There is a rich seam of literature relating to popular protest and crowd activities in Ireland, England and the rest of Europe in the early modern period. In particular, understandings of the culture and function of the ‘mob’ in Europe's ancien régime have advanced in recent decades. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries historians and social psychologists regarded the activities of crowds as connected to a broad social malaise. The French academic Gustave LeBon claimed in 1896 that individuals assembled in ‘mobs’ were fanatical, brutish and intolerant to others and believed that a cultivated man normally became a barbarian the instant he joined an anonymous crowd. This type of crowd was essentially immoral, and its sentiment represented the ‘atavistic residuum of the instincts of the primitive man’. LeBon's description, which was similar to those of eighteenth-century commentators like Daniel Defoe, became popular among fascists and liberal radicals in the twentieth century. However, styling popular protest in this way was challenged by another French historian, the Marxist Georges Lefebvre, in the 1930s. He argued that crowds had a collective mentality that went beyond primeval instincts. The crowd had a ‘collective unconscious’ that guided and restricted its actions. Lefebvre not only challenged the orthodox opinion of the crowd but also set important precedents for what became known as ‘history from below’, an approach later developed by English historians such as George Rudé, E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm.

The first part of the chapter examines theoretical models that are often utilised by historians to interpret self-directing crowds in Europe, in particular E. P. Thompson's theory of ‘the moral economy of the English crowd’. Thompson attempted to show that the motivations and actions of food rioters can be reduced neither to economic misery nor spontaneous irrationality; instead, protesters acted on the basis of moral judgements about markets. According to him, their violent actions can be read as a succession of confrontations between an innovative market economy and the customary moral economy of the plebs: ‘Hence the plebeian culture is rebellious, but rebellious in the defence of custom.’ Furthermore the actions of protesters, which were legitimised by the belief that they had the support of ‘the wider consensus of the community’, conformed to a ‘paternalist model’ of social relationships that was commonplace in Europe's ancien régime.