of Durham, 10 June 1740 in PRO, SP 36/51.

³ Joyce Ellis, “Urban Conflict and Popular Violence: the Guildhall Riots of 1740 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne”, Int. Rev. Social Hist., xxv, 3 (1980).

⁴ They were discharged at the Sessions a few days later.

⁵ “Account of the Riots” by Alderman Ridley in Northumberland CRO, 2R1 27/8.

¹ Ellis, op. cit., pp. 341-6.

² At Durham Assizes Anne Withy, Hannah Crone and William Young were transported for seven years for taking a large quantity of wheat out of a ship at Stockton. Three more women and one man were tried and acquitted: Newcastle Journal, 9 Aug. 1740. My thanks to Robert Malcolmson again.

³ William Price, 13 June 1740 in PRO, SP 36/51, and various depositions in SP 36/50 and 36/51.

⁴ PRO, SP 36/135.

⁵ Caple, op. cit., p. 82.

¹ Holles Newcastle to Secretary at War, 26 May 1737, PRO, SP 41/10.

² Logue, op. cit., pp. 21. 44.

¹ R. W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, 1700-1780 (1981), p. 118.

² Wendy Thwaites has found women present in Oxfordshire food riots in 1693, 1713, 1757, 1766 and 1795: Thwaites, thesis, table p. 472 (for 1795), pp. 485-6.

¹ Thomas and Grimmett, op. cit., p. 10, also accuse me, on the same grounds, of placing women “firmly in the market-place, if not exactly beside the kitchen sink”; and they also throw no light on how marketing was done.

² Bohstedt is strangely inconsistent. He suggests that men did the marketing (p. 116). But women (who did not normally do so and hence were confined to the household?) were nevertheless somehow knitting the networks of neighbourhood, and he commends a French study for noting that housework “overflowed into communal co-operation” in “fetching water and provisions, for example” (p. 98, my italics).

³ See Wendy Thwaites’ excellent study, “Women in the Market Place: Oxfordshire c. 1690-1800”, Midland History, ix (1984), pp. 23-42, and, for the earlier tradition, Rodney Hilton, “Women Traders in Medieval England”, in Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism (1985), p. 213.

¹ In the early eighteenth century Lord of the Market of Woodbridge (Suffolk) was threatening to prosecute “persons who come to this town with fish, fowl, fruits, butter, cheese, eggs” on market days, and who carry these things from house to house, instead of taking a stand or stall in the market: Ipswich and East Suffolk CRO, V 5/9/6 - 3 (3). Perhaps similar attempts at control were behind a rash of prosecutions of petty dealers (garden stuff, fruit, fish) for regrating in Oxford in 1712: of 24 persons prosecuted, 21 were women: Thwaites, p. 30.

² J. Dunkin cited in ibid., p. 29.

³ J. Mathews, Remarks on the Cause and Progress of the Scarcity and Dearness of Cattle. . . (1797), pp. 9-10.

⁴ Ibid., pp. 70-71.

⁵ J. Malham (Vicar of Helton, Dorset, and Ordinary of the Wiltshire County Gaol), The Scarcity of Grain Considered (Salisbury, 1800), p. 43.

¹ Thwaites, thesis, i, pp. 208-21, discusses the question with care.

² “Inquisition on Ruth Pierce”, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, xii (1870), pp. 256-7. My thanks to Mary Prior.

³ “A Person in Business”, Two Letters on the Flour Trade (London, 1757, 1766), pp. 7-8; the author is writing from Hampshire. See also Wendy Thwaites, “Dearth and the Marketing of Agricultural Produce: Oxfordshire”, Agric. Hist. Rev., xxxiii (1985), p. 121.

⁴ Thwaites, “Women in the Market Place”, p. 37.

⁵ PRO, TS 11/1138/5956: Special Commission, Gloucester, 14 Nov. 1766, Crown Brief.

¹ Catherine Phillips, Considerations on the Causes of the High Price of Grain. . . (1792), p. 7.

² William Brooks, The True Causes of our present Distress for Provisions (1800), pp. 29-30. My thanks to Dr Thwaites.

³ F. W. Steer (ed.), “The Memoirs of James Spershott”, The Chichester Papers, 30 (Chichester, 1962).

⁴ See Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour, ed. Marian Sugden and E. P. Thompson (1989).

¹ Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919; reprint 1982), pp. 108-9.

² “A.B.”, Observations on the detriment that is supposed must arise to the family of every cottager. . . from the loss of woollen spinning. . . (1794).

¹ Ipswich Journal, 7 June 1740.

² Bohstedt may be drawing too far upon the suggestions of Hans Medick on “The proto-industrial family economy”, in Peter Kriedte, H. Medick and Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 60-3.

¹ The full text is in Publications of the Thoresby Society, xli, pt. 3, p. 95 (1947). Extracts are in H. Heaton, Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries (1920), pp. 344-7; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 300-1.

² See Dorothy Thompson, “Women, Work and Politics in Nineteenth-Century England: the Problem of Authority”, in Jane Randall (ed.), Equal or Different (Oxford, 1987), pp. 61-3.

¹ Clark, op. cit., p. 51. See also Maxine Berg’s suggestion as to networks in The Age of Manufactures (1985), pp. 164-7, and the excellent survey of women’s work in the family economy in Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1989), chapters 3 and 4.

¹ Thomas Parsons, Letters to an M.P. on the absurdity of popular prejudices. . . (Bath, 1800).

² Thwaites, thesis, ii, pp. 468-9.

³ Gloucester Journal, 24 June 1740.

⁴ Bewdley — Northampton Mercury, 6 June 1757; Worcester — Worcester Journal, 19 May 1757; Taunton, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Salisbury, Kidderminster — all in R. W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, 1700-1780 (1981), pp. 117-8.

⁵ Dale E. Williams, “Midland Hunger Riots in 1766”, Midland History, iii, 4 (1976).

¹ John Walter in Charlesworth (ed.), An Atlas of Rural Protest (1983), shows women present in riots In Kent (1595), Essex (1596), and unloading a ship at Southampton (1608).

² In Scotland at the end of the eighteenth century, the issue which occasioned the highest participation of women in direct action “was opposition to the exercise of church patronage by lay patrons against the popular wishes of the congregation”. Food riots came second. Logue, op. cit., pp. 199-204.

³ PRO, Assi 24/42, Devon, Winter 1767: 21 men (17 weavers, 2 woolcombers, 2 labourers, 1 cordwainer) for attacking a boulting mill; ibid., 9 men of Ottery St Mary for pulling down a water mill (and the two following cases); ibid., Somerset 1766, cheese riot, Wellington (13 woolcombers, weavers, etc. indicted); ibid., Somerset, Summer 1767, cheese riot, 7 labourers of Trowbridge indicted (but no true bill found); ibid., Wiltshire, Winter 1767, 8 men indicted (5 broadweavers, 2 scribblers, 1 labourer).

⁴ PRO, Assi 4/22, Shropshire, Summer 1767, 5 women of Culmington, for cutting sacks and throwing grain on the floor. Assi 4/20, Worcestershire, Summer 1768, 7 women for carrying away 60 bushels of wheat. Assi 4/21, Worcestershire, Lent 1775, 7 women from Old Swinford (1 widow, 2 spinsters, 2 colliers’ wives and 2 labourers’ wives) for a flour riot in which 200 took part. Assi 24/43, Somerset, Lent 1801, 4 women for compelling the sale of bread under market price.

⁵ PRO, Assi 24/43, Devon, Summer 1801, 5 labourers and 1 single-woman, for compelling the sale of barley under the market price.

⁶ PRO, Assi 24/42, Somerset, Summer 1767, butter riot, 5 women and 1 labourer indicted.

¹ For a Bicester (Oxfordshire) wheat riot in 1757, 4 men and 4 women were tried, of whom 1 man and 1 woman were sentenced to 7 years transportation; for a riot involving beans, 2 men were transported, and 1 woman was branded: Thwaites, thesis, pp. 471, 473.

² Bohstedt, “Gender, Household and Community Politics”, p. 120, note 116.

³ PRO, Assi 24/42, 24/43, 4/20, 4/21, 4/22. I have only counted cases of riot related explicitly to food.

⁴ Douglas Hay has found women leading food riots in Staffordshire in 1740, 1757, 1783 and 1800: “Crime, Authority and the Criminal Laws in Staffordshire 1750-1800” (Univ. of Warwick Ph.D. thesis, 1975), p. 265, and private communication.

⁵ In 1795 miners from the Forest of Dean searched a trow at Awre on the Severn. Finding wheat and flour, 100 men, women and children came down from the Forest with horses and asses and carried off 500 bushels. According to a witness “the women were more riotous than the men”. But 5 miners were arrested, of whom 2 were hanged for stealing flour; PRO, Assi 5/116; London Chronicle, 17-19 Nov. 1795.

¹ PRO, Assi 24/42, Devon, Summer 1765; F. J. Snell, The Chronicles of Twyford (Tiverton, 1893), pp. 192-201.

² PRO, Assi 24/42. Those whose indictments were “not to be found” by the grand jury in Ottery St Mary included 4 carpenters, 4 woolcombers, 3 husbandmen, 2 tailors, 2 labourers, 2 cordwainers, 1 thatcher.

³ PRO, Assi 24/43.

⁴ In a Taunton cheese riot, 11 men and 6 women were indicted. All were found “paupers” and discharged. The “paupers” included 3 woolcombers, 2 serge weavers, 2 cordwainers, 2 labourers, 1 whitesmith, 1 fuller: and 3 spinsters, the wives of a cordwainer, a labourer and a serge weaver; PRO, Assi 24/42, Somerset, Winter 1767.

¹ See Wells, Wretched Faces, ch. 16, “The Role of the Courts”.

² These are the formal returns in Baga de Secretis, G.B. Deputy Keeper of Public Records, 5th Report (1844), Appendix II, pp. 198-204. But some prisoners were held over for subsequent trial or their cases were dismissed. The Gloucester Journal, 15 Dec. 1766, reported that 96 rioters were then in prison, of whom 16 were women: see also Williams, thesis, pp. 162-3. But other records suggest that as many as 22 women were committed: cases against one or two were dropped, and another turned evidence against her fellows; crown brief, PRO, TS 11/1188/5956, and “A Calendar of the Criminal Prisoners in the Castle Gaol of Gloucester”, 13 Dec. 1766 (annotated) in TS 11/995/3707.

³ This is suggested by John Beattie in his authoritative article, “The Criminality of Women in Eighteenth-Century England”, Journal of Soc. Hist., viii, (1975), p. 113, note 57. Also Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 436-9.

⁴ Booth, op. cit., p. 106 finds that in the courts in Lancashire 1790-1801 “no differentiation seems to have been made between the sexes”.

¹ Crown briefs in PRO, TS 11/1116/5728. Elizabeth Moody and Mary Nash were both pregnant, giving birth immediately after their trials, Mary Nash with twins: it is not clear whether their sentences were enforced. See Williams, op. cit., pp. 167, 170.

² Some of the following deductions depend upon rough annotations to the ²Gaol Calendar in PRO, TS 11/995/3707. On feme covert, see Blackstone, op. cit., iv, pp. 26-7 and John Beattie, op. cit., p. 238, note 71. op. cit.; Gloucester Journal, 22 Dec. 1766; Gloucester CRO, Q/SG 1767-70, Gloucester Gaol Calendar, 13 Jan. 1767.

¹ Elizabeth Rackley was later pardoned.

² Gaol Calendar in PRO, TS 11/995/3707. On feme couvert, see Blackstone, op. cit., iv, pp. 26-7 and John Beattie, op. cit., p. 238, note 71.

³ Letter of John Halford, 1 July 1740, in Lincs., Archives Office, 3 Anc. 7/4/14.

¹ Ann Welford and Barbara Mason were sentenced to six months hard labour at Northampton Quarter Sessions in 1796 for trying, with a great number of persons, “principally women”, to stop a market wagon: Northampton Mercury, 9 Apr. 1796. My thanks to Jeanette Neeson.

² For Anne Carter, see John Walter, “Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law: Maldon and the Crisis of 1629”, in Brewer and Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People, pp. 47-84, an excellent study which follows the rioters back into the local records. For Hannah Smith, see Thomis and Grimmett, op. cit., pp. 43-44.

³ Memorandum as to the state of evidence against food rioters (1766) from Treasury Solicitor in Shelburne Papers, Vol. 132, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; see also PRO, SP Dom 44/141.

⁴ Williams, “Midland Hunger Riots in 1766”, p. 277.

¹ Wells, op. cit., p. 121.

² John Walter in An Ungovernable People, p. 63; see also Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts (Oxford, 1988), pp. 96, 116.

³ Williams, op. cit., pp. 273-4.

⁴ After “repeated solicitations” from a Captain of marines, the constable of Brentwood reluctantly arrested two women, in “The Ship” alehouse, who had been “singing a song in Brentwood Street reflecting on the military”: Essex CRO, Q/SBb 352/55 (Aug. 1793).

¹ PRO, WO 1/1091, 5 and 8 Aug. 1795; Assi 2/26 and 5/116.

² Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 28 May 1757 reports a wagon of wheat taken away in Bath by a mob in women’s clothes. I have not found any eighteenth-century indictment for such an offence in a food riot.

³ See Natalie Davis, “Women on Top”, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975). I think Professor Davis overlooks the fact that a woman’s gown was the most readily-available garment to disguise a collier or a cottager. Some of the upside-down symbolic effects (which she describes so well) were consequence rather than intention. Attacks on turnpikes had more military symbolism: “Deponent saith. . . they heard the Noise of Horns blowing. . . and soon after a great Number of Persons armed with Guns & Axes, some of them disguised with black’d faces and Womens Cloathes. . .”. This was an attack on a turnpike gate in Ledbury, Herefordshire. James Baylis, labourer, who was apprehended said that he had blacked his face with a burnt cork, and that the gown, apron and straw hat which he wore were his wife’s: informations in PRO, TS 11/1122/5824, 4 Nov. 1735.

¹ Temma Kaplan, “Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910-1918”, Signs, vii, 3 (1982), pp. 545, 560, 565.

² Snell, The Chronicles of Twyford, pp. 194-5. This was an election riot.

³ Williams, thesis, pp. 203, note 2, and p. 279.

⁴ Logue, op. cit., p. 22.

¹ Walter, op. cit., pp. 58, 72.

² Ellis, op. cit., p. 340; Thomis and Grimmett, op. cit., p. 31.

³ Ibid., pp. 43-5.

⁴ For examples, see Derby Mercury, 10 July 1740 (Derby 1740). Elizabeth Beer and Elizabeth Bell were each sentenced to 7 years transportation for their part in this riot. Information of Thos. Higgins against Ann Burdon, who stopped his wagon in Long Handborough in August 1795, took the horse out of the shafts, and got into the shafts to prevent the horses being put back in: PRO, Assi 5/116.

¹ Northampton Mercury, 2 June 1740; Ipswich Journal, 7 June 1740.

² Intercepted letter of J. and L. Golby to “Dear Brother and Sister”, dated Nottingham 7 Sept. 1800, in PRO, HO 42/51. Extracts of the letter are in Quinault and Stevenson (eds.), op. cit., pp. 58-9 and in Wells, Wretched Faces, pp. 120-2.

³ Or maybe the answer differed according to place and time. Walter, op. cit., p. 62 writes that “women were present in almost every food riot in the period [i.e. early seventeenth century] and some riots were exclusively feminine affairs”.

¹ Tom Wedgwood wrote to his father, Josiah, describing “the mob” in the Potteries in March 1783: “The women were much worse than the men, as for example, Parson Sneyd got about 30 men to follow him. . . but a woman cried: ‘Nay, nay, that wunna do, that wunna do’, and so they turned back again, and it was agreed that the corn taken [in] the boat should be sold at a fair price”: The Wedgwood Letters, ed. Ann Finer and G. Savage (1965), p. 268. My thanks to Douglas Hay.

² Women and miners were prominent in traditional price-setting in south-west England in 1847, and women and fishermen in north-east Scotland: A. Rowe, “Food Riots of the Forties in Cornwall”, Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society (1942); E. Richards, The Last Scottish Food Riots, Past and Present Supplement (1981). See also Roger E. Swift, “Food Riots in Mid-Victorian Exeter, 1847-67”, Southern History, 2 (1980). Robert Storch, in a most interesting study, shows how in 1867 in Devon and Oxfordshire, traditions of food riot, of rough music, and of “Guy Fawkes” carnival came together, with the women and the disguised “bonfire boys” playing the leading roles: “Popular Festivity and Consumer Protest: Food Price Disturbances in the Southwest and Oxfordshire in 1867”, Albion, 14, 3-4 (1982). Although women were often the most active in these events, few of the women were arrested or brought to trial. See Storch, p. 233, note 41.

³ Dorothy Thompson, “Women and Nineteenth-Century Radical Politics: a Lost Dimension”, in Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (eds.), The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 112-138.

¹ Thus Robert Southey was claiming to espouse “MORAL versus political economy”, see David Eastwood, “Robert Southey and the Intellectual Origins of Romantic Conservatism”, Eng. Hist. Rev., civ (1989), p. 323. The “moral economy of the factory system” was employed in a very different sense by Dr Andrew Ure in The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835).

² Bronterre’s National Reformer, 21 Jan. 1837. I am indebted to Dorothy Thompson for this reference.

³ (Penguin, 1968), pp. 67-73.

¹ Similar “moral economy” themes have been examined in different national histories — notably (France) Louise Tilly, “The Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, i (1971), pp. 23-57, and Cynthia A. Bouton, “L’ ‘économie morale’ et la Guerre des farines de 1775”, and also the editors’ “Introduction” in Florence Gauthier and Guy-Robert Ikni (eds.), La Guerre du Blé au XVIII^e Siécle (Paris, 1988); Laura Rodriguez, “The Spanish Riots of 1766”, Past and Present, 59 (1973); Barbara Clark Smith, “Food Rioters in the American Revolution”, in Alfred F. Young, (ed.), Beyond the American Revolution (Urbana, forthcoming); John Rogers, “The 1866 Grain Riots in Sri Lanka”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, xxix, 3 (1987).

² A. J. Randall in John Rule (ed.), British Trade Unionism, 1750-1850 (1988), pp. 29-51. See also Charlesworth and Randall, “Morals, Markets and the English Crowd”, pp. 206-9. Professor Charles Tilly, in a private communication, has suggested a further definition: “The term ‘moral economy’ makes sense when claimants to a commodity can invoke non-monetary rights to that commodity, and third parties will act to support these claims — when, for example, community membership supersedes price as a basis of entitlement. To the extent that moral economy comes merely to mean tradition, custom, or exchange outside the established market, it loses its conceptual force.”.

¹ Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge, 1987), ch. 6.

² K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 99-199, 103.

¹ The great British miners’ strike of 1984 was a late example of such a confrontation, although “free market” forces appeared in the guise of every resource of the State.

² Charlesworth and Randall, “Morals, Markets and the English Crowd”, p. 213.

¹ William Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), pp. 331-4.

² Carl Gersuny and Gladys Kaufman, “Seniority and the Moral Economy of U.S. Automobile Workers, 1934-46”, Journal of Social History, xviii (1985), extend the notion into non-“economic” trade union defences.

³ A danger which Reddy himself does not wholly avoid in his sequel, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), in which “asymmetrical monetary exchange” is made the key to all modern history, wherein “honour” and “money” enact an unequal contest.

¹ James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976). See also James M. Polachek, “The Moral Economy of the Kiangsi Soviet”, Journal of Asian Studies, xlii, 4 (1983), p. 825.

² For constructive criticism, see David Hunt, “From the Millenium to the Everyday: James Scott’s Search for the Essence of Peasant Politics”, Radical Hist. Rev., 42 (1988), pp. 155-72; Michael Adas, “‘Moral Economy’ or ‘Contest State’?”, Journal of Social History, xiii, 4 (1980).

¹ James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), p. 350. See also the editors’ contributions in Andrew Turton and Shigeharu Tanabe (eds.), History and Peasant Consciousness in South East Asia (Osaka, 1984), and the special issue of the Journals of Peasant Studies, xiii, 2 (1986).

² Barrington Moore Jr, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (1978), pp. 18, 506.

¹ Michael Watts, Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (Berkeley, 1983), pp. 106, 146.

² Leslie Anderson, “From Quiescence to Rebellion: Peasant Political Activity in Costa Rica and Pre-Revolutionary Nicaragua” (Univ. of Michigan Ph.D. thesis, 1987; Erick D. Langer, “Labor Strikes and Reciprocity on Chuquisaca Haciendas”, Hispanic American History Review, lxv, 2, 1985.

³ Thomas Bartlett, “An End to Moral Economy: The Irish Militia Disturbances of 1793”, in C. H. E. Philpin (ed.), Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland (Cambridge, 1987).

⁴ Paul R. Greenough, “Indian Famines and Peasant Victims: The Case of Bengal in 1943-44”, Modern Asian Studies, xiv, 2 (1980), p. 207.

¹ See Scott, Weapons of the Weak, ch. 8 — an excellent discussion of “hegemony” in this everyday sense.

² See also Charles F. Keyes, “Economic Action and Buddhist Morality in a Thai Village”, Journal of Asian Studies, xlii, 4 (1983).

³ Paul R. Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal (Oxford, 1982), esp. ch. 1. Greenough derives his account from Hindu cosmology and is silent as to any differences between Hindu and Moslem villagers.

⁴ Paul R. Greenough, “Indulgence and Abundance as Asian Peasant Values: a Bengali Case in Point”, Journal of Asian Studies, xlii, 4 (1983), p. 842.

¹ Greenough, Prosperity and Misery, pp. 266-7.

² Ibid., p. 268.

³ Ibid., p. 271.

¹ Ibid., pp. 215-25 and “Indian Famines and Peasant Victims”, pp. 225-33.

² Megan Vaughan in “Famine Analysis and Family Relations: 1949 in Nyasaland”, Past and Present, 108 (1985), has similar disturbing evidence of the aged, the young and the disabled being abandoned, and of husbands abandoning their families: and M. Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine. Gender and Famine in Twentieth-Century Malawi (1987).

³ Some men may have left their families in the hope of finding work (and sending remittances) or in the expectation that in their absence the wife’s kin or village charities would support the family. Wives might have been encouraged to go begging as the ultimate recourse against starvation. Similarly, the sale of children may have been an ultimate strategy to secure their survival. (Greenough assumes that “the dominant motive” for selling children was to secure cash for the parents’ food, or else to “relieve themselves of the intolerable clamoring of their children for food”! Prosperity and Misery, p. 221.) Greenough’s account of age-differential mortality during famine (ibid., ch. 6) makes no attempt to relate this to the findings of historical demography as to trends commonly encountered during subsistence crisis. Indeed his treatment of historical and demographic studies is cavalier: see David Arnold, Famine, pp. 89-90.

¹ Prosperity and Misery, pp. 215 and 264. Cf. Greenough, “Indulgence and Abundance”, pp. 832-3: heads of households “coolly abandon” their dependents; in “an extreme realization of core patriarchal values. . . it becomes acceptable to channel threats of extinction toward less essential actors like clients, women and children”.

² “Indulgence and Abundance”, p. 847.

³ Ibid., p. 847; Prosperity and Misery, pp. 270-1.

⁴ Ibid., p. 268.

¹ “Indulgence and Abundance”, p. 846.

² Ibid., p. 848.

¹ See my essay, “The Crime of Anonymity”, in Hay, Linebaugh and Thompson, Albion’s Fatal Tree, esp. the “Sampler of Letters”, pp. 326-43. But even these letters are studied and “literary” productions.

² Crown brief in PRO, TS 11/1188/5956. I cannot find out what happened to Walter Stephens. His name does not appear on the Calendar of Prisoners in TS 11/995/3707. The case against him may have been dropped, or he might have been the Thomas Stephens committed for riot and diverse outrages and felonies, who appears in the Calendar with an annotation “acquitted”.