Apprentice Riots in Early Modern London

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 Rude—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.”