The social order, especially in the towns and cities, was always a work in progress, a daily construction. It was framed and constrained, but not irrevocably determined and articulated by royal, parlementary and municipal law. The law enforced and reinforced it, but could not on its own produce and reproduce it. By social order, I mean a system of relatively stable relations among groups and individuals founded on certain implicit reciprocities (such as respect for each others’ vital interests and customary rights) and on open-ended negotiations concerning respective claims upon the community and the polity whose urgency varied according to shifting circumstances. The understandings that undergirded this process of forging order did not by any means preclude frictions and even frank conflict. These counterpoints did not, however, ordinarily compromise the state of public tranquility that constituted the collective objective. Despite fundamental socio-economic, psychological and cultural cleavages, by and large no one had reason to subvert this order, if the integrating mechanisms functioned. They included built-in forms of recourse, institutional and informal, local and central, for dispute settlement, and for compensations and sanctions that obtained general approbation (allowing for protest at the margin).

Everyone concurred that a reliable system of provisioning was the sine qua non for the maintenance of social peace and a modicum of social cohesion, and for the fruitful operation of the economy on which everyone depended, directly or indirectly. That meant, at least in urban locus, a regular supply of grain and flour, almost exclusively for bakers, and of bread in sufficient quantity, of satisfactory quality and at accessible prices for the final consumers. The quest for daily bread was the cardinal preoccupation of the vast majority of inhabitants. At this social moment, norms and expectations had to be fulfilled: it was the litmus of success, not only for the authorities of all stripes but also for the community as a whole. Save for the usual number of cynics, misanthropes and proto-anarchists, no one had an interest in seeing it explode or implode. The rich and the poor, the dominant and the dominated all shared a stake in sustaining tranquility, for disorder, in its various avatars, menaced them all (while opening opportunities for a small number at various places in the social hierarchy).