Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Puritanism and Social Control?
- 2 Popular Religion and the Pilgrimage of Grace
- 3 Honour, Reputation and Local Officeholding in Elizabethan and Stuart England
- 4 The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England
- 5 Order and Disorder in the English Revolution
- 6 Drainers and Fenmen: the Problem of Popular Political Consciousness in the Seventeenth Century
- 7 Gender, Family and the Social Order, 1560–1725
- 8 The ‘Moral Economy’ of the English Crowd: Myth and Reality
- Index
- Index of places
8 - The ‘Moral Economy’ of the English Crowd: Myth and Reality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Puritanism and Social Control?
- 2 Popular Religion and the Pilgrimage of Grace
- 3 Honour, Reputation and Local Officeholding in Elizabethan and Stuart England
- 4 The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England
- 5 Order and Disorder in the English Revolution
- 6 Drainers and Fenmen: the Problem of Popular Political Consciousness in the Seventeenth Century
- 7 Gender, Family and the Social Order, 1560–1725
- 8 The ‘Moral Economy’ of the English Crowd: Myth and Reality
- Index
- Index of places
Summary
The social history of the early modern period has been transformed in recent years by the attempt to explore and explain the popular culture of the common people through their rituals, celebrations and protests. The last of these has become one of the most important windows onto the world of otherwise largely inarticulate sections of the population. Hence for a generation or more British scholars have followed a path first trodden by the Annales school in using popular disturbances and movements not only to investigate the ideas and beliefs of the people concerned, but also to reconstruct their assumptions and attitudes and to place them in the context of larger-scale processes of social and economic change. Few concepts have proved more influential in this exploration than E.P. Thompson's notion of the ‘moral economy’, in which Thompson argued that the activities of English crowds in the eighteenth century indicated an ‘extraordinary deep-rooted pattern of behaviour and belief’ – a ‘moral economy’ – which legitimised popular actions against those who transgressed customary practice. For Thompson the crucial task was to ‘decode’ these actions and their ceremony and symbolism in order to reveal the underlying assumptions of what he called the ‘plebeian culture’, assumptions which frequently ran contrary to those of the propertied and those in authority.
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- Information
- Order and Disorder in Early Modern England , pp. 218 - 238Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985
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