Ever since the first flowering of scholarship on women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, convents have occupied a central place in historians' estimate of the position of women in medieval and early modern Europe. In 1910, Emily James Putnam, the future dean and president of Barnard College, wrote enthusiastically in The Lady, her path-breaking study of medieval and renaissance aristocratic women, “No institution in Europe has ever won for the lady the freedom of development that she enjoyed in the convent in the early days. The modern college for women only feebly reproduces it.” In equally pioneering works published in the same period, both Lena Eckenstein and Eileen Power recognized the significance of the nunnery in providing a socially acceptable place for independent single women.

Many contemporary historians share this positive view of convents. In Becoming Visible, one of the most widely read surveys of European women's history, for example, William Monter wrote approvingly of convents as “socially prestigious communities of unmarried women.” Similarly, Jane Douglass praised nunneries for their importance in providing women with the only “visible, official role” allotted to them in the church, while Merry Wiesner, sharing Eckenstein and Power's perspective, has observed that, unlike other women, nuns were “used to expressing themselves on religious matters and thinking of themselves as members of a spiritual group. In her recently published study of early modern Seville, to give a final example, Mary Perry criticized the assumption that nuns were oppressed by the patriarchal order that controlled their institutions; instead, she emphasized the ways in which religious women “empowered themselves through community, chastity, enclosure and mystical experiences.”

Historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and sociologists are accustomed to categorizing the inhabitants of the rural farming households of medieval England as peasants without questioning the disciplinary implications of imposing such a category on historical subjects. Foundational categories, such as the worker, the peasant, the woman, become so familiar that they appear natural and divert us from studying the historical and power-charged processes involved in their constructions, past and present. The century-old debate over views of medieval English peasants as bound statically by custom, on the one hand, or as dynamically diverse or mobile, on the other, perhaps expresses embedded disciplinary tensions in the historic division of labor between anthropology (including archaeology) and history. From their disciplinary formation in the early modern period, anthropology and history together have constructed and guarded an imaginary but nevertheless potent boundary between the historical and the primitive, a boundary that divided the European colonizer from the non-European colonized and that within Europe divided the historical past from the traditional past. Who gets an anthropology and who gets a history therefore becomes a question of historic and power-charged disciplinary practices. As a foundational category, “peasant” straddles both disciplines and both divisions of the past, historical and traditional.

In this essay, I wish to examine the powerful yet unacknowledged ways in which these disciplinary practices inform medieval peasant studies. I shall focus especially on the study of the material culture of the medieval English peasantry. Both history and archaeology claim the medieval English peasant to justify disciplinary narratives.

When officers of Ludlow's Palmers' Gild composed their reply to a royal inquiry into the state of English gilds in 1388–89, they included the following description of their organization's plan for assisting indigent brothers and sisters:

The same gild also offered aid to sick, aged, and wrongfully imprisoned members and set aside money for dowries so that daughters of families that had experienced unexpected misfortune might marry or enter nunneries.

The Palmers' Gild was a religious fraternity, a type of voluntary association that enjoyed tremendous popularity during the late Middle Ages. These gilds were lay associations of men and women that devoted themselves to a variety of religious and social undertakings. Unlike the more well known craft fraternities, religious gilds drew their members from a variety of professions and made no attempts at industrial regulation.

There is no question that the plantation of Ulster during the reign of James I had a profound effect on the course of British history. However, the nature of that plantation has been either misrepresented or misunderstood. In order to overcome this problem, we must address two provocative questions: (1) Were the Scots-Irish, the largest group of settlers, predominantly Celtic or non-Celtic ethnically and culturally? and (2) If they were mainly Celtic, why were they better able than non-Celts to establish viable settlements in Ulster, a predominantly Celtic area? A reexamination of the origins of the pre-1625 Scottish settlers and their methods of settlement indeed casts the problem of the Ulster Plantation in a new light.

For the last two decades, historians have begun to question the portrayal of the Scots-Irish, or Ulster Scots, as frugal, hardworking, anglicized Presbyterian Lowlanders who brought the light of civilization to a benighted Celtic backwater. For example, Nicholas Canny correctly dismisses the “myth” of Ulster's material transformation by pointing out that the province, unlike Leinster and Munster, was settled by British planters from less economically advanced areas of the archipelago. But, again, he does not adequately examine the cultural and ethnic background of the dominant Scots-Irish. Traditionally, they have been classed as “Lowland,” non-Celts rather than as “Highland,” Celtic Scots. These designations are misleading because they oversimplify Scotland's historical and cultural divisions that had been in place as early as the Norman invasion.

The seventh of the thirteen “ancient and indubitable” rights proclaimed in the English Declaration of Rights was neither ancient nor indubitable. It declared “that the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by Law.” The right of ordinary subjects to possess weapons is perhaps the most extraordinary and least understood of English liberties. It lies at the heart of the relationship between the individual and his fellows and between the individual and his government. Few governments have ever been prepared to make such a guarantee, and, until 1689, no English parliamentary body was either. Its elevation that year to the company of ancient and indubitable rights unmasked the deep-seated distrust between the governing classes and the crown. Together with the equally novel article that gave Parliament greater control over standing armies, this right was meant to place the sword in the hands of Protestant Englishmen and the power over it in the hands of Parliament.

The actual novelty of this right had eluded historians for a variety of reasons. First, its framers were taken at their word when they described it as ancient and indubitable. Indeed, Whig historians preferred to believe there had been a conservative revolution. Thomas Macaulay rejoiced that “not a single flower of the crown was touched. Not a single new right was given to the people. The whole English law, substantive and adjective, was, in the judgment of all the greatest lawyers … almost exactly the same after the Revolution as before it.

In Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 1860–1914, J. S. Hurt employs what has become a classic opening in works of social history. “Much of the history of education,” he declares, “has been written from the top, from the perspective of those who ran and provided the schools, be they civil servants or members of the religious societies that promoted the cause of popular education. Little has been written from the viewpoint of those who were the recipients of this semi-charitable endeavour, the parents who paid the weekly schoolpence and the children who sat in the schoolrooms of nineteenth-century England.”

Hurt's point is well taken, but he leaves himself open to the retort that he also draws his information mainly from official sources. The parents rarely speak in his book, the children almost never. One could make the same criticism of Phil Gardner's The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England. Gardner claims that the so-called dame schools, the private venture schools that served a large fraction of the Victorian working class, were unfairly disparaged and suppressed by educational bureaucrats. But he too depends largely on bureaucratic reports to reconstruct the history of schools outside the state system. Neither Gardner nor Hurt quite succeeds in plumbing educational history to the very bottom: they do little to reconstruct the classroom experience from the viewpoint of the working-class child.

What sources could we use to recover that history? There are, of course, the reports of school inspectors, but Gardner warns us that they had a vested interest in condemning dame shools.

It has been twenty years since E. P. Thompson introduced the term “moral economy” into the historian's vocabulary. Since then it has exerted a paradigmatic force in explanations of the motivations for, and responses to, various forms of popular action. Pitted against this has been the notion of political economy, most often presented as a subsequent (and eventually triumphant) ideological development that was necessarily antithetical to a moral economy. Together these two models have served as fundamental reference points around which accounts of popular protest and public policy have been constructed. Recent explorations into past assumptions regarding the proper functioning of the marketplace have served to open this conventional schematization to debate. Thompson himself has once again entered the fray with a further refinement and restatement of his original arguments and a spirited riposte to his critics. The purpose of the following essay is to focus and further develop this debate in light of the author's ongoing research into the City of London in the late eighteenth century.

In seeking to loosen the constructs through which past economic relations and ideologies have been characterized, this essay will concentrate on two main areas of enquiry. The first follows the work of other historians in attempting to probe more deeply into the diverse and often conflicting understandings of the marketplace articulated in this period, thus revealing alternate possibilities in the interstices of moral economy and political economy. The second as yet remains relatively unexplored and concerns a series of assumptions as to who might be expected to advocate these various conceptions of market relations and why.

The recent historiographical revolution in our understanding of the eighteenth-century state has broad implications, analytical as well as empirical, that are only beginning to be plumbed. Due largely to the work of Patrick O'Brien and John Brewer, the old picture—of a small, amateurish, corrupt central apparatus largely maintained (between sporadic wars) to dignify the crown and assist gentlemanly (i.e., parliamentary) plunder—has been pretty completely effaced. We now see that by the end of the French wars the British state was one of the largest and most efficient in Europe; certainly it engorged the largest proportion of national product by means of a ruthlessly regressive tax system. The French wars were the climax, not the sole begetters of this system, which had been spawned by a chain of wars mounting in scope and sophistication since the late seventeenth century and requiring commensurate improvements in fiscal policy: thus Brewer's memorable naming of the system as the “fiscal-military state.”

For historians of the early nineteenth century, this revision raises a host of questions about the relationship of social change and social class to government growth. Particularly, it casts doubt on the customary association made between growth in the size or scope of government and the rise in the Industrial Revolution of new social and economic questions and a bourgeoisie to answer them; that is, it casts doubt on the implicit “modernization” model that hitches together economic growth, government growth, bureaucracy, professionalism, and embourgeoisement.

In 1833, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “I do not know where I could put my hand upon a book containing so much sense with sound constitutional doctrine as this thin folio of Johnson's works.” The “Johnson” to whom Coleridge referred was not the celebrated Doctor Samuel Johnson of the eighteenth century but instead the late seventeenth-century Whig clergyman, the Reverend Samuel Johnson. Reverend Johnson's single volume of complete works impressed Coleridge; he scribbled laudatory remarks throughout the margins of a 1710 edition. Coleridge admired the directness of Johnson's style and his persuasive method of argumentation. Johnson would have appreciated Coleridge's comments. They reflected the way he himself understood his work—as sound constitutional doctrine, plainly put.

Yet for all its clarity and consistency, Johnson's political thinking was not always appreciated by England's political elite of the 1680s and 1690s. The implications of Johnson's political ideas—much like those of his contemporary John Locke—were understood as far too revolutionary and destabilizing. However, Johnson's fiery prose and sardonic wit often proved useful to the political opposition: from the Whig exclusionists of the early 1680s, to the supporters of William and Mary in 1688/89, to the radical Whigs and country Tories of the 1690s and early eighteenth century.

Johnson's career as a Whig propagandist spanned 1679 to 1700. Among his contemporaries, he was undoubtedly most renowned for his strident anti-Catholicism and for the brutal punishments that he endured for his radical politics.

In the waning years of the seventeenth century Sir William Petty, F.R.S., a talented statistician, champion of trade and commerce, and “projector” of schemes for national betterment, drew up a plan to cope with what he, at least, saw as a major problem. Petty had observed that there were large numbers of English youth from respectable families who had not the leisure, money, nor opportunity to travel to foreign countries. He was concerned that these worthy young men would miss the chance to develop the expansive faculty of mind and commercial acumen that foreign travel provided and national progress demanded. The crux of his scheme was that these youths would repair to London, where they would encounter businessmen around the Royal Exchange “who have fresh concerne & correspondance with all parts of the knowne world & with all the Commodityes growing or made within the same.”

One of the great themes of modern history is the movement of poor people across the face of the earth. For individuals and families the economic and psychological costs of these transoceanic migrations were severe. But they did not prevent millions of agriculturalists and proletarians from Europe reaching the new worlds in both the Atlantic and the Pacific basins in the nineteenth century. These people, in their myriad voyages, shifted the demographic balance of the continents and created new economies and societies wherever they went. The means by which these emigrations were achieved are little explored.

Most emigrants directed themselves to the cheapest destinations. The Irish, for instance, migrated primarily to England, Scotland, and North America. The general account of British and European emigration in the nineteenth century demonstrates that the poor were not well placed to raise the costs of emigration or to insert themselves into the elaborate arrangements required for intercontinental migration. Usually the poor came last in the sequence of emigration.

The passage to Australasia was the longest and the most expensive of these migrations. From its foundation as a penal colony in 1788, New South Wales depended almost entirely on convict labor during its first four decades. Unambiguous government sanction for free immigration emerged only at the end of the 1820s, when new plans were devised to encourage certain categories of emigrants from the British population. As each of the new Australian colonies was developed so the dependence on convict labor diminished.

On June 27, 1777, the Reverend William Dodd, “the Macaroni Parson,” Master of Arts and Doctor of Laws in the University of Cambridge; first Grand Chaplain of Modern English Freemasonry and sometime Chaplain-in-Ordinary to His Majesty; Chaplain of Magdalen House, a “Public Place of Reception for Penitent Prostitutes”; proprietor of the Charlotte Street Chapel, and a principal instigator of such other charities as the Society for the Release of Debtors and the Humane Society for the Resuscitation of the Apparently Drowned, was hanged at Tyburn for forging the signature of his patron and former pupil, Philip Stanhope, fifth earl of Chesterfield, on a bond for £4,200. Dodd's story, culminating in his trial, condemnation, and execution, despite massive efforts to procure a mitigation of the law's severity, survives best in the literary history and biography of the period. On the other hand, historians, whether political, social, or cultural, have had little or nothing to say about his predicament and suffering except as either the deserved nemesis of a swindler or an early cause celebre in the raising of public concern about the state of the criminal law. The probable reason for this neglect is that, for all the sentimental frisson which it aroused, Dodd's case was a middle-class melodrama which lacked plebeian dimension and appeal.

In early 1831, the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton contributed a comparative essay to the Edinburgh Review on “the spirit of society” in England and France. A key issue for discussion, of course, was that of fashion. “Our fashion,” stated Bulwer-Lytton, “may indeed be considered the aggregate of the opinions of our women.” The fundamental dichotomy which ran through these pages was that between public and private: “the proper sphere of woman,” Bulwer-Lytton continued, “is private life, and the proper limit to her virtues, the private affections.” And in antithesis to the aggregate opinions of “the domestic class of women”—in his view, the only virtuous kind of women—which constituted fashion, stood “public opinion”; that exclusive masculine realm, that should remain free of “feminine influence.”

Some two years later, in his two-volume England and the English, Bulwer-Lytton restated the antithesis between fashion and public opinion, both repeating his earlier formulation and at the same time significantly modifying it. By 1833, his definitions of fashion and opinion ran as follows: “The middle classes interest themselves in grave matters: the aggregate of their sentiments is called OPINION. The great interest themselves in frivolities, and the aggregate of their sentiments is termed FASHION.” Here, Bulwer-Lytton no longer designated fashion as the aggregate of the opinions of women but, instead, as the aggregate of the opinions of the upper classes; and public opinion was no longer the domain of men but, instead, the aggregate of the opinions of the “middle class.”