Customs in Common, page 39
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.
And (in conclusion) more caution might be proper in the use of the term, “market”. I return to my earlier question: is market an actual market or is it a metaphor? One hears on every side these days talk of “a market economy”. When this is contrasted with the centralised direction of old-style collectivist states one understands what is being described. And, very certainly, the “market” here is beneficial and can also be democratic, in stimulating variety and in expressing consumer choice. But I cannot clearly say what was “a market economy” in eighteenth-century England; or, rather, I cannot find a non-market-economy to contrast it with. One cannot think of an economy without a market; and even the most zealous food rioters, such as Cornish tinners or Kingswood miners or West of England clothing workers,1 were inextricably committed to the market, both as producers and as consumers. How could they have existed for a month or a week without it? What we can find are different ways of regulating the market or of manipulating exchanges between producers and consumers, to the advantage of one party or the other. It is with the special case of the marketing of “necessities” in time of dearth that we have been concerned, and the crowd’s preferred model was precisely the “open market” in which the petty producers freely competed, rather than the closed market when large dealers conducted private bargains over samples in the back parlours of inns.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).
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”.
The “market economy”, I suspect, is often a metaphor (or mask) for capitalist process. It may even be employed as myth. The most ideologically-compelling form of the myth lies in the notion of the market as some supposedly-neutral but (by accident) beneficent entity; or, if not an entity (since it can be found in no space but the head) then an energising spirit — of differentiation, social mobility, individualisation, innovation, growth, freedom — like a kind of postal sorting-station with magical magnifying powers, which transforms each letter into a package and each package into a parcel. This “market” may be projected as a benign consensual force, which involuntarily maximises the best interests of the nation. It may even seem that it is the “market system” which has “produced” the nation’s wealth — perhaps “the market” grew all that grain?
Market is indeed a superb and mystifying metaphor for the energies released and the new needs (and choices) opened up by capitalist forms of exchange, with all conflicts and contradictions withdrawn from view. Market is (when viewed from this aspect) a mask worn by particular interests, which are not coincident with those of “the nation” or “the community”, but which are interested, above all, in being mistaken to be so. Historians who suppose that such a market really could be found must show it to us in the records. A metaphor, no matter how grand its intellectual pedigree, is not enough.
III
Let us next take the question of the role of women in food riots. In 1982 Jennifer Grimmett and M. I. Thomis published a helpful chapter on the theme,2 in which they raised but left unanswered the question as to which sex was the more prominent. Kenneth Logue, in a study of “meal mobs” in Scotland found that women were very active, although they comprised only 28 per cent of those charged before the courts. But this was possibly because “they were less likely to be prosecuted than their male colleagues”, so that, again, the question is left open.1 In 1988 John Bohstedt sought to bring a conclusive answer in a substantial article which purports to demolish “the myth of the feminine food riot”.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.
Kenneth J. Logue, Popular Disturbances in Scotland, 1780-1815 (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 199, 202-3.
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.
Bohstedt’s conclusions are as follows:
Women did not dominate food riots; food riots were not a distinctly feminine province. . . Women typically joined men in food riots. . . Women’s co-operation with men is much more significant than the monopoly suggested by the older view. Women were significant partners to men as bread rioters partly because they were essential partners as bread-winners in the household economies of pre-industrial society and partly because bread riots were still effective politics in stable small-to-medium-sized traditional towns.
These conclusions are sustained in two ways. First, John Bohstedt presents what purport to be refined statistics of all riots in England and Wales between 1790 and 1810. Second, he introduces some pages of speculation as to gender roles in the proto-industrial household economy.
I have already expressed my admiration for Bohstedt’s major study of riot. And there is interesting material in this new article. But the piece obscures as much as it reveals. The first difficulty is that there is no “myth of the feminine food riot” to demolish. No-one, no historian, has ever suggested that food riots were a “monopoly” of women or were predominantly feminine, and Bohstedt can show none. The best that he can do is hold up to censure Barbara and J. L. Hammond for writing (in 1911) of the crisis year of 1795 as the year of “the revolt of the housewives”, because of “the conspicuous part taken by women” in the food riots.3 That does not constitute a “myth”, so that we are being led into a spurious polemic. Previous historians have, perhaps, not always given enough attention to women’s part in riots, but most have agreed that women were highly visible rioters and were frequently involved. Since all historians show riots in which men also were highly visible, or in which men and women acted together, no-one has suggested that food riots were “a distinctly feminine province”.
Ibid., p. 88. J. L. and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer (1911; reprint 1966), pp. 116-8.
In his eagerness to drive this mythical opponent from the field, Bohstedt introduces his tables. He has with great industry assembled a “sample” of 617 riots between 1790 and 1810 and he drills this sample through various statistical manoeuvres. Now I don’t know what to say to this. There are times when his figures are helpful — for example, in showing a rough division between different occasions for riot. And Bohstedt is a careful scholar who sometimes remembers the limitations of his evidence. But in general his history becomes less credible the more he surrenders to his own figures and the further he gets away from “literary” and contextual sources. This is because much of the evidence is too “soft” to be introduced to the hard definitions of a table. And when one looks at some of John Bohstedt’s counting, the points at issue may seem absurd. Of his 617 riots he is able to identify 240 as food riots. These are further refined as:
If one deducts D, and puts A and B together, then 77 out of 158, or 49 per cent of these food riots had female participation and 51 per cent did not. So that if one wished to claim that women took part in “most” food riots, one would be at fault by 2 per cent. But, putting B and C together, one would discover that 123 out of 158, or 78 per cent had male participation — which could be a step on the way to a myth of a male food riot, to be demolished by a subsequent generation of computers.
When Bohstedt offers to drill these figures through more refined manoeuvres (such as violence and disorder quotients), he must make anyone laugh who is familiar with the source material which he is using. Let me explain some of the difficulties. There are, first of all, the difficulties in gathering any reliable count. These are familiar, and have often been discussed.1 Bohstedt’s sample is drawn from the Annual Register, two London newspapers, and the in-letters to the Home Office concerning disorders (HO 42). This is a wide survey, but the provincial coverage of the London press was patchy, JPs might not always wish to report their local affairs to the central authorities, the sample tends to over-report dramatic or violent affrays and under-report quieter episodes (hence possibly under-reporting women’s participation), and so on. When compared to regional studies which draw upon local sources, Bohstedt’s sample shows a serious undercount. A most thorough study, by Alan Booth, of food riots in the north-west of England in the same years, lists forty-six disturbances of which only twelve are in Bohstedt’s sample. Booth adds that “in most riots where sexual composition was recorded women appear to have been both more numerous and particularly active”, and he goes on to cite thirteen examples. Hence Booth’s examples (which he does not suggest are exhaustive) exceed the total of Bohstedt’s count of food riots in all categories, which must undercount the feminine presence.2
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.
Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics, pp. 11-14, 230-1; Booth, op. cit., pp. 98-9.
Next, we must consider the nature of the evidence which is being used. How does it come about that in eighty-two cases (or more than one third of the sample) the sex of the rioters is unknown, and how hard or soft is the evidence in the eighty-one cases of men only? The evidence often comes in a sexually-indeterminate vocabulary: “rioters”, “the mob”, “the poor”, “the inhabitants”, “the populace”. Let us take a letter of 12 July 1740 from Norwich, published in the Ipswich Journal, which describes a riot by “the common People”, “the meanest of the People”, “the Multitude,”:
About Eight in the Evening the Mayor committed three of four disorderly Fellows to Prison; which Act so incens’d the Mob, that they broke open the Prison, releas’d their Companions, and have scarce left a Pane of Glass in the whole Prison. . . Upon this Outrage of the Mob, an unthinking Gentleman is said to have taken a Musket out of the Hands of a Dragoon, and shot a Man thro’ the Head. You will imagine how this enrag’d the Populace; and the Consequence of that Evening’s Work was, three Men, a Boy, and two Women, were shot. . .1
Ipswich Journal, 26 July 1740. I am indebted to Robert Malcolmson for this.
This report commences as indeterminate (D), becomes male (C) at “disorderly Fellows”, and moves sharply across to (B) — women and men — only when the dragoons, by firing point-blank into the crowd, take a random sample. Amongst all the indeterminate (“mob”, “populace”) and male vocabulary, the first mention of women, in a long report, is when two of them are shot. A similar sexually-indeterminate crowd, in 1757, descended on a Hereford miller, and insisted on searching his house and mill for grain. The miller refused:
Yet they persisted in having another search, saying that if he had no grain he had some money, upon which declaration there was necessity for fireing on them in which four women and two men were wounded, which occasioned the rest to disperse.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.
Again and again reports of “mobs” leave them sexually indeterminate until the moment of some action or arrests make individuals visible. Nor is this any indication of sexist bias in the reporter. The bias (if there is one) is more likely to be in the mind of the twentieth-century historian or reader whose expectations, when he reads of “mobs”, are of crowds composed of men, and who reads the accounts accordingly. Perhaps, in the later nineteenth century, “the mob” became a male noun? But the image called to the eighteenth-century mind by these collective nouns was very different — for them a “mob” suggested women, men and (often) older children, especially boys. I think it probable that Bohstedt’s table is misleading, and that many riots in column (D) (gender unknown) and some in (C) (men only) were mixed affairs.
Moreover, these figures which enter the tables, whether derived from the press or from a letter to the Home Office, normally report a particular moment of riot — perhaps its crisis — and they rarely describe its evolution. Yet a riot may pass through phases, for example it might commence with actions by women, be joined by men, and end with men alone. In my view there are two situations in which we may expect to find a predominantly male crowd. First, when disciplined male working groups, accustomed to acting together, spearhead the riot: such may be the case with coal miners, keelmen, Cornish tinners, and seamen. In the second case, when heavy conflict is expected with the authorities, the women sometimes seem to fall back — or perhaps are asked by the men to do so.
Yet the evidence is not as tidy as that. Miners and tinners were archetypical male rioters, yet also it is notorious that the whole communities shared in their movements. The Kingswood “mob” is usually thought of as masculine, for example in its destruction of turnpikes and toll-gates. But on occasion its resistance to authority was more like a rising of the whole district. During riots against the cider tax of 1738 the excise officers were “resisted by that savage Crew by Fire Armes”: “there are now in the Forest not less than 1000 Men, Women and Boys in Armes, destroying all before them. . .”.1 In 1740 the Kingswood colliers marched into Bristol and demonstrated against the price of corn at the Council House, leaving behind “their usual Armour of Clubs and Staffs”, but accompanied by “some weavers, colliers’ wives and abundance of other women”.2 Both the absence of “armour” and the presence of women suggests (on that occasion) a commitment to peaceable courses.
G. Blenkinsop, 14 Oct. 1738 in PRO, T 1/299(15).
Northampton Mercury, 6 Oct. 1740; R. Malcolmson in Brewer and Styles, op. cit., p. 117.
In 1740 the north-east was swept with food riots, which culminated in the sacking of the Newcastle Guildhall. (See above p. 70 & p. 231.) Pitmen and keelmen were prominent in this, and at a superficial view this might appear as a male riot. But a longer and closer view will show an alternation of male and female presence. The regional actions against export were first raised in Stockton by “a Lady with a Stick and a horn”. (See above p. 233.) Women as well as men took part in boarding vessels loaded with corn, and forcing them to off-load to the crowd on shore.1 When — after three weeks of popular export embargo — the Sheriff raised the posse comitatus against them, the people of Stockton, to the number of three thousand, “sent for the Colliers of Ederly and Caterhorn”.2 Meanwhile there had been small disturbances in Newcastle-on-Tyne, involving a group of women “incited by a leader calling herself ‘General’ or Jane Bogey, ringing bells and impeding the passage of horses carrying grain through the town”.3 After five women had been committed,4 the troubles in Newcastle died down, only to resume on a much greater scale in mid-June, with the involvement of keelmen and pitmen (who struck their pits). In the first phase, “a body of 3 or 4 hundred men women and children” came into the city and demanded corn at a low rate; granaries were broken into, and the crowd marched about the streets in triumph, huzzaing and blowing horns. The magistrates then summoned and armed the Watch and Ward and seized some prisoners; the crowd then appears in accounts as increasingly male, with “Colliers, Wagoners, Smiths and other common workmen”, well armed with cudgels, breaking open the keep and releasing the prisoners, and marching in great discipline through the town with drum, bagpipes and mock colours.5
Edward Goddard, 24 May 1740 in PRO, SP 36/50/431 and miscellaneous depositions in SP 36/51.
J. J. Williamson, Sheriff of Durham, 10 June 1740 in PRO, SP 36/51.
Joyce Ellis, “Urban Conflict and Popular Violence: the Guildhall Riots of 1740 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne”, Int. Rev. Social Hist., xxv, 3 (1980).
They were discharged at the Sessions a few days later.
“Account of the Riots” by Alderman Ridley in Northumberland CRO, 2R1 27/8.
