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The classic and imaginative account of the working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, revolutionized our understanding of English social history. E. P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and recereates the whole-life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation, and who yet created a culture and a political consciousness of great vitality.

"This book has a clumsy title, but it is one that meets its purpose. Making because it is a study of an active process, which owes as much to agency as conditioning. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.

Class, rather than classes, for reasons which it is one purpose of this book to examine. There is, of course, a difference. 'Working classes' is a descriptive term, which evades as much as it defines. It ties loosely together a bundle of discrete phenomena. There were tailors here and weavers there, and together they make up the working classes.

By class I understand a historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasise that it is a historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a 'structure', nor even as a 'category', but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships."

Contents

Preface

Preface to the 1980 edition

PART ONE : THE LIBERTY TREE

1 Members Unlimited

2 Christian and Apollyon

3 'Satan's Strongholds'

4 The Free-born Englishman

5 Planting the Liberty Tree

PART TWO : THE CURSE OF ADAM

6 Exploitation

7 The Field Labourers

8 Artisans and Others

9 The Weavers

10 Standards and Experiences

I Goods

II Homes

III Life

IV Childhood

11 The Transforming Power of the Cross

I Moral Machinery

II The Chiliasm of Despair

12 Community

I Leisure and Personal Relations

II The Rituals of Mutuality

III The Irish

IV Myriads of Eternity

PART THREE : THE WORKING-CLASS PRESENCE

13 Radical Westminster

14 An Army of Redressers

I The Brick Lamp

II The Opaque Society

III The Laws Against Combination

IV Croppers and Stockingers

V The Sherwood Lads

VI By Order of the Trade

15 Demagogues and Martyrs

I Disaffection

II Problems of Leadership

III The Hampden Clubs

IV Brandreth and Oliver

V Peterloo

VI The Cato Street Conspiracy

16 Class Consciousness

I The Radical Culture

II William Cobbett

III Carlile, Wade and Gast

IV Owenism

V 'A Sort of Machine'

Postscript

Bibliographical Note

Acknowledgements

Index

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All historical studies begin with the framing of questions to be addressed to the evidence left by the past: questions which in the process of research will be revised or abandoned, and will give rise to further or often unexpected questions. In the case of this book the questions arise from hypotheses formulated in Marxist historiography, because those are relevent to 'history from below' and focus on the 'poor', especially the wage workers, and those who claimed to speak for them.

At the time of the English Revolution it was common to make a tripartite division of society into the gentry, the 'middling sort' and 'the poor'. The first and second of these categories have occupied the attentions of historians — the first much more than the second — in assessing the causes and course of the revolution, but the third has been largely neglected. It is the intention of this book to make a preliminary attempt to remedy this omission.

The first chapter considers the economic setting and the growth of the wage earning class in the context of developing capitalism. The second chapter analyses the ideological setting, especially the important role of religion.

The Levellers provided much of the philosophy and programme of radicalism, to which the millenarian Fifth Monarchists and the Quakers added important elements. Such radicalism may be described as being on the 'left' of the revolution, being more radical than the Presbyterians, Independents and Republicans who dominated the revolution. But the focus of thsi book is upon those who stood further to the left than the leaderships of the Levellers, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. The 'far left' in the English Revolution is defined in terms of ideas, which sought to promote a shift in the revolution towards establishing and economic equality, and in terms of practice, which involved taking more militant action than the established leaders, in order to achieve some of the aims of the far left, but also of the left in general. The latter is the subject of chapter three.

Attention is concentrated on those who attempted to speak for the poor and the more depreived sections of society. Questions arise about how far they reflected attitudes and aspirations of the poor, who remain almost entirely silent in the sources. Questions also arise about cultural differences between dominant and subordinate classes, and about obstacles to revolutionay action by the poor.

The third chapter deals with two attempts at armed insurection arising from the radical or left milieu of the 1650s, and at the same time puts the focus on two individual revolutionaries who emerged from the ranks of plebians. The poor generally did rise in revolt against the republican governments established by the revolution. But viewing the period from below brings with it analysis of the formation of classes, the appearance of class conflicts, and explanation of the course which the revolution eventually took. It is also the purpose of this book to consider aspects of Marxist historiography that relate to its themes, and to place the English Revolution in the history of struggles for social justice.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: LABOUR

The extent and limits of proletarianisation

Resistance to proletarianisation

Divergence between small producers and wage workers

Resistance by wage workers

Chapter 2: EQUALITY

Religion and the poor

The search for equality

Decentralisation of power

'Practical Christianity'

Redistribution of wealth

God and revolution

Resistance

Restraints on popular revolutionary action

Chapter 3: REVOLT

The Corporal's Revolt, 1649

The Cooper's Revolt, 1657

Chapter 4: THE ENDING

Index

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Southern England has been studied considerably less than the industrializing north and midlands in the debate on the standard of living in the period up to 1850. Yet it is becoming clear that it was in the south and in the countryside that the greatest poverty and deprivation was to be found.

These essays examine responses to the struggle to live. The responses ranged from, at the most extreme, sheep-stealing and incendiarism to joining in food riots in an attempt to impose a "moral economy". More sustained protest is to be seen in passive and sometimes active resistance to authority, and in particular in the opposition to the introduction of the New Poor Law of 1834. Finally the appeal yet limitations of Chartism in the south is demonstrated.

From the authors' preface:
Our formative years were in the great era of 'History from Below'. Although we acknowledge that it left some 'silences', especially over gender and ethnicity, it still hugely enlarged the historical subject. We have no reluctance in continuing to write within the tradtion of George Rudé, Eric Hobsbawm, Edward Thompson and Gwyn 'Alf' Williams.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Abbreviations

1 Crime, Protest and Radicalism

John Rule and Roger Wells

2 The Revolt of the South West, 1800-1

Roger Wells

3 The Perfect Wage System? Tributing in the Cornish Mines

John Rule

4 The Chartist Mission to Cornwall

John Rule

5 Richard Spurr of Truro: Small-Town Radical

John Rule

6 Resistance to the New Poor Law in the Rural South

Roger Wells

7 Southern Chartism

Roger Wells

8 Social Crime in the Rural South in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

John Rule

9 Crime and Protest in a Country Parish: Burwash, 1790-1850

Roger Wells

10 The Manifold Causes of Rural Crime: Sheep-Stealing in England, c. 1740-1840

John Rule

Index