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Customs in Common is a companion volume to The Making of the English Working Class. It explores the ebullient and contradictory plebian culture which preceded the formation of the working class institutions and consciousness, and its customs and practices, some of which survived well into Victorian times.

Although rooted in English evidence from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these studies have wide-ranging reference and significance. The notion of 'the moral economy', which Tompson first developed to analyse the motives of food rioters, has subsequently become influential in many fields, including peasant studies. Thompson takes up the discussion again, replies to some criticisms and extensions of his work and welcomes others. He shows how careful attention to fragmentary evidence enables one to decode some practices, such as the sale of wives, or shaming rituals like rough music, with their forgotten vocabulary of symbolism. In examining the rigorous presence of women in food riots from the sixteenth century onwards, he suggests the light which this throws on gender relations.

In a study which confronts the triumphalism of much recent history of the agricultural revolution, Thompson re-examines the ways in which villagers lost their common-rights in the face of the law's hostility to custom. Some historians have written of the riotous plebs of eighteenth century England and Wales as if they were only a problem for magistrates and governments to handle. For Thompson, the rulers, landowners and governments were a problem for the people to handle. Perhaps this is why the pages come alive for us. Using an unusually wide range of sources—legal records, folklore collections, academic studies, local record office collections, contemporary newspapers, pamphlets, sermons and poems—Thompson has once again given voices to the silent majority.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

I Introduction: Custom and Culture

II The Patricians and the Plebs

III Custom, Law and Common Right

IV The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century

V The Moral Economy Reviewed

VI Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism

VII The Sale of Wives

VIII Rough Music

Index