Abstract
The apprentices of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London achieved an unenviable notoriety for their riots, but, if such acts were infamous then and well known now, there is nevertheless little agreement about their meaning and motives. Interest in the social meaning of riots and other crowd activity that was not sanctioned or organized by those in authority is not new. Concern with popular movements, riots, and the crowd in history can be traced back at least to George Lefebvre’s work in the 1930s. In England, one can cite the pioneering studies of Eric Hobsbawm—Primitive Rebels1 published in 1962—and George Rudé—Wilkes and Liberty2 published in the same year. The mob in eighteenth-century London turned out to be neither the “dregs of the people” nor the mindless rabble of contemporary stereotypes. Furthermore, mob action was seen as disciplined, if not ritualized, and to have a clear political or religious agenda. In Hobsbawm’s 1964 study of the Luddites, he described them as engaging in a rational process of “collective bargaining by riot.”
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Notes
Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester University Press, 1959, first paperback edition, 1962).
George RudéWilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford, 1962).
Edward Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class ( London, 1963).
Edward Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century,” Past & Present, 50 (1971), 76–136.
Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past & Present, 50 (1971), 41–75.
Steven R. Smith, “The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-Century Adolescents,” Past & Present, 61 (1973), 149–61.
Valerie Pearl, “Change and Stability in Seventeenth-Century London,” London Journal, 5 (1979), 3–34.
Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge, 1989), p. 17.
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© 2008 Joseph P. Ward
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Seaver, P.S. (2008). Apprentice Riots in Early Modern London. In: Ward, J.P. (eds) Violence, Politics, and Gender in Early Modern England. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617018_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617018_2
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