INTRODUCTION

John Seed has recently remarked upon the tendency of social historians of the nineteenth century ‘… whose attention has been concentrated upon the working class, or to a lesser extent, the landed aristocracy and gentry’, to produce a distorted image of the prevailing class structure, due to the absence of a middle class. The same has been even more true of social historians of the eighteenth century. Where middling people do appear, it is rarely as the figures of power and influence upon which the structures for the administration of the local state were based, nor as the local arbiters of approved behaviour, morals and values. There is a tendency to underestimate the influence, power and political importance of the middling sort at a local level and to oversimplify and misconstrue their characteristic social and political attitudes. They appear as prototypes for the consumerism of a later middle class or, in work on the moral economy, most often as stage villains who serve as theatrical props against which moral economist proletarians and paternalist gentry may demonstrate their value systems, either in conflict or in agreement with each other. The case of the Norwich food riots of 1766 and their aftermath shows the middling sort of the city behaving very differently.

At the start of the eighteenth century, Norwich was the largest town in England, London excepted, and was half as large again as Bristol, its nearest rival.