The Regulations and the Regulators

Abstract

The police were structurally fragmented and often divided by interest and ambition but they shared a number of basic ideas about the provisioning question. This chapter deals with the police view of the grain trade and the ways in which the police translated their attitudes into action. It is the story of persistence rather than change, of an overwhelming sense of continuity informed by a belief that things—at least subsistence things—are at bottom always the same. The police clung to the old ways because they were proven ways. Yet it would be a mistake, I argue, to infer from the immobility and the tone of police regulations that the police operated in a mindless, mechanical and timeless fashion. On the other hand, there were limits to flexibility and adaptability. The police were wholly unprepared for the radical innovations which they had to face in the 1760’s when the government turned against the multisecular tradition of regulation.